6 ms·

With regard to the comments after the aside: The former model has become a “fad” because of technological progress in e.g. logistics and predictive analytics.

With regard to the comments after the aside: The former model has become a “fad” because of technological progress in e.g. logistics and predictive analytics. The wording “send some stuff to you every month you don’t get to pick the stuff but trust us” belies the fact that this is actually a very difficult problem with a very interesting solution. If some instance of this model succeeds it will be because it managed to create a service that improves lives at _essentially zero cognitive cost_. To cultivate and then engage with certain preferences takes some amount of time and energy and to be able to offload those costs to software is, at the very least, interesting. The latter model is only uninteresting under the assumption that the products will never work in the sense you mentioned (efficiency improvement). I’m not sure there’s any reason to assume that “smart”, “connected” products won’t improve substantially in the relatively near future. I also think there’s plenty of simple tasks that could be automated in a meaningfully useful way. For example, cooking rice. More generally, building a profitable, sustainable organization of human beings is intrinsically useful and interesting. This last part is less a reply to your post and more a response to a cynical (in my opinion) tone throughout this discussion.

CPLX 10y ago
> More generally, building a profitable, sustainable organization of human beings is intrinsically useful and interesting. This last part is less a reply to your post and more a response to a cynical (in my opinion) tone throughout this discussion. I do understand this view, and I share it to some extent. It's easy to be cynical and it's hard to try to make things work. I understand that far more now in my old age than I did back in the fuckedcompany.com days, for example. With that said, I think people who espouse this view can be a little oblivious to the downsides of frivolous investment bubbles in tech. If you take a million dollars of investment and do something like take cases of wine, open the bottles and pour it into little glass size vials, and mail it to people for a couple months before realizing that service is not really useful to anyone, then that's a real life tragedy. Asset bubbles are bad and have real life consequences. Those million dollars belong to someone, often someone's retirement fund or similar. That million dollars can help people. It can help them directly, by giving to those in need, or more relevantly, it can support business ideas that aren't frivolous, people who aren't privileged graduates of prestigious colleges or connected to hot incubators. Maybe a system that is funding that idea but leaving so many prospective entrepreneurs and ideas completely out of the system, is somewhat broken. Maybe we're allowed to notice it and find it problematic if we want to. Maybe we can say hey this is disappointing because it is.
- aaachilless 10y ago
  I agree with most of this and probably shouldn't have included that last bit because I see that it might indicate otherwise and shift focus from what I think is a more important point. I guess our disagreement is that I'm not ready to label the wine delivery company as frivolous. It provides, of course, a purely luxury product, but I'm not sure that providing (or investing in) a purely luxury product is ethically or morally deficient or frivolous. If you add in that YC funds many extremely risky companies with highly humanitarian, philanthropic, etc goals, I think it becomes even more difficult to look at specific investments and say "what a shame."
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    Frivolous or not, though, is it sustainably profitable? I'm not convinced that it could be, and I think that that's the core of CPLX's doubt as well. A silly but profitable project can fund basic research that would be too expensive on its own; but a project that's neither particularly valuable in its own right, nor able to fund others, isn't good for very much. (Old-style luxury goods also provide work for artisans and keep traditional knowledge alive, but I'm not convinced that that element is present here either.)
    - aaachilless 10y ago
      I disagree. I think CPLX is disappointed not because he thinks YC is picking losers, but because, in his opinion, YC isn't accounting for certain ethical, moral, humanitarian, philanthropic, etc (I'm not sure what the correct word is) ideals when it makes its picks. Or maybe: taking risks on inherently frivolous ventures in lieu of more valuable ones is disappointing. Weighing in on the accuracy of these sentiments does make for interesting discussion. I think "YC says investment X is +EV, I say it's -EV" is usually an uninteresting statement unless it's made outside of the context of ROI and profitability. I know the HN crowd is well-informed and knowledgeable, which is why the forums are so interesting, but an extremely small number of us are qualified to critique YC's investments in terms of financial ROI. So my initial response was w.r.t the sentiment that these companies are frivolous, regardless of whether they're profitable. If you're correct, then I must have missed CPLX's point.
Tossrock 10y ago
I think automatic rice cooking is a solved problem. There's a device called a "rice cooker", where you pour in the rice and water, press a button, and then later you get cooked rice. No wifi necessary!
- aaachilless 10y ago
  Idk, I think there's room for improvement [1]. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/xiaomi-ih-pressure-rice-cooker/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/xiaomi-ih-pressure-rice-...

