HN user
I don't think that's exactly true of dot com and '08. In both cases the developing bubbles were identified and widely discussed in the years prior to the burst. The surprise in '08 was not that there was a bubble in real estate, but rather that a massive fraction of the financial system was built on leveraging that sector. To paraphrase Buffett, you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out.
Mass. Electric cars are much heavier. F=ma.
This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high.
Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.
Talk about burying the lede
I think that comment actually misses Susan Cain's point entirely. Here's a quote from Ms. Cain:
"Shyness and introversion are not the same thing. Shy people fear negative judgment, while introverts simply prefer less stimulation; shyness is inherently painful, and introversion is not." [1]
If you accept that definition of shyness, then it is necessarily bad. Living with fear and pain is bad. Missing opportunities to connect with people because of a remote possibility of being hurt is bad. Simply wanting more time to yourself is not.
Regarding fault, it doesn't really matter who's to blame (and I didn't see anything in the article about fault). As an example, some people are born with type 1 diabetes and have to constantly manage their blood sugar levels. It's not their fault that they were born with this disease, but it's their problem to manage it. The same goes for shyness. Your shyness may not be your fault, but you're the only one that's hurt by it.
[1] http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/26/dont-call-introverted-child...
This was an interesting point in the context of comparing YC to a large company:
Comparing himself to an air-traffic controller, Graham says much of his time is spend making introductions and helping the YC community solve problems within the network
Most of the large companies I've worked with are missing somebody in the "air-traffic controller" role. It can be very difficult for individual employees to understand all the resources that are available within the company, or who they should contact with a particular question. YC might actually have an advantage in this area.
At some point in the article he states:
Evolution simply could never have anticipated...
Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.
Can we please drop this hyperbolic platitude that "ideas are worthless." You need to have ideas. That's how you decide what to do. In the case that the author describes, your ideas will help you decide what type of "smart nerds" you need to find. After all, there are as many different types of nerds as there are topics to study in depth.
The real problem is thinking that you're just one big idea away from a successful company. A successful company is made up of thousands of ideas and many man-years of execution. The real value creation happens when you have infrastructure in place to separate the good ideas from the bad ones.
So it's true that a single untested idea isn't worth much, but a huge collection of validated ideas really is valuable.
A couple of comments:
And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold
Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.
The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%
This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.
It's interesting to look at these renderings in the context of the story from a couple of days ago about working out at the office (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314922).
Treadmills in a conference room are certainly better than sitting all day. But instead of a treadmill, I'd rather just work in an office where I could go outside and take a walk. I hope more companies will start thinking about office design in the way that Apple has, even if they do it on a smaller scale.
If the author were writing in the late 60's he could have titled a similar piece: Why GM will never feel threatened by Toyota
FYI, this is one of those "classic blog posts." It was originally posted in 2005 when many of his points hadn't yet been repeated to death.
At the risk of sounding overly snarky, I don't think that GM's leadership is in any position to make recommendations on how to run a car company
Despite the general level of incompetence among GM's leadership there were a few smart people there. Lutz was one of them. He has a strong track record of developing successful products and has never been shy about criticizing his bosses.
And to get to his point, it's fluff
It's not fluff. Perhaps this synopsis of his book didn't provide sufficient detail, but his point is broadly acknowledged as one of the major problems with the US auto industry. If you look at a US made car from the early 2000's, the level of cost optimization at the expense of all other factors is embarrassing. It's indisputable that as MBAs have gained prominence in the US auto industry, the products have become less compelling. Lutz is simply advocating that the people who love the product be the ones who have the final say.
(Disclosure: I'm an automotive engineer)
I have a friend who owns a company that makes manufacturing equipment. I've often heard him say, usually in frustration, that if you make something in America you will eventually get sued. Sadly, it looks like his observation now extends to movies.
Knowing the business. If we ask a bunch of questions and they have the answers at their fingertips because they understand the domain really well, that's a good sign.
