Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

diegobasch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 121 posts

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#91

Post by repsilat »

jaggederest wrote: post #29
vertr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If new startups agreed that they wouldn't leave their users out to dry if they got acquired would you be more likely to trust them and use their service?

No, because how would they enforce that? If your company is acquired, all that goes out the window anyway.

Keeping the product alive could be one of the terms of the acquisition, but it seems unlikely - it could lower the offer, and it's unlikely startup founders would throw away money on a matter of principle unless the community promise was somehow legally binding.

In a sense the promise is a "non-credible threat" in game-theoretic terms. It would attract users if they carried it out, but because acquisition happens after the user-attraction stage they don't have an incentive to carry it out. This means they won't rationally carry it out, which means they don't attract rational users. This situation can be avoided if they "tie their own hands".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-credible_threat

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#92

Post by repsilat »

refurb wrote: post #74
Estragon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier in the year, you could get a 12 month CD in Australia for almost 6%.

The inflation rate in Australia was pushing 4% last year. That's a nominal return of 2.X%.

It's a real return of ~2%, it's a nominal return of 6%. "Nominal" in this case means "in name only" - it's the face-value of the return, not the actual value.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#93

Post by Retric »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #90
lukejduncan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm continually reminded of Neal Stephensons remark "I saw the best minds of my generation... writing spam filters." He talks a lot lately about how we've stopped trying to solve the really hard problems and instead are continually trying to sell digital "sugar water." *Source: https://plus.google.com/116416314233992548280/posts/NxCMjiQX... )

Allow me to quote myself: In the '60s, the best and the brightest were being lured by NASA, to put a man on the Moon. 50 years later, the best and the brightest are being lured by the Silicon Valley, to sell ads on social media. Biggest anticlimax ever.

That might sound bad, but selling adds on social media is actually more useful for society as a hole and takes a lower percent of our GDP than the moon missions. As to cool tech, we are actually discovering earth sized planets orbiting other stars, that's IMO far more interesting that having people play golf on the moon and a lot harder. We are also getting ever closer to building things at the atomic scale. As well as consumer robots be they roomba's or self driving cars.

Not to mention stuff that's useful in space and at home. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PVeff(rev120404).jpg

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#95

Post by dougabug »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #73
dougabug wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly defeating spam in all its guises (SEO, commercials, daily offers, junk mail) is a pretty difficult problem. How do you recognize cleverly concealed data? Spammers constantly adapt to spam filters and new/pristine communications channels which catch on precisely because they are relatively spam free. Of course, spam filters also evolve, this kind of runaway adversarial co-evolution is what leads to systems which…

So I guess now all marketing is spam.

Pretty much.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#96

Post by dougabug »

zacharycohn wrote: post #69
dougabug wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly defeating spam in all its guises (SEO, commercials, daily offers, junk mail) is a pretty difficult problem. How do you recognize cleverly concealed data? Spammers constantly adapt to spam filters and new/pristine communications channels which catch on precisely because they are relatively spam free. Of course, spam filters also evolve, this kind of runaway adversarial co-evolution is what leads to systems which…

By "difficult" he doesn't mean "technically non-trivial." He means world hunger, building spaceships, developing new sources of clean energy, etc. I'd rather have spaceships AND spam than no spaceships and no spam.

From Google: dif·fi·cult/ˈdifiˌkəlt/ Adjective: 1. Needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand. 2. Characterized by or causing hardships or problems.

I don't see lack of spaceships causing hardship, so that's really more of a definition #1 type of thing. Society built spaceships in the 60's, contrast that against the effectiveness of a spam filtering system built with hardware, software, algorithms and statistical inference techniques available in the 1960's.

While I appreciate and admire the work put into into accomplishing space fight, the existence of manned spaceships really doesn't contribute much to my existence, whereas spam sucks away a bit of my life, every day.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#97

Post by ryanlchan »

seiji wrote: post #5

Disturbingly accurate. • Make a sufficiently shiny, yet imminently disposable product. • Hoard employees (each one bumps your valuation by ~$1.5 million), be loud, get acquired. • Kill product. (You never cared about it anyway -- it was just a vehicle for ego and attention. Now that you've got your $5 million, you don't need the validation of all those silly pawns/customers anymore.)

What worries me, more than the accuracy of the story or not, is the overwhelming level of agreement from commentators. There's a pervasive sense of cynicism blanketing the tech start up world, but for some reason we're all still in the game.

There's a certain amount of hypocrisy you have to accept. We do this to ourselves. No one on HN would think worse of themselves for achieving a $5M exit, yet we are happy to vilify those who do.

Where are the founders of the next GE? The next IBM? Those who seek to solve the fundamental problems society faces? I'm not asking about space ships and world hunger. I'm just talking about solving real, concrete, long term business problems. The ultimate filter on this is simple: If your product were to disappear, would your customers' quality of life significantly decrease?

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#98

Post by graue »

villagefool wrote: post #46

A bit ironic that he sarcastically referees to HN as "Hacker Noise" but then at the end invites people to discuss the post on it.

I didn't interpret that as a dig at HN, any more than "GooBook" is a dig at Google and Facebook... He just changed the names to make it clear his story is fictional.

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#99

Post by lukejduncan »

dougabug wrote: post #96
zacharycohn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "difficult" he doesn't mean "technically non-trivial." He means world hunger, building spaceships, developing new sources of clean energy, etc. I'd rather have spaceships AND spam than no spaceships and no spam.

From Google: dif·fi·cult/ˈdifiˌkəlt/ Adjective: 1. Needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand. 2. Characterized by or causing hardships or problems. I don't see lack of spaceships causing hardship, so that's really more of a definition #1 type of thing. Society built spaceships in the 60's, contrast that against the effectiveness of a spam filtering system built with hardware, software, algo…

OK how about I rephrase: I meant "OMG-big-deal-game-changing problems." Difficult is just a proxy for that.

To Stephensons point, which he makes in the video in the link, he really means dreaming up and solving big problems. The example he gave was building the worlds tallest building. I'm paraphrasing him here: Typically accomplishing the goal of building the worlds tallest building is measured only in contrast to the current record holder. So when people aim to set this record, it's only incrementally bigger. If you actually do the research you'll find that it's possible to build a building 20x taller than the tallest existing building. Why aren't we thinking on that scale?

Re: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

#100

Post by lukejduncan »

beambot wrote: post #72
iosvpn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a second. Isn't Neil working on a realistic sword fighting video game? Kind of hypocritical, don't you think?

Don't forget his employment at Intellectual Ventures -- which is largely regarded as a patent troll.

Do you have a reference for the IV link?

EDIT: Should have googled it myself. For reference http://web.mac.com/nealstephenson/Neal_Stephensons_Site/Inte...

Post reply on HN