danm07

I was an economics major (also technical) who started his own company in college. Generally it doesn't help, or at least not that I noticed.

Economics is mostly theory about how the world should operate based on certain laws... supply and demand etc. They go through rigorous derivations using calculus and statistics. You might get a top level overview of the driving forces behind an industry, but in a startup that's hardly useful.

Also in microeconomics, you are taught how a prototypical consumer might behave under canned conditions. Not at all representative of the real world.

There's really a single law book for running startups, and the first commandment is talk to your customers. Literally everything else is bs, at least in the beginning stages.

Externalities usually become obvious after the fact. The problems we aim to solve through our inventions are multi-dimensional topologies. Like tree, at any given point we can only see portions of it, leaving other perspectives unaccounted. Trimming leaves or branches would reveal deeper previously unseen parts.

The human brain and our tools thus far are more adapted to solving linear problems, so the higher the dimensionality and non-linear the relationships, the less we're able to produce determinist results.

I personally believe problems of this kind we cannot arrive at perfect solutions, only optimal ones. By optimal, I mean making trade-offs on certain variables so as to minimize total cost. The weights are also variables depending on trends of the epoch (environmental factors not such a big deal a decade ago, big deal now --> need to update our equation)

The other factor comes as a form of bureaucracy. It takes time to push the change through the chain of politics, re-aligning incentives, carving new markets and distribution channels, changing market sentiments, etc.

Management makes less than devs in my experience.

That's like half the world's population!

There are the rushing waves mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its own business trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison

Ages on ages before any eyes could see year after year thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet with no life to entertain.

Never at rest tortured by energy wasted prodigiously by the Sun poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the Universe.

Feynman

It feels like the material is a little rote and that I can learn it on my own. I have a much harder time learning math on my own, and I figure it might be more worth my tuition to do that instead.

Dumb as it may sound, have a list of todos that each takes no more than 10 minutes. We generally think linearly, so go through the list of what you must do one at a time, and make the physical gesture of crossing out the item on completion.

After leaving the startup I had founded, I had the option of earning a six figure salary and a senior position at another company. I passed this up to go back to college. I love math and physics and always regretted not finishing. I’m still in the midst of this so it’s hard to tell whether it’s the right decision.

Being the dumbest guy in the room, and knowing so is probably good for you in the long run.

Boy is this article filled with unwarranted hyperbole. And Tim Ferris, really?

Substance is overwhelmingly like a self-improvement article, cherrypicking details to support whatever point the author stands to posit.

In my experience, everything but "yes" means no.

I have another border-line mental sickness that keeps me from going for the easy solution. If something is sub-optimally structured, it will get under my skin beyond what is normal.

Wonderful advice. Thank you for sharing.

Interesting to read the experiences of others.

I experience difficulty with task switching. When I latch onto a problem, I feel like I cannot do anything else until that problem is solved. This makes for very inefficient studying as often I just need time to digest. This also creates problems for multi-tasking.

What I find strange is that I have much less of a task switching problem when it comes to programming.

As others have pointed out, will-power comes and goes with energy levels. On afternoons I'm practically useless. In my experience the disparity between what one wants to do and what one ends up doing is function of available energy, as a form of mental agility.

Not to be wry but how often has kicking out the founder been the solution to VC's problems?

I wonder if instead of Amazon building out their own stores, they're going to use Whole Food's... unlikely but possibility is there if they do it well.

Anyone else find it odd that all these headlines states only how much these companies are going to spend on manufacturing, but none of them say what they're actually going to be making?

Your investor is being unrealistic. You can barely hire a single developer in SV with 100K. I recommend set aside a traveling budget of two weeks or in two or three trips so and do what you need to do.

I hired a growth hacker to accelerate our app to ~1000 users. I tried sending emails out to people to use the app, but my network just didn't fit the niche we were targeting. I also showed the app to people in Starbucks and wrote custom replies to people online looking for the app: they were of little help.

I didn't read the whole article... of what I did read, I didn't find it convincing. Few things:

AI doesn't need to exceed humans in every dimension to become a threat. Just sufficient dimensions.

Humanity is basically a bacteria colony in a petridish with I/O. Disrupt infrastructure, and you disrupt input leading to changes in the size of the colony. And mind you, much of our infrastructure resides in the cloud.

Of course, It will be a while before this even becomes an issue, but this is basically how a machine would frame the problem.

Implementation wise, AI doesn't need to be general. At its most inelegant (and not too distant) design, ML can be configured as a fractal of specific of algorithms, with one on top with the task of designating goals and tasks, and subordinates spawning off generations and evaluating performance.

Andy Grove had a good saying, "anything can be done will be done"

Autonomous AI, if it does not break the laws of physics, will exist. It's development will be spurred by our curiosity or profit.

Wish my prof in college gave this as a course reading.

There is no clear cut definition of "business." You have a picture in your head of what you want the future to look like, and "business" is all the actions associated with making it come true, and this can vary dramatically by sector.

Best advice I can think of is to not think generally about what is good strategy, or anything of that sort, but about what makes your product valuable in the lives of the people you hope to make it for.

The rest will sort itself out.

The answer to most questions beginning with, "where will (insert job) be ... ?" will be invariably be, "done by a neural net," as is partially covered in this article.

Distracting aside: It's amusing that languages use so many references from the coffee industry. I wonder how long it will take to fill a Starbucks menu.

The phrase shameless self-promoter comes to mind.

Yes. It is a joke.

Good to know I'm not the only one who finds Tim Ferriss cringeworthy.

That's not surprising. Hollywood is egregiously wasteful in its spending. If it takes $100M to film a movie, that equates to ~100 Series A rounds. With a ~80% write-off rate, that's ~20 successful companies for roughly the same money (except the money won't be sitting at the bottom of your DVD rack a year later).

That's it. Incognito mode, permanently.

Everyday I'm holding onto the shares is the same as if I made the decision to buy that many shares on that day

While I'm not a banker, I find with this method looking at investments highly disagreeable. The price of the stock at the time of purchase is the projected future profits discounted to present day. In other words, it is the fundamental value of the firm, which is invariant of its day-to-day fluctuations.

If you have to be watching for the daily upticks, it's a sign the company is either incompetent or is operating in a highly unfavorable environment.

I don't see how any good can be gained from envisaging a purchase price other than your lock-in price.

This post just goes to show how many people use the upvote button as a way save articles without reading them first.

The flywheel of clickbait titles in action.