jkuria

Mining for gold is even more inefficient. You've got dig earth several kilometers down, build massive infrastructure, use harmful chemicals to purify it, lose lives etc etc

You must not have read the article mate.

"The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands show no age-related decline, in some ways seeming as youthful at 170 as at 30. Mr Steele thinks this phenomenon, known as negligible senescence, is within humanity’s grasp, too."

Hmmh, how did he try to monetize?

Was the author ever identified?

Isn't this what led Kleiner Perkins down the wrong path and tarnished John Doerr's reputation? He made a killing investing in tech stocks in the 90's and 2000s then decided he wanted to do good for the world and leave a legacy for his kids, and got into climate, clean tech and other 'feel good' stuff. The results were not pretty!

I believe it is best to use one's wealth and earnings to invest in climate stuff outside of a formal fund, with no expectation of outsize returns.

By the way, here's an interview with Sahil, where he talks about his "Failure to build a $1 billion company..." and how it ended up being a blessing in disguise:

https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/2987051/Candid-...

The author of the article is rich. He is an boutique investment banker who has sold several 'old economy' companies.

For those, like me, wondering what ECC is, here's an explanation:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ecc-memory-ram-glossary...

Thanks for pointing this out. It was guest post so I'll ask the author to check his math.

The map you shared doesn't give me this sense. It appears to be straight-forward in the US. From the map, I can't see why you would need to go to Canada first, to get to the rest of the US.

There are some very big businesses using them. RB (a $20 Billion conglomerate) uses Shopify.

And a large supermarket chain I know uses WooCommerce.

From BigCommerce's S-1 filing, plenty of large companies use them.

A company like Nvidia, while it has a $300 billion market cap, likely doesn't sell in massive volumes to consumers. More of their business is to OEMs.

I thought it was generally accepted that John Stuart Mill was the last man to know everything there was to know.

By Haldane's time, knowledge had expanded so much that it was no longer possible for any one person to lay claim to that title.

No concept of zero?

Hmmh, I thought Andy Grove's strategic genius was to get Intel out of memory entirely and double down on processors. At least this is one of the reasons the popular business press celebrates him. Didn't know they were still in this business.

Hmmh, I took away the exact opposite point. They developed a model to do exactly this and Fangio from the 1950s came out on top. He raced for four different teams and the driver's contribution (versus the car's and the team's) was 58% compared to 19% today.

There's also a little bit of the "DARPA effect" where several key things align perfectly in time to create such an outcome i.e. The Economist did a study on numerous attempts to create another "DARPA" that would lead to break through innovations of the kind DARPA did. Not one has succeeded.

From what I've heard, In YC's case:

+ Paul was a successful technical founder with the money and reputation. He could rally the troops with "suits and MBAs don't matter, hackers rule the world" rhetoric.

+ Paul had a giant megaphone with his blog (not initially done to market YC)

+ He had a partner who was good at reading and sizing up people, crucial in picking the first batches whose success was crucial to the whole thing working.

+ The cost of doing a start-up had fallen dramatically

+ and so on. I am sure there a few others.

Similarly, everyone has tried to replicate the Kenya's mPesa, the world's most successful mobile money system. No one has succeeded because there hasn't been the same confluence of factors that led to mpesa's success:

“Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California.”

-- Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002)

they say they are #2. I thought Shopify and Woocomerce were #1 and #2 and they were a very distant third, or even fourth if Magento is to be believed. Or does WooCommerce not count as SaaS?

Paul Hoffman talks about Ron Graham's house and Erdos in this interesting talk about The Man Who Loved Only Numbers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9634A0iBw7w

Prior discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120

Seattle-based OVP Partners which shut down a few years ago also had a interesting anti-portfolio page. The Starbucks story was hilarious:

“A guy walks into your office some time in the late 1980s and says he wants to open a chain of retail shops selling a commodity product you can get anywhere for 25 cents, but he will charge 2 dollars.

Of course, you listen politely, and then fall off your chair laughing when he leaves. Howard Schultz didn’t see this as humorous. And we didn’t make 500 times our money.” OVP believed that there was no market for Starbucks’ premium coffee, which may indeed have been the prevailing wisdom at the time,

How is this different from the current site. I don't immediately notice any differences.

Maybe HN could gift him this Lego Bugatti (1:5 replica)?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/build-your-own-supercar-on-your...

Op here: We will fix the social media bar and ask AnswerBase (the publishing platform we use) to not require a login to upvote or downvote. But hey, you had to login to participate on HN. Not that big a deal!

ICYMI (Was on the front page most of the day 2 weeks ago):

Once you figure out general price, here's a good guide to Pricing Plans

https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/Article/3169972/The-Def...

this was only during the test. In the actual direct mail piece, they had a price.

Exactly what I was wondering. Did it work? I remember hearing that the science behind it has since been discredited.

We are working on the look and feel but there is lots of great content.

What do you think of these mockups:

https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/...

https://theconversionwizards-my.sharepoint.com/:i:/p/jasper/...

Something we are looking into.

The independent findings have been published but no one had put them into a cohesive whole "formula".

All the technologies Tesla uses existed but no one had created a Tesla :)