nqureshi

The primary source is the book mentioned in the post: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Super-GM-Michael-Adams/dp/...

You’re right that GMs are much faster ideating, I point this out later in the essay. But they also spend longer on falsification, even in absolute terms.

It’s from the book I mention right at the beginning of the essay. https://www.amazon.com/Think-Like-Super-GM-Michael-Adams/dp/...

Awesome example, thank you!

OP here -- that is a fantastic anecdote!

Do you have an example of a "drawing" of a theorem, in this context? (I've seen these for fairly trivial theorems but not for more complex ones, so I'm curious.)

What advice would you give for productivity/getting things done?

> "That item, in May 2011, was one of the last posts Mr. Szabo made before he went on a lengthy hiatus to work, he said later, on a new concept he called temporal programming."

Anyone know what 'temporal programming' refers to? Sounds intriguing.

This is an incredibly smart observation, and not made often enough:

"Often the smarter people are more prone to trendy, fashionable thinking because they can pick up on things, they can pick up on cues more easily, and so they’re even more trapped by it than people of average ability"

Would you rather invest in Campbell soup or Snapchat?

Great post & it's totally true that company culture mirrors that of founders. I think this works through 3 mechanisms:

(1) Employees tend to ape founders, so whatever founders care about & value (in their actions) tends to filter down.

(2) Getting aspects of culture to stick (e.g. transparency) is hard, and requires real commitment from founders. So whatever sticks will tend to be whatever founders care enough to really push through.

(3) Founders tend to hire people who are 'like them', so a critical mass of employees end up being very similar to the founders.

I guess it comes down to how far you're willing to push. If you do move to the Valley (as YC partners frequently advise you to), then you probably could get a meeting with Peter Thiel if you really tried. I mean if someone figuratively held a gun to your head and told you to, you probably could.

I agree with the general point, though - you need a certain amount of baseline opportunity to be able to do this stuff. That is a problem that needs fixing.

Yeah, that part of Paul's talk was amazing. He said most people thought Gmail was a mistake, so he explicitly set a goal to make 100 users really happy, and just went round asking them "What exactly can I make this product do to make you happy?" Then he'd just pick things off the list and do them.

Thanks Kristjan!

Thanks jl! Everyone I spoke to loved the event, particularly because:

1. The talks were awesome 2. It was ridiculously well-organised (and the food was superb) 3. There was a really good crowd there

I look forward to more YC events in London!

For those who (like me), don't like watching long videos, I made summary notes on all the talks here: http://theinflexion.com/blog/2014/07/26/notes-from-startup-s...

GoCardless (YCS11) - London, UK

We are looking for a senior backend software engineer to join our team to help us build our next wave of products. Our product is primarily built in Ruby and JavaScript, using frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Angular. We strongly believe in test-driven development, and deploy code multiple times daily.

You will have the opportunity to contribute to different areas of our code base, and build open source frameworks like Hutch, or Statesman along the way.

On a day-to-day basis, you will be:

- Building out internal services to communicate with international banking systems.

- Helping us to scale our services to serve our fast growing merchant base.

- Working on systems to intelligently identity-check and risk-assess new customers and merchants.

To apply, email Milz (milz@gocardless.com). Please include your expected salary and the date you'd be available to start.

This is a fair objection. I should have been more rigorous, i.e. I've assumed a very high value-of-life, which still leaves me prone to Pascal's-mugging type objections (http://lesswrong.com/lw/kd/pascals_mugging_tiny_probabilitie...).

I think my argument can be modified to be defensible, but agree that the post does not reflect this as it stands.

"I'm honestly starting to believe that it isn't hard to hire"

If this were true, then engineer salaries would not be rising so much. The demand for good engineers vastly outstrips supply.

Also, any explanation that requires you to posit mass irrationality is usually a bad one.

This is pull-based. Pingit allows A to pay B, but B does have to chase A for the payment. Whereas Payyr allows B to 'pull' payments from A after a DD is set up.

As I understand it, your argument is:

1. Some friends I know use Snapchat for 'photos they don't want other people to see'.

2. Therefore, most people use Snapchat to send porn.

3. Therefore, Snapchat should be valued as an amateur porn company.

Do you really believe that's a valid argument? And that all of the 350m+ photos sent on Snapchat every day are porn?

"It makes infinity times more money than snapchat, but has a thirtieth of the valuation. What is going on?"

A valuation isn't just based on how much money a company makes right now. It's based on how much money the company's expected to make over its lifetime. Snapchat's valuation [1] is based on expectations of high future revenue.

(There was a point where Facebook & Twitter had 0 revenue, too. Now they're both multi-billion dollar public companies.)

These stories always cause scepticism, especially in the HN crowd. It's the most common response ("What?! 4 BILLION!?"), and an easy one (i.e. doesn't require much thought), but it's the wrong one.

Sure, you can argue over the exact number, but let's consider the reverse claim: are you really willing to bet that an app that processes 350m+ messages every day is worth nothing? If not, what would you value it at?

