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a_don The function that gives AI value is the ability to make predictions

I could probably generalize: the value of every model is in its ability to make predictions.

This includes, and not limited to:

* mental models: if your mental model doesn't predict reality, then it probably needs to change

* financial models: if it doesn't forecast well, it is wrong

* even AI models :-)

I would add though: "All generalizations are dangerous, even this one." ― Alexandre Dumas

a_don Nearly 1,000 Paintings and Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Digitized and Put Online

There is a hi-res version of starry night, if you admire that painting here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-...

It is 30,000 × 23,756 pixels (file size: 205.1 MB) .

While incomparable to seeing it up close, a lot of brush details can be seen up close. If there was such as thing as a favorite jpg, for me this is it! :-)

a_don The Benefits of Thinking Small (2010)

I wonder why so much of the business writing suffers from survivorship bias type writing - what wrong lessons are we all drawing every day because of that. The esp dangerous ones are probably the ones that sound right but are wrong.

I am a big fan of startups, those who build and innovate. I even like the strategic advice that VCs/ex-founders give about building a business.

However, any writing of the style: "Facebook, Google, Zynga, Twitter did [x] when they were small -> So you must do [x]" doesn't resonate strongly with me. It has this underlying promise of 'if you did [x] you will become Facebook' - which ignores a vast multitude of other factors that went into making an FB. It is worth thinking much harder about how much of [x] is actually right on a strictly case-by-case basis -- depending on what one is trying to build, the problem one is trying to solve and for who.

Sometimes one has to take a different approach and build several features/product bundles in order to sell.

One approach probably is to find some overriding truths that are close to being immutable: such as,

1) make something people want (I haven't seen a counterexample to this yet)

2) nothing happens until somebody sells something (This puts focus sharply on building what will sell)

3) articulating 'why now' to the best available clarity is important in my view (even if to explain why a bigger scope may be needed now than in the past - e.g. if one has to build an HR system today, they would probably need to build a payroll integration as a feature; this wasn't true before 2013-14)

The problem of course with these that they sound super generic that they cease to be of value after a point.

a_don Fermat’s Library – Annotating Academic Papers Every Week

I am not using the phrase ‘fake news’ in the way Trump uses it (to seed doubt and cast aspersions). I mean to say: “sometimes, I know the details (inside story) of a story/situation. When I read an article about it - I can always tell precisely what got misreported or misinterpreted - which causes me to wonder, what else is getting (mis-)reported like that - about things I don’t know”. Probably the choice of the phrase ‘fake news’ is too extreme. I meant to convey a more subtle point.

a_don Fermat’s Library – Annotating Academic Papers Every Week

This approach could save journalism from the scourge of fake news. The specific issues are:

1) opinions masquerading as news. 2) misinterpretation of facts/data. 3) misrepresenting the facts. 4) cherry picking (not showing full picture, such that the meaning changes). 5) insufficient context / history about the topic.

All these issues with reporting could be mitigated with expert + crowd annotation — esp where the author and the subject (say people mentioned in the news) can come and add more context.

When objective function is speed and clicks, sometimes depth on a topic suffers. This is true whether news is human or machine generated. In that case, continual engagement with the original article, amendments and updates become a very important tool.

If journalism is defined as a search for truth, then news annotation could be the thing that saves it.

HN, thoughts?

a_don Blot – a blogging platform with no interface

a simple blogging site — i never found anything more minimal than this.

http://adombic.appspot.com/

I don’t expect anyone to use it, just wanted to show for fun since we are talking about simplicity :)

a_don Jan Koum to leave after broad clashes with Facebook

Small tribute to Jan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14249880

a_don Jan Koum to leave after broad clashes with Facebook

If true, and still a big if, since the journalist seems to be conjecturing -- this might have implications for Facebook's future acquisitions.

Acquiring social networks that get to scale is an integral part of Zuck's strategy. It is a fairly smart strategy since one company cannot successfully lead or copy all the innovation - and social networks are very "taste-dependent" products. Zuck understands that Facebook is a big incumbent, and as with any incumbent there would be 'anti-incumbent' products. He was just willing to buy these products without too much fuss.

His willingness to overpay for these companies has been a part of a long-term dominance strategy. Maybe he has one or two misses like Snap; but by and large, his sense for "pricing" these companies and a no-nonsense "Corp Dev" approach could be thought of as a competitive advantage (plus he has proven that he can do it repeatably). The lawyers don't get involved until much later - he "leads" from the front when doing these deals. It is not very common in large-company-land.