An old boss of mine is a design judge for a student engineering competition. Often times he will ask a team for a specific piece of information about their project, only to have the team pull out a giant binder and start shuffling through looking for the answer. At this point he tells them "If I ask you to tell me your girlfriends phone number and you pull out your phone book and start searching for it, you're probably not in love"
I think the same sentiment applies here
Very nice work!
I'm seeing a bug in the drawing demo on the front page. I can draw the first line and it works as expected, but if I release the mouse and try to draw a second line it's not working correctly. It doesn't show the shape that I've drawn until I release the mouse and it connects the end of the first line to the start of the second.
A few points:
- Apple is pushing the boundaries of minimalism with their industrial design (to absurd levels in cases like the control-free iPod Shuffle). This is not necessarily better design, but it is the currently fashionable design. I would argue that the single button interface on the iPhone/iPad is an example of moving too far towards minimalism (from a purely functional perspective). The same button now performs different functions depending on how many times you press it and where you are when you press it, yet there is plenty of room for a second button.
- In my opinion, Apple's software is a mixed bag. I love the user experience in iOS, and OSX is my favorite desktop operating system, but I think iTunes is among the worst commonly used desktop applications available.
- All of these devices will be judged on categories beyond hardware/software in the future. For example, I expect a phone's ability to connect with important services to become increasingly scrutinized. It seems like it will only be a matter of time before we're all using something like Google Voice to manage our phone numbers. A device's ability to interface with these types of critical services could very easily become the killer app.
- A small point, but I think the comparison between a MacBook Pro an a Lenovo is a bit odd. ThinkPads are not far off from Apple in terms of build quality and are certainly more durable.
To blindly give your faith to someone because of who they are?
Read my comment again. I never blindly gave him faith. I was pointing out that he's a well-known expert in this field, which is relevant when evaluating the substance of his argument.
OP jumped to an unsubstantiated conclusion
Unsubstantiated? The OP is Don Norman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman) and he's speaking from experience. The fact that he has more experience in this branch of design than pretty much anybody else should give his argument some weight.
we could have been writing about the elephant in the room: that functional design, like journalism and sensible politics, is a lost art.
I think he was addressing this point directly, but he happens to disagree with you. Take the following as an example:
Hurrah, I said, now the entire wash can be automatic, so there need be only two controls: one to chose between “hot and colored wash” and “easy-to-clean fabrics,” the other to start the machine. Nope, this washer had even more controls and buttons than the non-automatic one. “Why even more controls? I asked my contact at Siemens, “when you could make this machines with only one or two?”.
“Are you one of those people who wants to give up control, who thinks less is better?” asked this usability expert. “Don’t you want to be in control?”
Strange answer. Why the automation if it isn’t to be trusted? And, yes, actually I am one of those bizarre people who think that less is better.
It appears that marketing won the day. And I suspect marketing was right. Would you pay more money for a washing machine with less controls? In the abstract, maybe. At the store? Probably not.
Both Norman and his friend at Siemens understood that the interface to the washing machine could have been as simple as two switches. The problem is that they need to sell washing machines when they're sitting in a row of competitive products. In their experience, people in the market for a washer tend to buy on features. And Norman never claimed that everybody buys this way, just that most people do.
He's not creepy, just honest
There's a certain branch of honesty that's intensely creepy. It happens when someone is oblivious to the emotions of the people around them, and it's generally characterized by consistently being far too blunt, or dismissively laughing at something that frightens everybody else. Communication is as much about the emotion conveyed as the actual words. If Schmidt thinks it's just a matter of time before it will be the norm to ditch your identity for fear of embarrassment, he's creepy. He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities.
The following scene was described in the fortune magazine article:
“All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”
A room full of tech journalists cheering and applauding a tech CEO for saying that he's the best person to know everything about everyone is about as creepy as it gets. It sounds like a work of fiction deliberately crafted to be creepy. But Schmidt is insensitive to how most people feel about privacy. He just thinks he escaped a tough question with a clever one-liner.
From a high level it's easy to look at a device or a system and say "All these options are making this really hard. This thing should do less." But less is just a direction, and it's only useful to go that way until you can't do something you need to do.
