Search is a red herring. It was invented when folks didn't realize that links between pages were important. The next step is about disrupting what 'search' means for the internet, not just trying to do better than Google.
741 karma · joined September 29, 2021
For a real tour showcasing a few of the organized rooms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q8Hw3XCwhs
A interesting aspect of the Catacombs is that some Parisians have dug their own tunnels and added various objects in the rooms.
Considering that business is about compounding unfair advantages, if you have to hire people to tell you if you're going in the right direction it's going to be tough.
Here's what worked for me: look for an important and frequent problem that you and people you know have, where the solutions are inadequate and people are not happy.
To know if you're going in the right direction talk to people about their problem and see how unhappy they are with the current solutions. You don't need to build anything at first just to validate the problem.
Most of your time building a business will be spent talking to customers, doing sales, understanding the problem space, not so much coding.
"People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses"
It's less about that distinction and more about not turning execs into mini 'CEO/founders' - their incentives are completely different. When the full extent of the damage they've caused reveals itself, most execs will be long gone.
The problem is about delegating effectively, especially in the case of delegating to executives. The issue is treating parts of the org as "black boxes" and optimising for the wrong thing as a founder. Some founders/CEOs delegate the things they don't want to do or aren't good at. Others want to reinvent the wheel in terms of what "managing" and "direct reports" means. Still others just want to set the vision and hire some "strategists" etc. (who's doing the work?)
Founder mode is basically optimising for the quality of the product down to the gritty details and keeping wannabe professional fakers that manage up on a short leash.
The central thesis of the book is that eroticism and death are inextricably linked - that the most intense erotic experiences often involve elements of sacrifice, and the transgression of taboos. The author argues that this connection between Eros and Thanatos - the drives of life and death - is a fundamental part of the human condition which he sees as a means by which humans confront their own mortality and the limits of their existence.
The conclusions are often questionable but the scope of the work and the historical deep dive makes for quite a ride.
There's been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them.
LLMs are the next wave of this shift - what could be awesome tools for research and writing will become a crutch. It's not so much an issue with LLMs as it is a shunning of any discomfort while learning in favour of amusement and enjoyment.
- PG and Jessica 'retired' - they were the killer combo in terms of identifying talent in tech and culture.
- YC became massively successful - when it started YC was prestigious because of the startups it funded, now the startups are prestigious because of YC.
- Selection is much harder - tech & startups became mainstream unlike when the self-selection consisted of PG essay readers and niche programmers.
Not having a clear goal in mind, not leading by example and using time in the office as a benchmark for progress are all red flags.
Meaningful progress is not about how long you can work, it's about how effective you can be in leveraging limited resources. Problem solvers know that death marches are counterproductive in the end. The big question is how to work smarter and solve more problems using less, i.e. how to not die.
To the downvoters: ultimately the market doesn't care how hard you work. It's brutal but it's true.
Makes sense although gaming is and will remain the most significant use case for VR in the foreseeable future
The original email is from 2015, posted on HN in 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742#33540359
But I think searching for PMF should theoretically be the bread and butter of startups. You're searching for the right combinations in terms of the interaction between People, Problem, Pitch and Solution. Changing your Pitch and Solution is "iterating", changing People and Problem is "pivoting". Improve accordingly until PMF or die trying.
- Network effect: does the product get better with more users?
- Viral growth: does each user bring more users?
- PMF: is there a correspondence between the market, problem and solution that results in market pull?
You can have PMF without the other 2, which is not as strong. You can also have PMF for a niche that never grows to a mass market or have decent sales without PMF. Agreed having to buy your traffic and needing to go through the FAANG toll booth every time you want to access your audience is a problem.
> an aviation grade GPS can cost upwards of $10k, but it’s the same hardware as in a $20 consumer grade GPS
I think the cost of aviation hardware might be much higher because of issues with precision, insurance, updates, redundancy and the very small volumes compared to consumer volumes. Is there a way to certify consumer hardware for aviation applications or are there essentially monopolies and regulatory capture that limit cheaper alternatives from entering the market?
This is not altruism although it's still great for devs and startups. All FB GPU investments is primarily for new AI products "friends", recommendations and selling ads.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Even if the idea is truly good all the value is in the execution and acting on non obvious information from your customers. Anyone who isn’t committed to this long and uncertain process probably shouldn’t be a co-founder.
Rep. Adam Schiff gave the following interpretation: "Effectively giving a president immunity for any crimes committed while in office as long as that president can plausibly claim the action was taken in some form of official capacity. It must now be presumed that the president, as king, is immune from accountability."
https://www.militaryjusticecenter.com/blog/2022/03/can-you-r...
Baudrillard both admired the depth of Foucault's historically informed philosophical analysis but questioned its objectivity especially given Foucault had little to say about how power evolved with mass media & technology - and was in a sense always fighting the last war:
> "If Foucault spoke so well of power to us — and let us not forget it, in real objective terms which cover manifold diffractions but nonetheless do not question the objective point of view one has about them, and of power which is pulverized but whose reality principle is nonetheless not questioned — only because power is dead?"
> "We are no doubt witnessing, with sexual liberation, pornography, etc., the agony of sexual reason. And Foucault will only have given us the key to it when it no longer means anything"
https://medium.com/@noahjchristiansen/jean-baudrillards-call...
https://teddykw2.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/je...
Assange gave the public invaluable information that would not have been know otherwise, but he ended up playing right into the hands of the people who wanted to discredit Clinton.
Politics is complicated.
Find a manager that you can learn from that might not have technical skills but is a genius in another domain like sales. You will learn so much and the difference in culture is mind blowing. In my experience the smartest people tend to be nice and confident. There's been this assumption that being abrasive and being smart go hand in hand, especially in the tech industry. This is for the most part not the case.
You can provide enormous value to an org with your skills.
Safety is an important area in R&D but the killer application is the integration of LLMs into existing workflows to make non technical users 100x-1000x more efficient. There's a lot of untapped potential there. The big successes will have a lot of impact on safety but it will probably come as a result of the wider adoption of these tools rather than the starting point.
- schools need to be selective to keep the quality of the student body high so they persevere to finish the program and succeed
- getting students hired in a competitive field is a very high bar that is much higher compared to most schools
- software is a difficult field with high frustration and a steep learning curve
Lambda was open to everyone, in a tough field, with a high bar for success. Alternatives might be possible in less competitive fields
He was one of Nietzsche's mentors and analysed what being 'great' means from a scientific perspective. It's a clear historical deep dive which can't be as easily reduced to bombastic slogans.
- If the founders are de-risking appropriately it will take years of no pay/low pay work before they can even consider taking on employees. Building a valuable asset is not done overnight and takes extreme commitment - plus reputational & financial risk, opportunity costs etc.
- It's very rare for companies to get past the Series B stage. When they do, the founders have accumulated non trivial and non replicable knowledge about the market and the customers. The liquidity they get should be worth much more down the road.
Now of course if you are an early employee that is expected to 'make the startup work' like a founder and get none of the benefits there's a problem. On the other hand employees are replaceable & 'swappable' in a way that founders are not.