If Jan Koum, who is very highly respected (he is truly a no-bullshit product/management person) leaves for the "wrong" reasons, it might have long-term implications for other companies that Zuck wants to buy in the future. Thus leaving an opening in the market for an 'anti-incumbent' offering to thrive.

a_don Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write

I love that book. Short anecdote: back in 2006 I was lucky to get an early copy through a high-flying management consultant. The book basically rips into everything that is wrong with management consulting — but for some reason this person was completely unaffected by this book and kept praising it. After talking for a few minutes, it dawned on me: this person hasn’t read the book! ha ha.

Anyway after reading the book I thought phil rosenzweig was a genius and this book ought to be more popular.

a_don Bezos: A CEO Who Can Write

Business writing suffers from an epidemic of post-fact rationalization. Looking back, it is trivially easy to parse out whether something someone said was “insightful wisdom” or “useless”. I am continually amazed by the scope and depth of this hindsight bias disease.

While this author tries to make a point that bezos is a good writer, I am afraid that this is just riding a wave of bezos worship (like Elon worship, Jobs worship, Buffett workship, [‘name successful business person, preferably, billionaire’] worship) — after bezos’ company is seeing good results.

I wish more business writing was devoted to 1) suggesting ways so that people have their own original thoughts 2) Discussing merits of strategies before they become successful 3) Discussing problem solving frameworks 4) early days of companies when they weren’t successful etc. I believe learning about the first 100-300 days of companies would be very instructive. Someone should write a book about that :-)

a_don On Radical Markets

You are right. One of PG's main contribution is to provide a path for engineers to come into money (makers make money; as opposed to professional managers). Today engineers are (re) inventing money itself, thus "owning" the unit in which they come into money.

a_don Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

- Abstract from https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The first line of the paper says: Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments.

Aside from the technical solution proposed in the paper, the points related to "trusted third parties" and "financial institutions" are key. This is a product designed to circumvent institutions. It would most probably not be received well by the institutions. There is too much philosophy, religion, politics, and drama around Bitcoin - and is a great vehicle for all human folly to be on display - greed, fear, prestige, cultism and so on and so forth. Of course, No one really knows how this experimental product will play out but it is intellectually engaging and largely serves the function it was designed for.

It is fascinating to read critiques of this product (esp unsubstantive ones). There is no CEO, Customer Service, Executives, Managers etc that are really listening - unlike say, criticizing a company like Uber or Comcast. Therefore, most of the feedback just goes...nowhere and is just echoed amongst "people" (Echo chamber?). The inventor's mystique and politics further add to the cult-like qualities of this product - probably cognitive dissonance - because we have never seen a product launched like this ever before. As an author of these type of posts, one must really focus and ask what do they want to achieve. If they are warning the public about avoiding speculation (which is good motivation) then they need to make much better arguments.

This article is lazy. I would even generalize and say that this constant "thought leadership" around Bitcoin is one of the most tiring things about Bitcoin - with people doing it for themselves and not really making good deep arguments for furthering everyone's understanding.

It is tiring because all the points have been made - there is no new original thought (which would be great to discuss, actually). Bitcoin is an experiment. It is a pretty decent product, with some downsides (like inefficiency) for being "like money". Like a mycelium network [1] or Facebook, it spreads largely on its own. In some respects, Bitcoin is an amazing product.

Maybe we let the experiment play out. We will see what happens. What is playing out is truly fascinating :)

It would be great to see some new points being made so one can have an interesting discussion.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism...

a_don The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige

Is this from Zero to One?

a_don In India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis

I am from Kota - the city mentioned in this article as the epicenter of this crisis. India's annual suicide rate is 10.5 per 100,000 people, while the suicide rate for the world as a whole is 11.6 per 100,000 [1]. Kota has seen an extremely large influx of young students over the last decade. Roughly 200,000 [2] students come to live in this city to study for college entrance exam. Now, while the high-pressure exams are a problem and there are a complex set of contributing factors that make the exams "high pressure" - social norms, lottery-ticket-out-of-middle-class-mindset, lack of other options, population, demographics (large number of young people) etc. - but the article is trying to make a link between the high pressure exam and suicides, that seems a bit problematic to me. This exam has existed for more than 50 years, and has always been very hard and high pressure.

