troughway

Whenever I read statements like these I am torn because it's difficult to decide whether to cast it aside as "feel good rhetoric, but rhetoric nonetheless" or take it as it is. Do I simply gather the facts and make up my own truth of things, or do I listen to someone pen something like this up where there are so many self-admitted contradictions that you cannot help but wonder if these people are intentionally ruining social order, if they are just that ignorant of their actions.

Well I guess it was only a matter of time before people started making posts proclaiming that pg’s lack of conformism is problematic.

The thing I like about this post is that it isn’t dependant on VC backed ventures. It’s good, sane advice regardless.

Not to trout a cliche around since plenty of HN has heard of this already, but David Sinclair’s book Lifespan talks about caloric reduction. Nothing crazy, skipping a meal here and there.

Running isn’t the only way to get cardio in. Tabata/HIIT, while making you feel like you’re on the verge of dying, are wonderful and most important safe for your knee joints. Long distance running will wear your meniscus out.

So for everyone here who says they don’t like to run - that’s fine, get on the stairmaster or pick up a kettlebell or medicine ball and do some swings and tosses and side movements. Running will seem like a walk in the park by comparison.

The author eventually puts some thought into it and subsequently adopts a public stance matching what was privately true all along—revealing how little they value the things they said they did.

I wouldn't chalk this up to irony just yet, but the lack of benevolent gatekeepers has allowed this to happen. And it will happen time and time again and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You've had a good run in your basement using something that the suits didn't pay much attention to, because they couldn't connect at the time how this seemingly boring machine called the computer could lead to money. But rest assured, your hard work has demonstrated it to them and has brought them over.

Slowly but surely you should make amends with some utopian idea of a decentralized, apolitical, and not-under-control-of-some-state web. Anything less than that is being delusional.

A free society has so many enemies from inside and outside who wish to force their hand upon everyone, that it's best to stay out of the way of the herd unless you believe getting trampled over is worth it.

When we were "battling" for net neutrality last time (or was it two times ago?) there was a good meme image floating around that showed a handful of different "packages" of websites you could have access to:

https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-...

But if you really look, this has already started to happen. Netflix once had a decent library of movies, and then everyone caught up to them and now it's Netflix, Amazon, Hulu/Disney, HBO, and the list keeps growing.

Spotify, Apple, Google Music. Eventually this exclusivity card will be played by them in a much greater scale. At which point, the necessity of most people having to _ration_ what web they want to see will inevitably resemble having those packages up there.

So in closing, you're out-financed, out manned, and to make things worse, you've got so-called "leftists"/"liberals" as front line soldiers working free of charge (Mark Zuckerberg was right - they're not just dumb fucks, they're _gullible_ dumb fucks) for these corporations to further erode your chances of having any semblance of a decent internet.

As Morgan Freeman so eloquently put it in The Dark Knight: "Good luck."

Is this Active Focus?

To be fair this is another article/essay in a very, very long string of his that can be filed under some kind of a "Fundamentals of Business" type category. If you talk to owners, they will inevitably say the same things he's saying, sometimes verbatim. But these owners wouldn't speak in direct words either, because "speaking to customers/users" is too context dependent to get into in an HN comment. There's too much nuance to bash the person over the head with it when writing this sort of an essay.

That's mostly what tipped me off to not take his words at face value but to interpret them through his lens as a VC and someone who is trying to communicate business ideas (ideals?) to people who, I would at least hope, aspire to create a business of their own. Whether it's a million or a billion, it doesn't matter. Nearly everything he talks about applies to "lifestyle businesses," which is I think partly why YC offers some small bit of money to get the ball rolling rather than go gung-ho and throw massive amounts of money at people. I don't know if this has changed, I don't think it has. Obviously it doesn't hurt to get a leg-up from the counsellors and whatnot that YC provides through their alumni program.

I am not sure if he's spoken about it but I wouldn't doubt that one of his philosophies is that a diverse number of businesses can grow to a reasonable revenue (where the founders are happy and working away at it) with a bit of money to start with, and that way YC doesn't have to spend a fortune early on and everyone walks away happy even if YC doesn't turn a sizable profit. Some kind of a threshold where YC feels anything above that means they're pissing money in the wind and their ROI isn't any better, but at the same time they're helping the founders as best as they can.

