I appreciate your response, and I fully understand the realistic angle that you have provided.
But I have to clarify that I am not calling pg immoral. I am suggesting the essay could be. People outside the game industry may not get the Zynga problem, but you can also look at, say, Groupon's controversies. "Immoral" could indeed be too strong a word, but I believe few will disagree that aggressive growth strategies has some inevitable side effects, and for this no amount of footnotes is sufficient.
But again, call me naive, "people like Paul Graham and CEOs of startups" should, contrary to what you claim, should care MORE about these problems, because they can certainly afford to, and when they do, it will matter. :)
You made great points, but I disagree about the morality part.
Wall Street had also produced explosive growth in our economy. It was also a ingenious system with participation of lots of hackers and talents. But I think most will agree now, that when Wall Street operates without considering its own morality, it is by itself, immoral.
In other words, I believe the essay's lack of reflection on the morality issue, which is definitely not a small one (e.g. the Zynga example), is what makes it biased, and partly, immoral.
Am I the only one who think pg's view points appear to be getting more and more extreme, in some sense rather biased compared to his previous essays?
Zynga is definitely all about growth. It is fiercely focused on metrics, fiercely focused on growth. But as someone from game industry, we cannot agree that this model is THE model that gives the world and everyone value. If the game industry worked like the way pg describes in the essay decades ago, we would never have Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Grim Fandango or Minecraft. We would all be left with choices like Farmville, Monsterville, Mineville, forever and ever.
"Growth drives everything in this world."? Does it? All fads grow like wildfire too, but does it drive everything in world? Or a better question would be: should we allow it to?
This happens all the time in machine learning applications. Or many other engineering disciplines I dare say. If theorems and laws never need some tweaks here and there in the real world, what do we need hackers and engineers for?
"If you're a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can get a job paying about $80,000 per year."
Wow, things change fast. Isn't there a thread talking about certain mid twenties in Google having $250k per year lately? It was written only 6 years ago.
I too recently lost a co-founder to a Valley company of similar size. Considering that he is very green, not exactly the best in our startup and that we are based somewhere with rather low pay for engineers in general, the offer he received was very hard to believe for everyone. It's hard to convince people to stay when those work in Valley could be as interesting without the stress and come with a big fat cheque.
I doubt using typos to discredit other people's work or opinions is rational or polite. I didn't write that extension, but he/she could just be a non-native speaker like me. What's your problem with people who doesn't speak and write in your native language? Can you write in mine, 100% error free?
That doesn't mean the action make sense. My point is that it won't make sense for Motorola to do that, not whether they did or did not do it. Google can easily tell them that if they do that prematurely, Android ecosystem will fail, rocking the same boat they are in. Sensibly, you can't get much royalties from a failed platform, and Apple/Microsoft won't give Motorola any medals for going that path.
Threatening to go after other Android partners makes little sense for Motorola. It's not something Motorola would do to get most profit from it. If Motorola has threatened Google something, it would be to sell to Microsoft. That will make much more sense.
Another scenario: you wish to tell your web app's users that there are some issues on certain Firefox versions. You wrote "There are some issues for Firefox 7.xx". Users scratch their heads and ask, what version? Nightmare follows.
Could anyone explain to me why the HN community seems to have a particular interest in AI compared to other more "academic" areas? I have seen quite some amount of AI resources here, but at the same time for most startups discussed here they aren't particularly related to AI. Just curious.
The author's view is strange indeed. To be a "rounded, open and engaged intellectual citizen" we can well just get out of the room and put curiosity and action into people's lives and matters, and reflect on what you see and do. In my experience that works much better.
Concurred. Let's not forget that ASUS has mastered the netbook form-factor for quite some time. For many of us tablet is only an occasional need, say, read a long article, watch a show etc., so what I would call an "occasional tablet", i.e. the Transformer package, seems particularly natural.
This will serve nothing but encourage patent trolls and big corporations to invest more and more in ridiculously broad patents. Apple sues others, patent troll sues Apple and others, some other competitors dig out obscure patents and start sueing; someone gonna benefit from this, but definitely not entrepreneurs or customers.