This article states that "from the start of 2014 to November 2017, 45 Kota students committed suicide". Please make up your mind about the facts, but it seems like lazy journalism and a stretch to make the connection between the exam and suicides without accounting for deviations from per capita rates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_India

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-students-are-in-Kota

a_don Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?

Bret Victor - Inventing on principle

https://vimeo.com/36579366

Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs

Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HsGAc0_Y5c

Robert Cialdini - On Influence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC6ItuT1Eso

Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZQnKtjM1TA

Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast)

https://www.fs.blog/2017/02/naval-ravikant-reading-decision-...

Josh Wolfe - On "This is who you are up against" podcast

http://investorfieldguide.com/wolfe/

Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZbX_9ru9U

Paul Graham - Startup school (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc

James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary)

Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm3p_3Vgejk

Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZTrfvB2AQ

Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ

a_don Email marketing for e-commerce

I will attempt to argue against email marketing as a channel for any startup (B2b or B2c).

1. Channel is extremely crowded. Everyone has read the same best-practices and optimization techniques. So emails from most companies (each one of them thinking that they are ‘differentiated) regress in quality and content to a mean.

2. Because it is so measurable (a marketer’s dream), this channel becomes less about what the emails say, but more about tricks to get one to open and click.

3. Excessive click optimization might erode “brand” (my conjecture). Since “brand” falls under the “soft stuff” in marketing, it gets attention as a second class citizen after one has taken care of the measurable stuff. (Defining brand as the ‘impression a word creates in your mind when you hear that word’)

4. Once a startup gives up on the ‘crutch’ of email - may be the team will think anew and innovate. Due to its measurability, my personal opinion is that companies don’t explore other channels - meaning, there isn’t a lot of invention going on.

If one visited a random saas startup and saw a day in the life of their “email marketing team”, I bet they are all roughly doing the same thing and have the same goals. I fear that no one wants to lose out on the 1% out of 1 million attention that emails are able to get - consistently and repeatably - and are thus like a drug that one can’t get off of :-) and thus companies don’t risk inventing new channels.

This is probably an ignorant rant (Eg a good counter argument would simply be - “email is popular because it works!”).

Given the number of emails I get, I do wish more companies tried more creative techniques to grab attention. (The Snapchat vending machine for spectacles comes to mind as a good attempt at innovation. I must confess I have zero knowledge of how the numbers on that approach worked)

In ecommerce, companies like brandless are doing well at getting attention without playing the standard email game (standard email game = ‘buy lists—>optimize—>$’ -> repeat).

Having said this, the advice in this article is very sensible - if someone comes to your site and didn’t complete the purchase, it doesn’t hurt to ask again. I am just raising a caution against taking email marketing for granted - esp if an entrepreneur is just starting out - presumably she can take some risk and try innovative ways of grabbing attention, than just email.

a_don Adding ERC20 Support to Coinbase

“We are about to launch an actual tropical Island with an erc20 token and this would be good news.”

Super interesting comment. How can I learn more about your project?Are you doing this as a reg D offering? (With Securitize or polymath?)

Definitely one of the most interesting thing I have heard in a while :-) therefore curious to learn more...

(I have been thinking of a similar project, but didn’t move beyond research)

a_don Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16547215

This comment by Animats in the context of self-driving trucks is quite telling. He warns precisely of this danger.

a_don Pilot.com raises $15M to bring bookkeeping into the modern era

Brilliant model. PayPal's fraud detection is usually the most cited human intervention model for building "smart systems", but the idea goes back further: Amazon's backend in the 90s, CD baby's recommendation engine [1] and one can probably find examples that are decades old. I have built large operations teams around this central idea. Happy to chat if you want to compare notes and experience doing this.

[1] https://sivers.org/hi

a_don The ICO paradox and how to fix it

How does one execute an ICO that is compliant? Can you please point to specific details or methodology?

a_don On the Work of Edward Witten (1990) [pdf]

Two years ago, I had the profound honor of having lunch with Prof Witten. He is also a very kind and generous human being. A small tidbit I learned: He spends a disproportionate amount of time thinking, and very little time on the desk with a pen and a paper. His students told me that he likes to work things out in his head -- which could last for days -- before he would commit things to paper. I thought that was interesting, although not unexpected for a genius at his level. If I am not mistaken, he is the most cited theoretical physicist.