CPLX 10y ago

> More generally, building a profitable, sustainable organization of human beings is intrinsically useful and interesting. This last part is less a reply to your post and more a response to a cynical (in my opinion) tone throughout this discussion. I do understand this view, and I share it to some extent. It's easy to be cynical and it's hard to try to make things work. I understand that far more now in my old age than I did back in the fuckedcompany.com days, for example. With that said, I think people who espouse this view can be a little oblivious to the downsides of frivolous investment bubbles in tech. If you take a million dollars of investment and do something like take cases of wine, open the bottles and pour it into little glass size vials, and mail it to people for a couple months before realizing that service is not really useful to anyone, then that's a real life tragedy. Asset bubbles are bad and have real life consequences. Those million dollars belong to someone, often someone's retirement fund or similar. That million dollars can help people. It can help them directly, by giving to those in need, or more relevantly, it can support business ideas that aren't frivolous, people who aren't privileged graduates of prestigious colleges or connected to hot incubators. Maybe a system that is funding that idea but leaving so many prospective entrepreneurs and ideas completely out of the system, is somewhat broken. Maybe we're allowed to notice it and find it problematic if we want to. Maybe we can say hey this is disappointing because it is.

aaachilless 10y ago
I agree with most of this and probably shouldn't have included that last bit because I see that it might indicate otherwise and shift focus from what I think is a more important point. I guess our disagreement is that I'm not ready to label the wine delivery company as frivolous. It provides, of course, a purely luxury product, but I'm not sure that providing (or investing in) a purely luxury product is ethically or morally deficient or frivolous. If you add in that YC funds many extremely risky companies with highly humanitarian, philanthropic, etc goals, I think it becomes even more difficult to look at specific investments and say "what a shame."
- clock_tower 10y ago
  Frivolous or not, though, is it sustainably profitable? I'm not convinced that it could be, and I think that that's the core of CPLX's doubt as well. A silly but profitable project can fund basic research that would be too expensive on its own; but a project that's neither particularly valuable in its own right, nor able to fund others, isn't good for very much. (Old-style luxury goods also provide work for artisans and keep traditional knowledge alive, but I'm not convinced that that element is present here either.)
  - aaachilless 10y ago
    I disagree. I think CPLX is disappointed not because he thinks YC is picking losers, but because, in his opinion, YC isn't accounting for certain ethical, moral, humanitarian, philanthropic, etc (I'm not sure what the correct word is) ideals when it makes its picks. Or maybe: taking risks on inherently frivolous ventures in lieu of more valuable ones is disappointing. Weighing in on the accuracy of these sentiments does make for interesting discussion. I think "YC says investment X is +EV, I say it's -EV" is usually an uninteresting statement unless it's made outside of the context of ROI and profitability. I know the HN crowd is well-informed and knowledgeable, which is why the forums are so interesting, but an extremely small number of us are qualified to critique YC's investments in terms of financial ROI. So my initial response was w.r.t the sentiment that these companies are frivolous, regardless of whether they're profitable. If you're correct, then I must have missed CPLX's point.

Tossrock 10y ago

I think automatic rice cooking is a solved problem. There's a device called a "rice cooker", where you pour in the rice and water, press a button, and then later you get cooked rice. No wifi necessary!

aaachilless 10y ago
Idk, I think there's room for improvement [1]. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/xiaomi-ih-pressure-rice-cooker/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/03/29/xiaomi-ih-pressure-rice-...