eldavido

36 ms·

271.
by eldavido 8y ago
My theory is returns to scale are much, much higher. All this whiz-bang shit startups do like AI, machine learning, really even any kind of custom software or process innovation, just isn't possible when you're small. There's
272.
by eldavido 8y ago
Overfishing is a regulatory, not technical, problem. Though I do think many of the hardest problems today are regulatory (climate, health, digital political advertising), not necessarily technical.
273.
by eldavido 8y ago
One of the things I find most striking when watching old movies is the general attitude of people toward tech. If you look at movies from the 70s and 80s, conspicuous display of tech was common. Look at stereo systems of the time, and how p
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by eldavido 8y ago
I would participate in this. Email in sig if you want to discuss.
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by eldavido 8y ago
> I think public support of the health insurance status quo will collapse and Medicare for All will become an actual Thing. I'm almost certain about the first part (collapse) but much less certain about the second. The fundamental i
276.
by eldavido 8y ago
Not directly answering the question, but, one I've been thinking about: what skills/traits allow a person to make such predictions with high accuracy? One thing is that I think you need a pretty wide set of priors--breadth. Stuff
277.
by eldavido 8y ago
> "The best" is purely subjective Bullshit. Find me one "indigenous culture" as advanced as a modern developed western country (or China) and I'll believe you. I don't care whether your metric is life expect
278.
by eldavido 8y ago
So here's the thing: apart from you and maybe a few friends, nobody really cares about your "forging your own path". It may give your life meaning, which is important. But in any sort of professional / market context, pe
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by eldavido 8y ago
That is true. But you also have to acknowledge that this community isn't in any sense, "normal" (representative, average, etc) Most days I appreciate its uniqueness, but I find myself rolling my eyes at least once/week a
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by eldavido 8y ago
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.
281.
by eldavido 8y ago
It's not about being "fed information". It's the reality that being around a motivated group of peers confers real advantage. I look at the history of art (e.g. Impressionists), YC, winning athletics programs, Silicon Va
282.
by eldavido 8y ago
I love how there are these two parallel threads going in HNville: (1) COLLEGE SUCKS BURN IT DOWN and (2) "I'd like to learn complex things like machine learning and math that take more than reading 5 blog posts to master, how do I
283.
by eldavido 8y ago
Simple: nobody has time. Due to capital availability [1], the SV/SF ecosystem is highly optimized to favor spending money over time. That's why you get much-more-expensive WeWork over private office leases, everyone wanting to pay
284.
by eldavido 8y ago
One word: positioning. Apple is a luxury product. It is the best. If they started selling not-the-best, it would tarnish their (well-earned, in my opinion) reputation for always making the best. I use an Android phone and will freely admit
285.
by eldavido 8y ago
Slightly pedantic point: A shortage is a market failure where you have willing parties who want to transact (a guy wants to sell at $10 and someone wants to buy at that price) but for whatever reason they can't. For shortages in part
286.
by eldavido 8y ago
The way I've usually seen this split is "emergent" vs. "non-emergent" (as in "emergency). You are correct that non-emergent care is a WAY bigger market than emergent. Most people completely ignore this. Chronic
287.
by eldavido 8y ago
Yes and no. While you're technically correct that there are well-accepted principles, they don't always have much bearing on whether a company will be solvent, or easy to finance. Example 1: Amazon's core retail business. Not
288.
by eldavido 8y ago
This isn't even the whole story. Uber has progressed to where they're raising directly from the people venture capital funds raise from, cutting out the VC, a middleman.
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by eldavido 8y ago
You're just missing some terminology. This stuff is surprisingly complex -- which gives technical people used to worrying about mind-numbing levels of complexity an edge ;) "Revenue" is confusing for business like this. More
290.
by eldavido 8y ago
So, an important lesson I've realized from the whole scooters thing is that if you have a bunch of inconsiderate idiots in your city, regulation isn't going to fix that problem. So I'm not surprised you have a totally differe
291.
by eldavido 8y ago
Success for who? Customers: probably, employees: maybe, investors/early founders: maybe, maybe not. Capital has a cost. The job of investors is to allocate it. A company that gets to moderate success on a million of equity is a much di
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by eldavido 8y ago
This is the core of a computer engineering degree. You're looking for (1) probably a first course in the basics of circuits, (2/3) a first- and second-course in "digital design" or "logic design", (4) an operat
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by eldavido 8y ago
No. I have an undergraduate degree in computer engineering (basically this stuff) but do mostly software these days. You're better off going deep in one or the other, either how to design this stuff or the algorithms/math/CS-
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by eldavido 8y ago
This whole thread is frankly, so dumb. One of my best friends is a SoC designer at Apple and we talk about this stuff all the time. First thing people need to understand: this whole world operates at scale . You don't bother making an
295.
by eldavido 8y ago
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted here. This is pretty much exactly what I've observed. There is really no downside to "failure" other than lost time and a few years of your life. And if you fail big, it&#x2
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by eldavido 8y ago
I think you're looking at this totally wrong. Making things repairable has real costs. They have to be designed in a modular way so they can be taken apart. Given the choice, most people want sleekness and better industrial design over
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by eldavido 8y ago
I feel the real missing ingredient here was the foresight required to anticipate a lot of these changes looking forward. It's something I've been trying to develop myself. Any idiot can look back and say, gee, they could've d
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by eldavido 8y ago
Selectively looking at what's next.
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by eldavido 8y ago
You strike me as someone who has thought very deeply about this. I think of it as being too much context. There is just way too much real-world context for computers to assimilate. We humans might be terrible at understanding things like ab
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by eldavido 8y ago
This is basically Warren Buffett's conception of a stock: a bond with a variable interest rate. It gets easier when you think of a share as a fractional claim on a cashflow (profits - what's "left over"). Bondholders are

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