djm

Once I saw an episode of the UK version of 'Dragons Den'. A couple of guys pitched some adventure sports equipment they had built and one of the investors, Peter Jones, told them off for not wearing suits to do the pitch and refused to invest in them.

After watching that, I developed the following opinion:

Any time somebody is evaluating you (for investment, for a job etc) they are going to have an idea in their head of what they want. They will put you through a filtering process and decide whether or not to let you through.

What most people don't consider is that the filter is not just there to help the decison maker, it's there to help them too. You get to present yourself however you want so you can choose the inputs to the filter.

If you don't want to have an investor who would think your choice of clothing is important, don't wear a suit. If you don't want to work somewhere that chooses to interview people based on the amount of bullshit in their CV, don't put bullshit in yours, and so on.

edit: I forgot to address the question with regards to customers. In that case the answer seems to be "whatever the customer expects" since you presumably don't want to put a barrier in the way of them buying your stuff.

My apologies. I just checked and you were right.

I think the actual quote was "do or do not do; there is no try".

Oh, I see. I had guessed that stuff like that would be flagged to oblivion fast enough that it wouldn't be an issue. I guess that the speed at which flagging would have an affect relates to the number of people with flag permissions who are currently browsing the main page so the spam problem may vary with time of day etc.

Perhaps an alternative might be reducing the amount of upvotes that a 'review my startup' post requires to get on the main page in the first place. Or perhaps some combination of the two.

Would you mind please clarifying what you meant?

I see how spammers would create fake 'review my startup' posts to try and game the amount of front page time they got but if flagging is still applied to these posts then they would disappear quickly as people recognise that the submissions do not fit the 'review my startup' criteria and flag them.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Perhaps my comment didn't make my thoughts clear enough.

First of all, I think we are working on different definitions of 'inflation'. There seems to be two schools of thought on this: some people think inflation is driven by prices and some people think prices are driven by inflation.

Your comment suggests you are in the first camp and I am in the second. I define inflation as simply being 'when the government prints more money'. Prices increase when the money supply increases. Businesses have to raise prices when this happens because otherwise they will reduce the buying power of their profit.

I wasn't talking about the UK specifically. I was just trying to say that, in general, I think the outcome in terms of social unrest is going to be about the same whether you reduce the amount of money you give people or whether you give them money that is worth less.

To be clear, I didn't say that reversing the austerity measures would result directly in hyper-inflation or that we'd end up like 1920's Germany. I'd agree that that kind of scenario is a long way off.

I'd like to see increased focus from HN on reviewing new startups too. One way might be a special tab but I'd suggest an alternative - putting 'review my startup' posts on the main page and setting a time period for them to fall off.

You could keep flagging to get rid of abuse and adjust the rate with the story upvote so that time on the main page is still a function of popularity.

The austerity cuts haven't started yet

Actually welfare benefit rates have already been frozen. Couple that with an increase in prices in food/utilities etc and benefits claimants are already being hit hard.

These rioters seem to be primarily young people in areas of high unemployment so it is reasonable to assume that a substantial percentage of them may have experienced financial difficulty recently.

That's interesting. I guess it depends on the scale of the inflation. Germany printed money to pay their war reparations with and when it got to the hyper-inflation stage everybody was screwed.

Inflation in relatively small amounts is only going to really hurt savers so I guess if the population distribution is skewed towards more people with debt than with savings (isn't it always!) then a government might be able to use it to reduce the likelyhood and scale of unrest.

I'd guess that unrest is inevitable when a country gets a debt problem whichever way you deal with it. The current unrest in London and other UK cities may be the result of austerity and what happened in Greece recently certainly is.

However, the alternative (inflation) would have the same effect. See 1920's Germany/Austria for example - 'When Money Dies' by Adam Fergusson is the book on this.

It's not really surprising. PG has said many times that they invest in people not ideas. I gather they also discuss ideas with founders and try and put them onto something other than what they applied with if it sucked.

From YC's perspective investing in several startups doing the same (or very similar) things increases the chance that at least one of them might get somewhere with it.

Here's a list of them: http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

See also the 'design recipe' approach advocated in books like 'how to design programs'.

My assumption was that most of the people who load up DrRacket don't go poking around for the teaching languages. It's a pretty useful IDE, not just for students. I usually use it unless I'm working with a large number of files in which case I prefer emacs.

The teaching languages are only a menu option away. Most of them are designed to be used by students working through 'how to design programs' (htdp.org). I wouldn't really consider that a barrier to entry. Keep in mind most of the teachpacks implement reduced scheme implementations designed for students at a particular level so they would not be much use to anyone else as the default startup option.

Bamboo bike frames have been around for quite a few years but this is the first time I've seen anyone trying to commercialise them. I guess they might take off with the green crowd but otherwise I don't see people clamouring to buy one.

I wonder how they are repaired when broken. If you can fix them with wood glue they might be of more interest because it's easier/cheaper than getting somebody to weld it back together for you.

I'd like to add that responsibility for banks providing loans backed by the taxpayer ultimately falls on voters. This is what fannie mae/sallie mae etc are all about. Disconnecting access to credit from the ability to repay it inevitably results in loans that will default.

