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What Happened to the Future?

foundersfund.com

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Re: What Happened to the Future?

#81

Post by koko775 »

clobber wrote: post #78
btcoal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has improved my life as well. I went to high school in one city, college in one 1,000 miles away. Have since worked in cities all over the world. I don't know how I would manage to keep even a tenuous grasp on all the connections I have with people in these different places without Facebook. Admittedly, these are not and never will be deep social bonds I am maintaing, but that is hardly the point. There is v…

Stop. There is no value in maintaining shallow social connections. Work on making your actual friendships stronger instead of having 1000 acquaintances on Facebook. Your life has not been improved by Facebook beyond regular old email.

Shallow social connections have earned me two jobs and a number of deep social connections by leapfrogging off of shallow social connections.

If you think there's no value in maintaining shallow social connections, then I think you too need to put some energy into adding meaning to your social connections.

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#82

Post by dredmorbius »

athom wrote: post #30
natch wrote: post #23

What happened to HTML? If this were formatted with web standards, I could resize the fonts, scroll with my browser's built-in preferred scrolling mechanisms that aren't chunky, laggy, and painful, and I could actually read it. I'm not the only one to comment on this, but apparently whoever did this page is dense enough about web standards that the point needs to be repeated. How do you run a VC and not get this? My o…

No kidding! The best part is, it's all so unnecessary! When I saw the blank page, I decided to have a peek at the source, an lo and behold, there's the essay! Copy it to a text editor, turn on dynamic word wrap, and... enjoy?

Firefox: view -> style -> No style

Disabling CSS dumps the unstructured page. You can also pay it a visit in a console-mode browser.

I'm (sadly) finding this to be increasingly necessary to view web pages (as an aggressive user of NoScript).

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#83

Post by tomjen3 »

chailatte wrote: post #3

A world that is aging, where half the young are unemployed and the old demands to be paid to live to 98 A world lead by visionless, spineless leaders, employed by multinationals to kill anything that threatens their existence A world that is feminized, where men are taught to grovel for a women's affection, and to earn their attention with gucci and prada, paid by their mcjob A world ruled by bankers, where the mindl…

I feed that way too sometimes.

But then I remember that it doesn't matter what the world says or does, that our leaders are not only visionless and spineless but also ineffective playboys with a weak ego. That the multinationals have repeatably refused to change, even when we were screaming the necessity of that choice to them for a decade.

I remember that the bankers are a joke, that the middle class doesn't matter (make the product cool enough then they will buy it anyway); I remember that the dream that matters isn't theirs, but mine.

I remember that no matter how many sequels are made, how many WWII shooters are created, how many man years are given to graphics that is almost better than the real world, the creator of Minecraft is a millionaire.

I remember that the world needs the passionate, explorative, imaginative and the thinking more than it ever has, even if it does everything it possible can to deny it.

I remember that the critics, the negatives, the deniers and the naysayers don't matter as long as the men of action don't listen to them.

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#84

Post by ippisl »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #50
thinkcomp wrote: post #13

It's a good essay. The only problem is that it's Peter Thiel behind it. The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the prob…

> I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. I just want to burn some HN points here to tell you that you're not alone, and that there are a lot of other people out there that are terribly frustrated by this. Investors are primarily in it to make money. They're optimizing for returns. When you have a choice between a company that will spend rela…

But most people choose fun and money over taking a boring job that makes the world better. It's just human nature. Why should investors behave differently ?

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#85

Post by zb »

jberryman wrote: post #70
temphn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technological cul de sac and subsidized investment, yes. But looks like the Air France Concorde crash was due to debris on the runway rather than the plane itself. Or were you thinking of something else? https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Air_France_Fl... A Continental Airlines DC-10 departing for Newark, New Jersey, lost a titanium alloy strip, 435 millimetres (17.1 in) long and about 29 millimetres (1.1…

> But looks like the Air France Concorde crash was due to debris on the runway rather than the plane itself. Or were you thinking of something else? I know nothing about the Concorde, etc. but that the crash was triggered by debris does not really refute that it was a poorly designed or dangerous aircraft, as that should be a design consideration of any aircraft (I assume).

Exactly. If a blown tyre is enough to kill everyone on board, it's not an especially safe design. Note that tyres had burst on at least 4 previous occasions, so that was not exactly unforeseeable.

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#86

Post by zackattack »

thinkcomp wrote: post #13

It's a good essay. The only problem is that it's Peter Thiel behind it. The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the prob…

Facebook has improved your life. You got to publish a book about it.

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#87

Post by dredmorbius »

cbr wrote: post #44

over the past thirty years, there have been no radical advances in transportation technology Containerization.

That actually dates to the 1950s and is based on concepts up to a century older than that. Break-bulk has been recognized as a bottleneck in freight transport for ages.

It's evolved and become dominant with standardization of container sizes and fittings (by 1970) and with the deregulation of the US shipping industry and introduction of double-stack rail transports (both in 1984).

I suspect more significant recent advancements have been in inventory and logistics management (though bar-coding of rail cars was already happening in the 1980s) and overnight air and other rapid freight. Not quite as visible as containers, but vital to keeping the boats, trains, and trucks moving, and with JIT delivery probably accounts for much of the success of big box stores, and now Internet-based retail and shipping.

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#88

Post by jeffool »

ippisl wrote: post #84
thaumaturgy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm doing serious work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in the past five years. I just want to burn some HN points here to tell you that you're not alone, and that there are a lot of other people out there that are terribly frustrated by this. Investors are primarily in it to make money. They're optimizing for returns. When you have a choice between a company that will spend rela…

But most people choose fun and money over taking a boring job that makes the world better. It's just human nature. Why should investors behave differently ?

He isn't complaining about their choice, but instead that they made choice A, and are complaining they aren't getting the results from choice B.

It's like partying instead of studying for a test, and complaining you didn't pass. Of course you didn't; you chose "fun" over "boring".

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#89

Post by hnbla »

william42 wrote: post #20
chrismealy wrote: post #14

Enough with the flying cars! That was never a good idea.

Agreed. I'm not a big fan of Twitter, but flying cars don't exist for a reason. Now self-driving cars, those are interesting. Guess who's working on them ? Google.

Self driving cars? Yawn. Try taking a cab ;)

Flying cars are way more interesting.

Re: What Happened to the Future?

#90

Post by todayiamme »

dstein wrote: post #32
todayiamme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you make such an assumption with so little data? It might be that you've met people from this fund and you know something I don't, but until then your statement sounds a wee bit unqualified. It's hard to swallow that given they have invested in, > SpaceX ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTFlFFrfEB0&feature=youtu... ) > Halcyon Molecular ( http://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/halcyon-molecular-develo... ) > Pal…

It's merely my cynical conclusion that this VC fund is mouthing a lot of hogwash. Two-thirds of the companies they have funded are exactly the kinds of companies that this manifesto says are the problem. Their essay really doesn't really say what their goals are other than to invest in entrepreneurs "tackling challenging problems" which is what every single VC in Silicon Valleys says, yet all of them are still chasin…

Maybe they just need to balance out their portfolio for short term as well as long term returns? And perhaps they feel that these bubbly companies are the best way to do so?

For some reason this just feels like the fundamental error of attribution to me. Yes, I accept that I might be wrong, but it still does. http://www.paulgraham.com/randomness.html

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