tomhoward

Spam management is the hardest thing about comments. That’s a big part of what Disqus takes care of. I know you wrote that you would want approve and delete so as to moderate comments, but it becomes a big and unpleasant task, wading through the spam comments to find the good ones.

Comments like this are against the HN guidelines as they are at odds with the site's purpose, which is to gratify intellectual curiosity. There are plenty of ways people can discuss ideas from Varoufakis, Marx and other writers/philosophers from all parts of the ideological landscape without resorting to simplistic barbs like this, and without wanting a society that remotely resembles North Korea or any other authoritarian state.

Can you share your sources on this?

What figures can you point to on mg/L of fluoride in (commonly consumed) green tea vs tap water?

Even aside from that, it’s a specious argument: people who want to avoid fluoride can just avoid green tea; it’s much harder to avoid it in tap water.

As for “delusional panic”: it matters a lot for iodine absorption and thyroid function for some people, which is a both widespread and overlooked/diminished, at great harm and cost to those who are affected and unable to get help.

For what it’s worth I’m not advocating for removal of fluoride from tap water, but there does need to be more recognition of the harms to those affected and serious efforts made to develop treatment approaches for those with iodine deficiencies and thyroid dysfunction, as it really is a catastrophic problem for a lot of people.

People aren’t recommended to drink 8 glasses or more of green tea per day and most people don’t have any.

The whole thing with fluoridated water is that whilst small doses may be harmless for most people, the more you consume the worse it is, and plenty of people - based on official recommendations - drink a lot of tap water each day.

Yep.

Anxiety is an intelligence attenuator. Plenty of people have above-average intelligence but also above-average anxiety for all kinds of reasons, including socio-economic status. Anxious people don't do well in aptitude tests, job interviews, exams, presentations.

There's a study that often gets shared around, purportedly "Debunking the Myth of the Young Entrepreneur", showing data that most successful startup founders start their companies in their mid-to-late 40s, including tech/social media companies.

It depends a lot on how you qualify and categorise founders, companies and "successful", but of course you can understand why it can be somewhat truthful: people in their 40s have had 2-3 decades to build up experience, networks and a track record, making it much easier to build a team and attract investors and initial customers. I'm sure almost all of these founders in their 40s have had at least some partial success in their past.

So it still affirms that it's best to start as young as possible, allowing time to experiment with ideas, markets, co-founders, etc. I've seen plenty of founders bounce from one-to-another-to-another startup from their 20s to their 40s, each one being vastly more successful than the last.

But as you point out there are still all kinds of opportunities to build new products to address needs that are overlooked by younger founders, so you should absolutely go for it if you're inspired.

I feel the same as you about being less interested in "unicorn"-scale success after 40; as you mature, have kids, experience illness in your family and become more observant of problems in different segments of society, you become much more focused on just providing well for your family and doing some good for the world than having to be some kind of all-conquering hero.

If you want to connect privately to talk more about what kind of company you want to build and how best to go about it, feel free to get in touch (email in bio).

Also, Larry was 23 when PageRank was first published - that's not much older than "barely out of high school", even if we have to be so literal about everything :)

In the context of this article we're talking about the difference between the kind of rich you become from founding a hugely successful ("unicorn?") tech company, vs working hard for a salary for years and saving hard. It's more a qualitative thing than a specific number of dollars saved from a salary.

I'm well aware that the definition of rich can be very different in other contexts. I'm talking about the context of this article.

I edited the parenthesised part of the first sentence from "and very lucky" to "and/or very lucky" to make allowances for your objection. And sure, you can always point out exceptions.

The real point is that it's misguided to try and compare percentages of tech company employees with percentages of founders; they're very different things.

Of course, out of all the founders of all the companies, a relatively tiny percentage will be vastly rich. And out of all the employees of all the tech companies, most will be quite wealthy and comfortable, and a small percentage will be vastly rich.

But that doesn't tell you anything about what is the most reliable path for any given individual to get vastly rich; it entirely depends on whether you're the kind of person you are how well you can learn how to build successful products and companies.

He's giving advice to school kids on what to do during their remaining school years or early college years.

Unless you're very early (and/or very lucky), you can't get "rich" (i.e., can choose never to work again and can invest in many other things) as an employee (though of course a highly-paid employee can become very well off and comfortable).

Yes you need to be lucky to get super-rich as a founder too, but you have a lot more control, i.e., you make the primary decisions that determine whether the company will make good products that people will use/buy.

His advice is:

- Work on a personal project that is motivating to you (obviously you won't work on it if it's not motivating to you)

- It's a good sign if the project you're motivated to work on solves a problem that you and your friends care a lot about, because there's a good chance many more people will also want that problem solved and will buy/use your product.

Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.

Re-reading later, I recognise that “I guess you are not very familiar with addiction?” was perhaps not ad hom or ridiculing, but rather a suggestion that I haven’t personally experienced addiction.