So you have to take the times he talks about being Ramen Profitable and talks about building a Billion Dollar Business and find the underlying threads tying it all together.

pg can't tell you exactly what, how, when, where, why you should be doing the thing you need to be doing to build a business. His words sound like platitudes most of the time to me personally, which is why I take the side of "the people who need this the most won't take it, and vice versa", because the person who started a business and is profitable didn't have anyone like pg telling them this sort of stuff. Would someone read his words before starting anything and be inspired to? Perhaps, but it's a long journey and counting on such flimsy motivation to keep you going is to me silly.

For some, certain things might be common sense. For others, not so much. Plenty of founders, even those with serious business experience, still have it ingrained in them that "if you build it, they will come", and they neglect every other aspect of business. Yes, I'm talking primarily about engineering types. This essay is to remind you to focus on the users, and the rest will follow.

Aside: I'm grateful for the Startup School library. I think it's a great resource. It's got a nice mix of obvious and non-obvious advice in there. When people disparage pg's writing, they should take a moment and see what his company has built for people who wish to create a business before declaring him out of touch.

For those too lazy to hunt, SAFE stands for

Saturn

Azure App Service

Fable

Elmish

Slightly off topic but it’s good to see that F# is finally getting some proper web love.

I feel the bitterness

Elaborate on it then.

People have already minced words over "exploitation" and where to exactly draw the boundary between acceptable/tolerable and not. It strikes me personally as flimsy reasoning to harp on his writings.

If you're going to build a business and you hope to make money, you're going to have to EXPLOIT inefficiencies in markets, competitors, customers, processes, conventional modes of thinking, and so on. Doesn't matter if the business is making you a dollar or a million or a billion.

And also, this whole "scandal involving workers or consumers". YC's portfolio has plenty of companies who are making a killing with revenue who haven't had to do this.

Patrick Collison is a regular poster on here. Go ahead and tell him he's exploiting people and he's scandalous with workers and consumers. I'd like to see someone go to one of the successful YC alumni and say directly at them half the shit you people spout out into the nether.

As I have mentioned in a comment to the throwaway account in this thread - I sincerely think a lot of commenters on here either have no experience or no ambition in starting a business, never mind getting a healthy revenue stream. Hell, I wonder what the percentage here is who got as far to having to talk to clients.

This is certainly a newer-ish theme.

I am not sure where the bitterness comes, and to be honest, I would like to know. We are reading the same essays.

More and more I am starting to think that people who are decrying pg's writing should come clean and say whether or not they've started a business, and if so, what was the outcome. The outcome isn't as relevant, but I bet there are very few people out there who have reached, lets call it "Fuck You" money through running their own business who would read this essay and go "Hah he's so out of touch he doesn't even see it anymore" and toss some link about Dunning-Kruger or whatever.

For people who are in the business of making money through getting shit built, I think what he's saying will resonate just fine. But then again it's one of those things where the people who need it the most are the least likely ones to take it, and vice versa. It's akin to the "It's a good problem to have" crowd when you say how you're sick of dealing with clients on the phone even though you have a 200-person company, and they look at you sideways because they have no idea why you are complaining.

He's talking about billionaires and interviews in this one, and he starts off saying how the two threads are connected. But what he's really talking about is building-a-business-by-convincing-people-you're-not-full-of-hot-air.

And unfortunately, when I see people tearing his essays apart, their ramblings strike me as nothing but hot air.

I think it's HN who is out of touch more than pg is, because I don't think the vast majority are here to build businesses whatsoever.

Can someone pin point what is objectively wrong or out of touch with this article? Genuinely asking because the past three+ posts from pg have been met with negativity saying pg is a wealthy Londoner who doesn’t understand the prole struggle.

More and more I feel like some submissions are here to nerd-snipe the HN crowd into a furor.

Read it some 15 years ago.

I faintly recall an interview with one of the developers not too long ago, maybe a few years ago or so, where they said Sweeney still touches some 80% of the code base.

Also, there's always this old gem that HN should get giddy about: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced...

I just think JC/Abrash/etc have an aura/cult of personality that doesn't seem all that impressive when you get someone who is a powerhouse of tech and business acumen like Sweeney next to them.

I find it a curiosity that John Carmack is perpetually touted as the whiz kid even though Tim Sweeney has done far, far more from both a technological standpoint and a business standpoint. But then again I'll never understand the fawning to begin with so there's that.