The iPad isn't a success because it just does less than everything else. It succeeds because it does what it's supposed to do incredibly well. Users have certain expectations when they pick up an iPad and the iPad generally lets the user do what they expect and is intuitive in the process.
In the case of travel websites it often seems that no one has taken the time to consider what users will actually do on the site, instead just lazily giving users every possible option. For example, if a booking site has found me a $300 nonstop ticket it's probably not necessary to show me the 3-stop, $1700 option. Yet they all do because nobody has taken the time to filter down the results to the practical options (the user could create a filter, but that's just another option to deal with). I would much rather see just the 5 flight options that I'm likely to buy instead of 30 options with 5 potential winners buried in there somewhere.
If you're building a tool, the user will have to give some input. The key is to give the user what they want with the minimum possible amount of information.
The author's examples are not relevant to the argument. If you're just trying to design something that is, on its face, beautiful, there are obviously many viable styles besides modernism. The goal of web design is different from the goal of palace design or ornate ceiling design. Web design must be usable or it has failed. I think a better analogy in the physical world would be the design of tools. If you were driving nails all day, would you rather use a modernist hammer or a hammer that looks like that Rococo table?
I take his point that modernism has become close to dogma for some web designers, but I don't see how an abbey built in the early 1700s relates to a website.
This article is bullshit.
His main line of argument is the same criticism that's consistently leveled at Tesla: that it's too expensive to be a big seller. This is obvious. Batteries are still in their early days as the primary energy source in cars. Early technology is expensive (The original macintosh cost $5000, inflation adjusted). The obvious point of the Volt program was to develop technology and infrastructure for the future, not just to produce the first generation Volt. It's certainly fair to debate GM's efficiency in building electric vehicle capabilities, but the author of this article doesn't ever seriously acknowledge that GM has ambitions beyond just the first generation Volt.
A few smaller arguments I have:
For starters, G.M.’s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks
Bob Lutz said that the Volt would cost around $40,000 when he was on letterman a year ago, so the price shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who follows the industry. But as I already argued, we're in the early days of electric vehicles. Just like in the early days of personal computers, these cars will be bought by enthusiasts. As we've seen with every other new technology in history, price will come down over time.
And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius
It's a little difficult to take an automotive pundit seriously when he complains about a production model not looking like the concept. Frustrating as it may be, production models almost never look like the concept. This is nothing new. And the reason it looks like a Prius is physics. It turns out that there is an optimal shape for reducing aerodynamic drag, so cars that are built with fuel efficiency as a primary design goal will all be roughly the same shape. This also should not be a surprise to anyone who follows the auto industry.
It also requires premium gasoline
So what. It shouldn't use much of it anyway. For most owners this will not contribute significantly to the cost of running the vehicle.
seats only four people(the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench)
I'm guessing most of the target market won't care about this. This is also the type of compromise that has to be made in early technology.
has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze
So does a Lamborghini. People buying a Volt are not likely to be considering how much interior volume they get per dollar.
No wonder the Volt’s main competition, the Nissan Leaf, forgoes the additional combustion engine — and ends up costing $8,000 less as a result.
It also forgoes the ability to go on a road trip. Best case the leaf will have to recharge for 30 min every 80 miles. GM was trying to build something that could fully replace gas-only vehicles, Nissan wasn't.
So the future of General Motors (and the $50 billion taxpayer investment in it) now depends on a vehicle that costs $41,000 but offers the performance and interior space of a $15,000 economy car
The author should be embarrassed of making this statement. GM is a massive company who's business units range from car parts to medium-duty commercial trucks. The Volt is just one, albeit highly visible, program.
Yet G.M. seemingly has no plan for turning its low-volume “eco-flagship” into a mass-market icon like the Prius
A quote from Bob Lutz:
"The Volt technology is very exciting, but costs will have to come down before it can become generalized, and U.S. fuel prices will have to rise to world levels, meaning $5 or $6 per gallon,"
That seems to suggest that the plan is to develop the technology until prices can be brought down and fuel prices go up (a bit of a gamble, but it seems likely that fuel costs will increase eventually).
and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants
By putting the word retooling in quotes he seems to be suggesting that GM wasn't retooling their plants. If that's his argument, he should state it directly and give a source.