For the record, I have certainly been addicted to things, yes.

I'll start by noting just how much of this argument relies on ridicule and ad hom attack:

- I guess you are not very familiar with addiction?

- Ok, kind of funny

- should only be said as a punchline

- To be blunt, the story itself is speculative Freudian subconscious schlock which is why I believe I hear something similar from those fresh from therapy.

Once that's distilled away, the substance of the argument turns out to be a false dichotomy: I.e. it's not the subconscious mind trying to achieve the outcome it perceives is best for survival, it's just addiction. There's no examination or even apparently much contemplation of what an addition actually is, from a physiological and psychological perspective. Addiction is asserted as the final answer, rather than the deeper question it really is.

Why is it that some people are addicted to eating "too much" food, whereas others are "addicted" to eating "too little"? Why do some people get addicted to drugs and not others in the same social group/class who experiment with the same drugs?

I've seen that up close, in social groups where there has been recreational use of stimulant drugs, with most people managing to keep it a recreational thing and grow out of it, but a minority, sadly, ending up in a downward spiral of addiction and dysfunction. I saw two of my closest friends from the mid 00s end up in prison that way. Another died in his 30s from alcohol-related illness, the only one of his social group who had a drinking problem even though all were routine social drinkers. Those guys were every bit as capable and privileged as everyone else in their social circles, but were carrying a lot of trauma and showing patterns of self-sabotaging behaviour, observable for the whole decade-or-so I knew them.

I know there's a lot of pop-sci claptrap around on the internet. I totally get that and understand the impulse to push back on that.

But I've been exploring this topic for almost 20 years in some ways, and I'm not beholden to the theories of any particular authority figures from the past or present; everything I understand is based on my own experience and experimentation and in what I observe in others close to me.

I've been going deep on subconscious work for over 12 years, and have demonstrable evidence of significant changes in behavioural patterns and impulses over that time. I've seen others achieve far better life outcomes from subconscious healing work than I've seen anyone achieve from conventional therapies and health treatments, including with fertility issues.

And yes I know this is all self-reported anecdata, without the backing of any large clinical trials - but who is even trying to research this stuff?

This 2018 paper [1], and other works by its authors [2,3,4] seem to be orbiting the topic.

But most of the health industry and broader society continues to handwave away the topic with dismissals like "it's just addiction", thereby avoiding the work of exploring more deeply what addiction really is and what opportunities there may be to discover and popularise more effective approaches for recovery.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XrBcghcAAAAJ&hl=en

[3] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9bqE-hsAAAAJ&hl=en

[4] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RGBSG7EAAAAJ&hl=en

I just feel like this reply amounts to "there can't be a non-moralistic explanation for this, the moralistic explanation has to be the correct one".

I know that's an uncharitable oversimplification, but is there a way you can present your case without moralistic barbs like "the inner food-addict concocting excuses for an XXL pizza"?

And perhaps also include evidence rather than conjecture. My comment is consistent with the notion from evolutionary theory that our mind and body acts in accordance with what it determines is optimal for its survival, with the caveat that this can be complicated by factors like illness.

Robert Greene’s books/videos/interviews are probably a good option.

They were inspired by his own experience of being bullied/exploited as a writer in Hollywood.

They are criticized for being harmful explanations of how to behave in manipulative and damaging ways: his response is that he doesn’t like that this is the way people behave - he’s suffered from it as much as anyone else - he is just writing about what he’s observed in human nature and society so people can learn how to not be victim to it.

I sympathise with the thought process, but more laws/rules can't/won't fix it. Many (most?) jurisdictions in the western world and elsewhere already have laws against workplace harassment, and the possibility of civil action against any conduct that leads to severe emotional distress. And schools have rules against it. But it still happens - determined/clever bullies will always find a way to make their mark in some kind of way.

Better to help people learn how stand up to bullies, and for companies to make it a priority to be emotionally healthy places and become an example of how to do that most effectively so others can follow (this is one of my great hopes for any companies I build).

To the extent that this phenomenon is true for a significant number of people, it aligns with a concept that I came across several years ago and have been living by ever since with good success: our decisions are driven mostly from our subconscious mind. When seen this way, there are good reasons why a person may be beholden to subconscious patterns that cause them to return to an above-average weight (and thus continue to produce hunger hormones even though they've eaten enough fuel for the body to function well): it can be dangerous to be in good shape - it can attract unwanted attention, attack, or expectations of capabilities that would make people see you as a threat. If a person has had some kind of trauma in the past relating to physical attack, gaining weight can be a way to become invisible, a non-threat, or better protected in the case of an attack. (FWIW this might explain cases where there are severe side-effects after taking drugs like Ozempic: the drug may be effective at blocking the hunger hormones of whatever it does, but if the subconscious pattern is still congruent with maintaining the higher weight level, it will fight back in other ways. The subconscious mind always wins, in my experience.)