I'll bite, what's wrong with Naval? He's got decent content.

A new season of HWNDU. About time.

From JC: "the exactly predicted off-by-one-frame-of-latency input sampling happened"

I'm assuming this happened because the game, starting with an empty input buffer, queued input for the subsequent frame, rather than use the input as-is and process it right then and there?

Discord is an interesting case compared to Slack. Slack is, from my understanding anyway, built out in PHP. Fairly lingua franca for the web.

Discord, on the other hand, seems to have built a "technical moat" of sorts for themselves by using Erlang/Elixir and other non-standard tech. Suppose SF or a company like them were to acquire Discord. If and when the staff were to leave once their vesting period or whatever is over, who would take over the codebase from them?

I remember that, was on the front page. The writing was on the wall the moment they took out that full page ad in NYT which is a bizarre PR move that signalled fear.

Can someone pastebin the article for us?

I remember in the last handful of decades some great mystery/thriller movies with sophisticated characters where they were using Texan and Louisianan accents (think No Country for Old Men). That, to me, is what made it all the more interesting, although these weren't full on accents by comparison to how people from these places can really speak like.

bad press forcing change in laws and companies.

Big oil has entered the chat.

Collective action

Pray tell, what collective action? Are you going to boycott McKinsey? Write to the same congress representatives that companies like McKinsey personally finance and wine and dine and call in for favors?

Do share, we are all curious what is this collective action that will somehow lead to enlightenment of "building a common understanding of what the problems are and what should be done about them."

Billionaires are the untouchable class of people. They don't answer to anyone. They quite literally own and run the country. I don't know why it's difficult for the rational person to get this through their heads. The last thing you will see is them being in any kind of trouble about it. We can discuss the failing of a company like Enron another time. They really fucked the dog and in much the same way as Jeffrey Epstein hanging himself in a high security prison, pissed off other billionaires who are the only people who can get some sense of action out of the legal system on each other.

we've been taught to idealize superachievers and geniuses, and despise underachievers and mediocrity from an early age.

Who taught you that?

Hasn't this already happened in UAE several times? Where was the shock, awe and "Lawfare" on it back then?

I assure you, in almost every situation, driving up the cost of anything has huge ramifications. You might think "oh that's a good thing, they get paid more". Except they don't. Read on....

When the minimum wage was raised, that very same morning, all the prices of all the goods went up by that exact same amount to compensate for it. In essence, all that was was inflation. Your _actual_ "purchasing power" remained exactly the same as the day before.

What Amazon is doing here, which I find to be a pretty blatant case of a "bad thing" rather than a "good thing", is they are artificially increasing manual labor salaries by shoveling in money from all their other divisions, such as AWS.

The only thing you will see from this, as I had just mentioned, is a price hike to account for inflation, however in the meantime there will be a number of industries struggling to find workers at affordable salaries because companies like Amazon can just keep playing a different sort of game.

To give you an analogy, it's like VCs shoveling money in to startups to prop them up and keep them on top of their advertising channels and pay for employees, even though the company itself could not possibly survive without that kind of capital.

The wages here do not make sense for the labor market, but Amazon has so much money stocked up from all their other channels, and of course, the various shady government kickbacks that you are unaware of, that they just don't give a fuck.

Something that isn't discussed about is how Amazon is able to do this, and that is that they are using their position to pay more for jobs that involve manual labor work (lots of positions in that 427,000 figure) but also to pay rates that the local businesses that also utilize manual labor cannot compete with.

So what ends up happening is that Amazon is placing a dent in the over all labor market of all the industries in the surrounding area, not just their direct competitors. That is a lot of manual labor being impacted.

If you have worked in fields with manual labor (factories, construction, fabrication, assembly line of any sort), there is very little employee retention because those employees are just concerned about the next pay stub. Nothing else. This might come across as elitist, and it is, but that is the prevailing mentality of these sort of employees and there is very little to be done about it.

Forgive me for sounding daft. I feel reluctant taking one Tylenol pill nevermind anything close to this - how exactly have you had at least eight friends die? Was it accidental? Uncontrolled dosage? Suicide? Do you forget that you had taken it already?

I keep hearing about the opioid deaths and the crisis but what exactly happens that these people overdose on it?