Answering that question requires hard thought; reflexive scepticism doesn't. And if you were really imaginative & thought it through, you'd probably arrive at quite a high number.

For many consumer apps, the path to market dominance involves offering a service for free at first, and then 'monetizing' later on. The whole point of venture capital is to allow that (common) pattern to happen; the result is massive companies - like Dropbox and Airbnb - that weren't always cashflow positive, and that meaningfully benefit the world.

Perhaps it was crazy of Snapchat to turn down $3 billion, and maybe they really are overvalued, but it seems obvious that they are worth a lot of money [2].

[1] Although valuations make great media stories, valuation is really not that meaningful a number for private VC-funded companies.

[2] If you don't agree, consider that both Mark Zuckerberg & the founders of Snapchat disagree with you. So either you're smarter than Mark Zuckerberg & the founders of Snapchat, or you're probably wrong.

(I work at GoCardless).

GoCardless and Stripe tend to solve very different problems. We're a Direct Debit provider, whereas Stripe do card payments.

In short, Direct Debit is great for recurring payments and variable billing. It's traditionally really hard to get access to in the UK if you're a smaller business; but we allow people to sign up instantly and start using it without having to go to the bank.

DD is a great solution if you're in a service business or are charging a similar set of people each month. It's a less good solution if you're doing e-commerce/physical goods, since you need fast payment timings/clearing. That's the sort of problem cards (and therefore Stripe) are optimized for.

More info here: https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/use-cases/

"Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the "comments" link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page." - PG

>> "I for one would love proof that the diet is wrong about cereals and legumes."

>> "I read reports and testimonies of people getting better on it and athletes performing on it."

I think this is the wrong way round. When people make claims that stuff we've been eating for thousands of years (bread, cereals, grains etc.) are actually really bad for us, the burden of proof is on them.

If anyone could actually prove that wheat causes weight gain and health problems (independent of other variables), they'd be a good candidate for the next Nobel in Medicine.

Most studies I've read show that Paleo is no better or worse than a normal healthy diet. In some cases e.g. when you're an athlete, it'll be actively worse, since carbs are a basic source of fuel. [1]

On top of this, Paleo promotes some claims that are ridiculous, e.g. that burning fat for fuel == burning carbs for fuel. They have totally different consequences.

Yes, eating lots of carbs is bad for you. So is eating lots of fatty food. Loads of calories and not enough exercise means your body stores fat. That's sort of obvious, and nothing to do with any special properties that 'carbs' have.

Just eat plenty of vegetables (esp green / strongly coloured ones), and make sure you get adequate amounts of protein & carbs. To lose weight, make sure calories in < calories out. That's the general pictures studies give us.

Be extremely sceptical of anything claiming otherwise. I'm not sure why intelligent people can get so caught up in fads - such as Paleo - that are backed up by pseudo-science. My theory is that they appeal to the contrarian in us - after all, they're delightfully counter-intuitive in some ways (eating lots of steak can be good for me?!).

You've got to have contrarian ideas to be really intelligent, but not all contrarianism is good.

[1] I say this as a semi-pro runner who has tried running on a Paleo diet and found it disastrous. You cannot burn fat with the same efficiency as you can 'burn' carbs (i.e. use glycogen). It doesn't work that way. And if you still think it does, look up the diets of the top 10 athletes in basically any sport & explain to me why none of them are on Paleo.

good suggestion. done.

I've actually always had comments on, but recently switched to a CMS I wrote myself. I haven't had time to implement comments yet, but it's on the todo list. :)

No it's not. See the passage here. (http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education)

He's complaining about the fact that they don't really know what they've learned, they've just learned to 'say the right things', specifically because of the way they have been taught. Which is precisely the point I'm making.

e.g. "After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant."

Yes, we probably will open-source; it needs some work before that, though. (I work for GoCardless).

This is awesome. Thanks for posting - what a great story.

I don't think he missed it. From his essay:

"Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one could benefit from them. The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. What new things will we be able to do in the new world we'll have in a few years? What are we unconsciously ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible?"

GoCardless (YC S11); London; Ruby devs, Front-end devs

GoCardless is a London-based payments company that makes it simply for merchants to collect money from their customers by linking bank accounts directly to our systems. As a result, there are no credit card networks involved in transactions - payments become much cheaper and more flexible. We're a small but very technically-focussed company - even our sales/biz-dev guys write ruby, python & php to a reasonable standard - and we try to find tech-driven solutions to problems whenever possible. Developers are core to the company's success, so we're working very hard on recruiting the best people out there. The working environment is pretty flexible - while we work hard, we don't really have fixed hours and people are encouraged to work from home if it helps their productivity.

We're solving some really challenging technical problems across the whole stack, including deep integration with legacy banking systems, which brings its own set of challenges.

We're backed by Y Combinator, Accel Partners & Passion Capital, and we pay competitive salaries + stock.

We're looking for a Ruby developer who can work in our office in central London - for a full job spec, please see https://gocardless.com/jobs

Email tom@gocardless.com to apply. No recruiters, please!