That said, another factor can just be issues with the microbiome and digestive absorption: there are several conditions that can mean that even though a person has consumed enough food, the nutritional content is not absorbed into the body, due to the presence or colonies of organisms (bacteria, parasites, fungus) that consume the nutrients first), and/or digestive inflammation conditions that mean the nutrients just aren't absorbed, but the fat from the food is still stored. So, more food is desired in order to try to gain sustenance, even though it seems enough has already been consumed (though, issues relating to digestion can also originate in the subconscious mind, as the research behind YC company Mindset Health demonstrates – https://www.mindsethealth.com/research-outcomes)

Health is hard.

I didn't know much of him apart from his Arrested Development cameo, but my partner told me about this anecdote about him today and I think it's brilliant:

Hurwitz recounted how, when he actually got in touch with Weathers, the actor immediately dismissed the exact type of joke Hurwitz and the writing staff were envisioning. And not only that, but it was actually Weathers himself who came up with the running bit for his character:

"So I called Carl, and said, 'Hey, I don't know if you've seen the show but we wanna use you for it, and you'd be working with David Cross.' And he goes, 'Great, but let me ask you something. It's not going to be just a bunch of Rocky jokes is it?' I laughed, 'No! No! Give me a little credit, Carl. Of course not! It's a multidimensional character.' And he was like, 'Because I direct and I'm a funny guy and I don't wanna just do a bunch of Rocky jokes. Nobody wants that. Maybe I could be really cheap or something?' And I said, 'Whaaaat?' 'Maybe I could be really cheap?' 'Really? You'd like to do that?' 'Oh, absolutely, that's what I'm saying. I want to play someone funny, not just be a sight gag.' It was so much better. I went back to the writers room and said, 'You're not going to believe this. Carl Weathers wants to be incredibly cheap.' All credit to Carl on that."

https://www.slashfilm.com/1508464/carl-weathers-idea-for-hil...

The thing is it doesn't have to be that way. Well, Steve Jobs showed that it didn't have to be that way for Apple. He was able to command authority and weave a narrative that stakeholders could believe in, so bigger long-term outcomes could be pursued. Google was meant to be this kind of company too. So why did Larry and Sergey and other senior Googlers, who had the Steve Jobs example right there to follow, succumb to quarterly earnings servitude?

Have you considered or tried platforms like Upwork? Or is it that the kind of work you’re capable of isn’t in demand on those kinds of platforms?

I’d have thought if you had fairly basic web development skills you could make more than $300/month from somewhere like that?

"In September, aerospace expert Jean-Luc Marchand and pilot Patrick Blelly called for a new search based on revelations about the fate of the flight. During a lecture before the Royal Aeronautical Society..."

So these are comments made in an obscure lecture over 3 months ago, but first reported in mainstream publications on Christmas Day, presumably to fill otherwise empty pages?

Doesn't seem like much of a story.

Sure. It's a project initiated by a group of local farmers and researchers (meteorologists and an enviro engineer) in the state of South Australia, and funded by state government grants, to install high-precision weather stations throughout all the agricultural regions of that state.

Data is updated every 10 minutes, and it reports specific readings/calculations indicating whether it is safe to spray pesticides [1]. More recently (since I left the project) they've added in predictive calculations derived from ML models, that can indicate whether it's likely to become risky or stop being risky for spraying in the next two hours.

It also reports conventional meteorological measurements (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind etc) and relevant calculated values relating to fire risk, seasonal thermal accumulations (growing degree days), evapotranspiration etc - so it is a general-purpose weather/environmental data service for growers.

It seems to be very powerful and useful, however it still relies on growers remembering to look at the app and make the right decision each time they're thinking of spraying, and a combination of education, social pressure and law enforcement is needed to encourage responsible conduct.

The biggest issue they're trying to mitigate is damage to other crops [2] but pesticide residue in food/beverage products is another significant factor, as it can affect other producers' organic/biodynamic certification status, and some countries require imported food/bev products to pass very stringent maximum levels of pesticide residue.

You can search for "south australia mesonet" for more details.

[1] The most significant factor for this is the presence of thermal inversions, and this requires temperatures to be measured at ground level and 10m up, hence the need for quite elaborate/costly public infrastructure rather than relying on growers having their own weather stations.

[2] I started typing "nearby crops", but one of the major issues is that the combination of thermal inversions and winds can mean that residues can be carried long distances - 40km+ before being deposited onto other crops when the inversion reverses, which means it's hard/impossible to identify where the residue came from, meaning ex-post liability attribution for statutory or civil penalties can be impossible.

> You hinted at it but seem to brush off the external cost as a small thing to be improved.