Politicians sold people stuff like fannie mae and people voted for it by electing them. And I guess voting in favour of such things is inevitable when not all voters are taxpayers. An extreme solution might be limiting votes to people who are paying taxes. This seems logical but is obviously politically impossible.

I understand the reasoning that the fed & equivalents in other countries are supposed to manage the money supply as a smoothing function in booms and busts. I have never managed to accept though that the decision making of a committee can outperform the decision making of the market itself.

Agreed. Inflation amounts to stealing from people with savings.

I haven't read the book you linked to yet but I just wanted to chime in and reference another great little book "How and economy grows and why it crashes" by Peter & Andrew Schiff. It's an extremely readable cartoon book that explains recent American economic history in a comic fashion and shows the differences between keynesian and austrian thinking on the subject.

I meant corporation tax revenue from businesses that gain income by selling stuff to people who are paying with drugs money.

edit: I'm not sure I'm explaining myself very well so let me just spell it out:

If it was legalised and taxed they would receive sales tax income (VAT or whatever they call it in greece), and probably additional tax income from likely "harmful substance" taxes (like those applied to alchohol, cigarettes, petrol etc). At the same time the folks who had been selling drugs illegally would lose income and thus reduce their own spending in the economy.

The result would be increased revenue for some businesses (who started legally selling the dope) and reduced revenue (& thus corporation tax) for all of the other businesses who didn't.

I agree with what you're saying. A person's direction in life can change at any time and it's unfortunate that people judge and discriminate so carelessly.

They are acting rationally though. Take, for example, your anecdote about your friend's employment difficulty. The employer is just trying to get the best person they can for the job. They can't realistically predict future performance of the person they hire so they just rely on credentialism and base the decision on past performance/qualifications in the hope that a person who performed well in the past will continue to do so.

That might not work as well as we might wish. A substantial amount of spending in most first world economies results from spending money earned by illegal drug sales. (I don't have figures to quote. A pretty good book came out I think ~10 years ago that was about the contributions to various economies from spending as a result of criminal enterprise but I'm afraid I can't recall what it was called or find it on google now).

If you legalise and apply tax the government would see additional sales tax revenue but also a reduced corporation tax revenue.

I imagine they'd still be better off by a long shot because they'd likely spend less money fighting drugs related crime, and also because legalisation seems likely to increase consumption.

Yes, it was mostly that I would be more interested in watching a YC version than a techstars version. I think a single movie length documentary would be preferable to a series though that's more taste than anything else.

I also found this offputting::

What’s more, it should also be interesting to watch as Bloomberg TV’s board of judges, along with Cohen and Tisch, and many of the TechStars mentors dissect business models and offer startups and their founders pointed criticism and advice as they move through the program, reality-show style.

..especially the reference to the Bloomberg board of judges. I suppose I should give them the benefit of the doubt as they don't elaborate on what this board of judges will consist of.

I don't think I'd be too interested in watching this but I'd very much like to see a one off documentary on YC - maybe following a few of the companies through the 3 month cycle and including interviews with pg et al, some members of the alumni network and prominent valley investors who have worked with them.

Hi. I don't have anything to add but I just wanted to say thanks for sharing :)

Thanks for digging that up, I hadn't seen it the first time it came around. It seems obvious now but I really hadn't given any thought to how fairness in voting systems would ultimately come down to math. I'm not going to dig into it now but I've bookmarked it for reading on a rainy day. Cheers :)

You do raise an interesting point. There are certaintly problems with splitting the country into different constituency areas. For example, an MP representing a constituency with a small number of residents has the same voting ability in the commons as an MP representing a constituency with a larger population.

Your solution is problematic too though. If we simply voted for a party then we would no longer be electing local representatives which would mean that local issues would not have representation in the house of commons. It also creates the difficulty of deciding who would actually compose government - if we just voted for a party then does the party decide itself which individuals form government?

It's also important to keep in mind that the government and our elected MP's are two different things. MP's are elected to the house of commons, not to government. Whilst all members of the government are MP's the vast majority of MP's are not members of the government. Although they are constrained in voting by the whip system they do frequently address issues relating to their constituencies in the commons.

Agreed! I was aware of the salisbury convention but hadn't really given any thought to how it might come in to play with coalition governments.

Thinking through it, I guess the logical expectation is that the HoL will have bigger teeth under a coalition.

That is interesting in itself because the government is currently looking at another round of HoL reform.

By the way, if your interested in all this check out channel 81 on freeview. They seem to be replaying a documentary on the history of HoL reform every few days at the moment.

I know what you're feeling. I have never exercised my right to vote in a general election for the simple reason that, since I have been old enough to vote, the mainstream political parties have all been close to the center idealogically. I didn't see any point in using my vote. If I ever do it will probably be a tactical vote to try and prevent an extremist party (right or left) from gaining traction.

if they do promise change it's forgotten as soon as the election is over

I largely agree with your sentiment but I think it's important to consider that with our current government it is not reasonable that we should expect them to adhere to election manifesto promises.

We have a coalition government because no single party was elected with a majority vote. The government results from a compromise between the two parties and thus their election manifestos should be considered void.

It's because of this that I feel a little sorry for Nick Clegg over the student tuition thing - the public have held him accountable for a promise that should be considered void since he wasn't elected.