There's no shortage of legitimate reasons to criticize GM, but calling the Volt a failure before it's even been released is nothing but pointless speculation.
He concludes his post by saying:
Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.
The only way that's true is if you consider success to be binary. Either you succeed or you fail. But level of success is important in terms of economic value and it is demonstrable that the idea is a factor in level of success.
This post is just plain wrong. Obviously it's tempting to get caught up in ideas and ignore execution, but saying ideas are flat-out worthless is simply being ignorant of history. A few examples:
- Creating an assembly line to mass produce cars in the early 1900s was a good idea. It clearly wouldn't have gone anywhere without execution, but if Henry Ford had instead decided to execute flawlessly on a hand-painted rock business the results would have been far different.
- Starting a software-only company in the late 70s was a good idea. I'm sure most people here know Microsoft's story well enough to understand the importance of execution in this case, but they never would have achieved the same level of success if they weren't executing on a big idea ("a computer on every desk and in every home").
- I think you could argue that the company that makes Snuggies has executed their idea as well as possible. But because of the nature of their idea they will never be anything more than a flash-in-the-pan business. There's nothing wrong with that type of business, but the potential is much smaller.
Yes, your idea matters. It determines what market you'll be addressing and ultimately sets the upper limit for your success. The real problem is that people get caught up in ideas because they're more fun than executing. Realistically the time spent on the idea should probably be a fraction of a percent of the time spent on execution. Pick an idea that you think you can execute on and that has large enough potential, then focus 100% on execution.
Facebook is doing more than just taking away something from their users, they're being downright dishonest. Until recently Facebook's pitch to users was that it was a way to connect with people that you actually know. They were deliberately closer to the closed/private end of the spectrum. And back when they had real competition (myspace), privacy was one of the key differentiators. I still think privacy is one of the big reasons that Facebook's popularity took off like it did.
Now they're pulling a giant bait-and-switch. Attract users with privacy, kill competition, then kill privacy to gain easy profitability. This alone is pretty disingenuous, but to make these changes behind users backs (for example, pictures that were once private became publicly viewable) shows a blatant disregard for the trust that users gave Facebook when they signed up.
Another problem I see with creating artificial barriers is the demoralizing effect in can have on someone trying to learn a language. Whenever I'm prevented from doing something because some committee thought it was too complex for me, I begin questioning whether I'm using the right tool. Who knows what other random rules are going to jump out and bite me later.
I would much rather do something the wrong way and be burned by it (and probably learn a lot in the process), than be prohibited outright from using certain techniques.
Does this imply that nobody uses the "I'm feeling lucky" button?
-Exactly. How do you have one without the other?
If obvious patents are granted, society will be giving it's protection at a net loss. For society there is a cost incurred in enforcing protection as well as an opportunity cost in forbidding competition (assuming you believe competition creates better products). This trade-off could be worth it, but only if if the invention would not have emerged, or would have taken a long time to emerge, without protection.
-Should Microsoft (or any other patent holder) go to court and argue on the basis that society is not being well served?
Absolutely not. They should never have to argue for anyone but themselves in court. Microsoft is just playing the patent game by the rules that exist today. My problem is with a system that is neglecting its purpose. The problem seems to be rooted in patent rules that are massively out of touch with the current state (and pace) of technology.
-Any article that simply refers to a patent abstract as proof of the triviality of a patent is itself trolling. Patent abstracts offer a very broad description; it is the detailed body of the patent that distinguishes it.
You're absolutely right in saying that it's not fair to criticize a patent simply by its abstract. The problem is that often the detailed description in the body of the patent is far too broad. Many patents have less to do with a specific invention and more to do with gaining blanket coverage of a large swath of IP. This is the game that large companies and their patent lawyers are playing. I would argue that a system where "he who has the most lawyers wins" is very counterproductive to invention and innovation.