I understand you reading that way but it's not what I meant or at all what I think. The work I do (environmental monitoring and data display/analysis) is used heavily to reduce environmental externalities (I spent much of the past four years working on a project seeking to eradicate pesticide spray drift events) and to minimise resource utilisation (particularly irrigation water); the experience has taught me that these are major, difficult-to-solve problems, but they can be solved by people who are willing to do the work over many years to bring about the requisite changes both in technology and practices. Of course I know outsiders can sometimes bring about important changes that insiders didn't consider (indeed I've tried to be that kind of person in this and other industries, with some success at times); but it still needs thorough work over a long time to get major breakthroughs (as it did for SpaceX rockets), whereas these startups never seem to stick around for long.

> Being able to reduce land area used by farming would be a major win for humanity

I'm not convinced this is true, now we can see that the global population is flattening and likely to start declining in the foreseeable future. It's not a particularly strongly held opinion or one I need to argue about, but it just seems to me that the amount of land used for agriculture now is no great problem.

I've been working in ag-tech for about 10 years, having spent the prior 10 years in other kinds of startups/tech companies.

When I see the new ag-tech startups coming out of accelerators or being established by supposedly seasoned entrepreneurs, the ideas that keep coming up over and over are vertical farming, weed-killing laser robots and insect protein.

They all seem to be based on this assumption that traditional farming/food production is antiquated and inefficient, and that what the industry needs is clever outsiders to come in and re-invent it with the latest technologies. And they all just seem to go nowhere.

And in my view it's all based on a flawed premise: that farming needs any kind of technological revolution. It just doesn't. It's mostly fine. And whilst some things could/should be improved (environmental externalities and resource consumption being the most significant), these issues aren't going to be solved by outsiders with messiah complexes coming in and telling established growers/experts that they're wrong/stupid, they'll be solved via unglamorous work over many years by people who really understand the field.

I'm all good with supporting people of all genders to do whatever they choose, but this comment seems to be needlessly pedantic, and breaks an HN guideline:

- Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

We don't need to be so literal and inflexible about everything. Even with modern sensibilities, we're adults here and we're all capable of reading a comment like that and understanding that the author doesn't actually mean that no or even few women can be obsessive about coffee/knives/audio systems, or that no/few men can do yoga.

(FTR I'm sure I'm not alone here in being a male who does yoga and can also be obsessive about things like audio quality.)

I fell for this, though I realised it was a scam in time and locked my card quickly enough that I didn't lose any money.

I'm pretty sure it's the first time, in over 20 years of using the internet, that I've fallen for a phishing scam.

It completely gets through your defences because the message is sent via the Booking.com app and is about a legit hotel booking you've made. Very nasty.

But very poor of Booking.com to not be better at detecting these messages. The first consumer reports I can find about this scam go back to January [1], and it shouldn't need very sophisticated text classification to recognise and block them.

More details about the scam here [2].

[1] https://insideflyer.co.uk/2023/01/beware-of-this-booking-com...

[2] https://perception-point.io/blog/booking-com-customers-hit-b...

I think the luck factor is over-interpreted in this comment.

The reason most successful people have a string of failures behind them is because they learn from past experience and build networks and profile over the course of their career.

Luck applies most at the starting line - your location, your family and their wealth/status/connections [1], the traits and health you inherit, your education and the people you know who can mentor you, invest in you and work with you.

Over time the role of luck recedes and the role of experience becomes more significant (which is why, a few 20-something tech billionaires notwithstanding, most high-growth companies are founded when the founder is in their mid 40s [2]).

Also, “skill and hard work” are not the most important factors; in my experience the most important factor is the ability to self-improve, which takes humility and patience.

[1] It’s certainly not a given that being born into vast wealth equals luck in this context: plenty of heirs to vast fortunes turn out to be deadbeats. They may still be able to become successful in their own career but in a fairly pathetic, unearned kind of way. The right kind of luck for entrepreneurial success is a moderate degree of privilege (just enough not to spoil you) with a moderate degree of hardship (just enough not to break you). This certainly applied to Steve Jobs. Bill Gates too if you include the bullying at school.

[2] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

There are ways that your comment and the parent are both right.

I’m very much on board with the idea of eschewing victimhood thinking, and I generally see the invocation of survivorship bias as a pretty sad indicator of someone’s attachment to victimhood.

However I also recognize that the world isn’t great at empowering people to get out of difficult situations in life. Once you’re down, the world has all kinds of ways of keeping you down. “Just work hard and save money” seems like simple stuff that anyone can do but it doesn’t get you very far if you’re at the bottom of the heap, especially if you’re dealing with illness, family problems, or other burdens.

I do believe there are things that almost anyone (without irrevocable health problems) can do to go from a bad situation to a very good one over the long term (I’ve done them), but these things are not widely known or accepted by mainstream society.

So I sympathize with the sense of futility that many people hold.