General statistics are more helpful when the target group is homogeneous. Intuitively speaking, when a group has similar resources, goals and problems, what happens to others is more applicable to the individual. Whereas if a group is composed of highly differentiated members, general statistics is likely a result of a mixture of many distinct models, which in this case would be far less useful for the individual.
In case of start-ups, it would seem to me that the founders' motivations, goals, environments and backgrounds all have high degree of variations. General statistics like those in the Project should thus indeed be used with caution.
Buddhist philosophy without the religion part is actually allowed in East Asia. You can claim to be interested in purely Buddhist philosophy and not the religion here without any problems, and there are experts and communities in such too. Nobody gets offended by that. The religion part is kept for the masses, and is considered a choice.
I suspect that, since Buddhism is relatively new to the West (and mostly Zen Buddism?), the religion part is naturally more dominant. The Buddhist philosophy/religion duality will likely develop in the West too one day. It just takes time.
I am very surprised this is the first time someone try to get everyone's attention on this practice (if that's the intention of the poster/submitter). It's quite easy to spot recently there are well-timed attacks on Google or Android which are oddly fueled with passion. I suppose any money spent on this (which should be significant) would be way better used if it's used to improve whatever product the client have in competition with Google, really. End users, ultimately, won't benefit from these.
Downloadsquad was a great team. No bullshit, real opinions on big and little things that matter. Another horror story from AOL since AOL v.s. Engadget editors.
I believe our cases strikes a counter-intuitive point about what constitutes 'rest': despite the fact a distractive teaching job or marathon training can be taxing mentally and/or physically, they have shown to be good type of 'rest' for the entrepreneur. Strange creatures we are.
A bit of personal experience to relate to the article: in recent years there were certain obligations that demands distraction from my normal startup duties (in my case a part-time teaching job). I didn't really need that money, and at first I feel disturbed because most advices here tells you to put 24x7 into your startup, and I felt like a mother separated from her baby. But soon I find that when I come back from these short distractions I find myself more efficient and more energetic in what I really love to do. When I was doing startup-work completely full-time before, I will often hit those days when I am totally unmotivated and get nothing done the whole day. I never hit such a day since I "distracted" myself. I always find myself thinking "wow I can finally work on the startup again!". I think the magic is that I used some external obligations to "pull" myself away from startup to rest and recharge, rather than (wrongly) expecting myself to take breaks voluntarily.
Of course, I believe some people can really work 24x7 on ONE THING without any burnouts. But clearly not me.
Ever since "management" and the dedicated "manager" were invented, we have been told, increasingly in recent decades, that they, rather than talents in other roles, are the key to business success. With the increasing importance and accelerating pace of innovations in our time, it's time to test if to what degree such doctrine would still hold true. Good job Larry. That's some risk worth taking.
From my experience, most tablet users use the tablet for 1)videos 2)really casual games 3)random browsing - not particularly PC-ish in my opinion. To say 'Tablet is the PC' is in some way less accurate than saying 'Tablet is the new TV' or 'Tablet is the best mobile browser'.
I would speculate that there are some comment bots that simply upvote and comment whatever at the top by chance. Out of 6 comments here 3 seems completely off-topic and coming from relatively new users. There were reports of submission bots around lately too.
Not enough evidence to suggest that the downloads are not driven by being featured by Apple. Being featured is a big deal in the App Store (the "lottery", and photo apps are all the rage lately.
Japanese thing. It's actually happening to every corporate and stores in Japan, from our more extensive coverage here in Asia. It's just that they are too busy continuing to combat the aftermath to think about writing things down and tell the public in the middle of the disaster.
Given I am based in Asia, I can assure you that EVERY other companies in Japan did - all wifi are open and free, vending machine goes free, stores open for sleep and food. It's just that Japanese culture do not consider it necessary to tell western media about it, or actually consider it improper to PR on it.