bokonist

19 ms·

91.
by bokonist 13y ago
I have been working for a fast growing/successful startup that has brought in a number of outside executives (though not a new CEO). I am sure those executives have 100x the stock of the average engineer on the team. These executives
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by bokonist 13y ago
" Am I just extremely lucky, or are you a little bit full of it? " My own observations corroborate your data. I've personally known about a dozen founders who have built a seven or more figure net worth from startups. About
93.
by bokonist 13y ago
For the uninitiated, the term "Cathedral" used by the author, is an alt-right term referring to the network left-learning, establishment institutions. The Cathedral comprises almost all universities, public schools, NGO's, the UN, think ta
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The real 7 lessons of schooling(suspiriadeprofundis.net)
1 points by bokonist 13y ago|1 comments
95.
by bokonist 13y ago
"I don't wanna trade money for vacation." My point is that the tradeoff between money and vacation does not exist in the aggregate. You get the vacation for free simply from moving to the lose-lose quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma to the
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by bokonist 13y ago
So I'm not sure how concerned I should be about the work-life balance of someone making $250,000/yr. Well, most rat-racers are not making $250k. A more typical example of a rat-racer is a Dunder Mifflin sales reps in The Office , who wo
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by bokonist 13y ago
You have never heard such pronouncements? Pretty much every foreign policy speech by an American president involves talk of spreading freedom and democracy. Here for example is President Bush in 2005: 'Bush, putting Mubarak on the spot, de
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by bokonist 13y ago
I used to think that mandatory vacation laws were an undesirable restrictions on worker freedom. I figured workers should have the freedom to choose their own balance between compensation and vacation time. I changed my mind on the issue.
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by bokonist 13y ago
" Really the Islamic countries are about 500 years behind the history of Western Europe... Moving ahead 500 years is not easy.Net, Afghanistan is going to be an Islamic country, some version of an Islamic country, but still an Islamic count
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by bokonist 13y ago
Proper occupation can be and has been done many times in history, but it takes a force at least somewhat proportional to the population; which the west doesn't really want to afford. Controlling a territory has been done many times with a
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by bokonist 13y ago
Here is the working link: http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/wiki/faq
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by bokonist 13y ago
The problem is a deep class divide between the haves and have-nots. Britain of 1850 had a deep class divide, but they managed to keep the trash off streets. The rich do not have an interest in sewage running into the rivers or slums that
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by bokonist 13y ago
I'm not a pessimist about India by any means, because it's amazing how much the people of this country have achieved through individual hard work in the face of so many poor institutions Well, the Indian people are ultimately responsible
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by bokonist 14y ago
It seems like there would be an incentive for people to build radio jammers or other ways of generating interference. They would then use those jammers to extort legitimate broadcasters - pay me $1 million or I'll ruin your broadcast. Sin
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by bokonist 14y ago
The problem with the standard approach to monopolies is that in the long term the corporation ends up having power over government, while popular power is disorganized and diffuse. See Government's End by Jonathan Rauch or read about the
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by bokonist 14y ago
" Cell service is compeltely broken because the government "sold" radio frequency spectrum. They sold all of it. " Usually the government selling something off is not cited as an example of government intervention. Most lazzei-faire ty
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by bokonist 14y ago
Kleiner Perkins invested in over 60 cleantech companies. Unfortunately, their cleantech portfolio seems to be having pretty lousy results - http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_22385874/kleiner-perk... I think the proportion of VC fund
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The Rent Seeking Economy(intellectual-detox.com)
192 points by bokonist 14y ago|129 comments
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by bokonist 14y ago
There are a lot of problems that can be solved by technology but require some "niche" competence. Take the emerging field of data science. It's possible that market dynamics will change in a way that favors small businesses over large cor
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by bokonist 14y ago
The future isn't going to be built by VC-istan, but by a fleet of ~50,000 small-to-medium businesses formerly called "lifestyle" companies, The problem is that many technology companies have natural economies of scale. It is not realist
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by bokonist 14y ago
#1 I agree that prize-based research only works in certain areas. That is why I would make it only one of the three ways to fund research. I think that any competition should be judged by outsiders, if the competition cannot be accurately
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by bokonist 14y ago
Interesting, thank you for sharing. I think it's a major problem that there is no external accountability. The grants are scored by peer professors, based on publications (which again requires approval by peers). This creates a bunch of p
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by bokonist 14y ago
Who exactly decides how to allocate these grants? Professional federal government bureaucrats? Fellow professors in the field? Do you have any insight on why they choose to allocate the grants in such an inefficient way? Is the classic
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by bokonist 14y ago
My ideal world: Basic courses should be taught by professional teachers. Intermediate courses should be taught by practitioners who also have good teaching skills. So an junior year software engineering course might be taught by a Google
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by bokonist 14y ago
Hmm, I think the problem is slightly different. The job of a tenured professor in 1980 was pretty sweet. Upper middle class salary, great job security, a soap box from which to influence impressionable minds, freedom to pursue intellectual
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by bokonist 14y ago
"I think we really need to understand the problem: public schools are locally funded and operated and small locales can use real estate to become exclusive." Implicitly, you are saying that the real problem is that public schools do not
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by bokonist 14y ago
HN is undergoing the transition that every community undergoes, from ultra-exclusive and underground to more populist. There's always gnashing of teeth from the entrenched userbase as a site becomes popular. Well yeah, and in my IMHO the
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by bokonist 14y ago
I agree that if you were trying to lower housing prices you would start by eliminating all the subsidies. There is some chance that eliminating all subsidies would not meet whatever price goal is desired. Housing near employment is going t
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by bokonist 14y ago
Have you considered hiring someone full time just to improve Hacker News? You have built an incredibly valuable forum, and there is no other place on the internet like it. But the quality of the comments is definitely degrading over time.
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by bokonist 14y ago
I find that most people who use the word "we" or "us" when talking about government actions are not being imprecise. Rather they have internalized the civics class myth that ordinary citizens have a large amount of agency over government. I

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