He deserves to be celebrated in popular culture -- like Einstein and Newton. For me, he is the definition of a "living legend".

a_don Dropbox S-1

Is this the first company to go public that (almost) started/took-off as a "Show HN"? In a way, this is a big moment for YC, PG and this community. Is there a list of "Show HNs" that have become "big"? It would be very interesting to see.

a_don Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

>Would really welcome your thoughts and ideas here as well!

Will write to feedback@cointracker.io

a_don Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

2 follow-up questions:

On #1 - Have you done any work on which segment needs this the most? (just curious, what "talking to users" revealed).

On #4 - What are the future possibilities of this product (future vision of CoinTracker)? (again, just curious to learn)

Thanks.

a_don Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager

1. Cryptocurrencies as an asset class has a broad spectrum of "investors" - tech-savvy millennials, high-net-worth individuals, family offices, financial advisors on behalf of clients, sophisticated hedge funds and a ton of "regular folks" (e.g. moms putting a bit of their savings). Any effort that builds tools to navigate this space is a good direction.

2. Crypto bubble is unique because institutions are the last ones to get in. Retail was first. Consumer tools are an absolute necessity. Although, I wish these apps (incl CoinTracker) came with more warning (about scams) and helped people exercise more discretion (including a warning about too much exposure etc).

3. Taxes are a nightmare. Having a great tool to help with taxes helps everyone sleep better

4. Still in an early, immature, evolving [1] area. CoinTracker can be much more ambitious than their current version. Would love to learn more about the future roadmap.

Congrats on the launch. May the force be with you.

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-decentralized-future-series...

a_don The Decentralized Future

Harbor is promising. Their paper and code is still light on the details, but I am rooting for them. There are some open questions around compliant secondary trading, real world enforcement etc - but very promising direction. Do you know other projects that are attempting real asset security tokens?

a_don The Decentralized Future

PG/YC started a revolution: They suggested a way through which programmers came into money.

Now, with Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies: Programmers are creating money itself.

This article makes a bull-case very articulately, with sprinklings of realism. I am looking forward to this series. Being a blockchain cynic is the norm these days, and I appreciate when someone takes the trouble to lay down a well-reasoned and well-researched argument - great job rrecuero.

Clearly, there is irrational optimism/scams abound, but we can often forget that the mass-irrationality can be decoupled with the 'actual' promise of the idea. And the fundamental promise of the idea (Bitcoin, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain etc) is for us to rethink 'how things work the way they work and why' and attempt to improve it. The Bitcoin paper should atleast get us to think about what is money. It matters less whether these "blockchain things" ultimately succeed or fail -- the fact that something NEW is being attempted, has to be applauded (Ofcourse, it would be great to figure out a way to do this without harming people using their credit cards to buy shit coins).

I love reading about blockchain ideas/projects. Like many, I too am jaded by the scams - but I think it is worth maintaining some optimism through this.

This article doesn't even touch upon some very important use-cases like: moving money across borders and money being seizure resistant etc. I think there is was, and has always been a market for a product that allows us to store value in a way that is cross-border, govt resistant and anonymous (whether it is a $500B market or $5B market is less interesting than appreciating that a product was invented to fulfil this use case). There are plenty of interesting use-cases to explore here.

In the section on Tokens, the article says: "contributors can transfer their assets instantly and easily to other people (pending regulation)" while referring to securities. IF this becomes a reality, it would be huge.

I see a lot of upside if even a fraction of the promise of this tech is realized.

a_don Sustainable Sources of Competitive Advantage

I have been following Morgan Housel's (the OP) writings for a while. He has written some excellent essays. In terms of explaining important ideas, they come close to "PG-Level" (Paul Graham) in writing. If you are interested in reading more from Morgan, I recommend the following:

1. The greatest story ever told: "Capitalism’s success is built on a belief – a story – that, given the right incentives, people can work together to solve problems. It’s worked magnificently. It’s the greatest story ever told."

http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-greatest-story-eve...

2. The Reasonable Formation of Unreasonable Things "Few things have as much impact on your lifetime investment returns as the decisions you make during bubbles."

http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-reasonable-formati...

a_don Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog

> Even on high-contrast sites like Medium, the bright background combined with dark text can be tiresome on the eye, meaning that highlighted text will invert that yielding a more comfortable white text on blue.

Agree with OP and super OP. This is exactly why I do it (highlight). Question: Is there any consensus on which combination of text color/background color is best for reading?

a_don The US is the most expensive nation in which to have a baby

Crony capitalism.

"Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk taken for them, but rather, as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

(exactly what I explained in a separate comment on this thread :-))