walterk

16 ms·

91.
by walterk 18y ago
I honestly don't know enough about the situation to say what could have been done, if anything (which makes me incapable of knowing whether your claim of unknowability is true :P). But while governments don't intervene in hindsight, driving
92.
by walterk 18y ago
Being something of a utilitarian myself, I see intervention being necessary when market incentives are not aligned with what's best for society. I've never seen anybody make a convincing case that such misalignments do not exist, or that a
93.
by walterk 18y ago
> But part of guiding society (as you suggest) is trying to push it towards an ideal even if you know it will never fully reach that ideal. Right, but again, my point is that pushing for libertarian-motivated policies for no reason othe
94.
by walterk 18y ago
Right, except my point is that, last summer, you basically needed a demo just to get the interview.
95.
by walterk 18y ago
I would agree that the crash doesn't refute libertarianism to the extent that libertarianism demands a completely free market. On the other hand, the chances of libertarians getting their way in a large-scale society like the US is exactly
96.
by walterk 18y ago
Fwiw, I'm also a no-demo applicant. But odds are odds, and if last summer's less competitive round tilted almost exclusively in favor of applicants with demos, in virtue of the fact that they had demos, then we're de facto excluded from t
97.
by walterk 18y ago
> No, no, no. Libertarianism is not the philosophy that free markets will never crash. I don't think the author ever made that claim. You'll notice he links to a range of arguments, running the spectrum from "government intervention is
98.
by walterk 18y ago
At this point, I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to require a demo along with the application? As I recall, virtually all of the summer interviewees had demos, which gave them a significant advantage over other applicants. If YC only con
99.
by walterk 18y ago
No, but this is also my second time applying. Given how ridiculously competitive it was during the summer round, I feel it's probably unreasonable for just about anyone to get their hopes up. My advice is, don't bank your startup dreams on
100.
by walterk 18y ago
Trivial. Pointless. Get back to work. (3.07)
101.
by walterk 18y ago
I think it's extremely important to have academics in constant communication with the public. Keeps them grounded and their language plain, while the public can continue to engage with academics long after they've graduated.
102.
by walterk 18y ago
In that case, my suspicion is that even the threat of a buyout isn't going to do any good in terms of motivating him. He really needs to go do something else, at least temporarily, to resolve whatever's going on in his life. Having him st
103.
by walterk 18y ago
Out of curiosity, what on earth was he doing for those 4 months in which he wrote less than 100 lines of code? I get the sense that he may have other issues going on besides a lack of enthusiasm for the project.
104.
by walterk 18y ago
Asking yourself "how would a physicist solve this?" is a good example of priming. I can't remember if I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but there was an experiment where a couple groups were given a task, with one group told to
105.
by walterk 18y ago
I agree. (Incidentally, I wasn't trying to put down your comment specifically, in case it came across that way. I just replied to it since I didn't want to duplicate the point that working harder was also part of the equation.)
106.
by walterk 18y ago
He's definitely advocating both, but reducing the advice to "work smarter and harder" strips out all of the social and cultural context which gives it motivational force. The idea of making an "extraordinary effort" compels you to define yo
107.
by walterk 18y ago
The very article you link to carefully distinguishes Rand's definition of selfishness from the common understanding of the word. Rand was herself against the base selfishness that most people are against. The problem is that pure free mark
108.
by walterk 18y ago
Thankfully, however, we're not actually forced to choose between laissez-faire capitalism and communism.
109.
Don't Let Google Freeze the Airwaves(online.wsj.com)
1 points by walterk 18y ago|0 comments
110.
Everybody Calm Down. A Government Hand In the Economy Is as Old as the Republic.(washingtonpost.com)
1 points by walterk 18y ago|1 comments
111.
by walterk 18y ago
It's in my self-interest to rob you if I can get away with it. It's also in my self-interest to strong-arm my way to a monopoly and charge more than the efficient price. It's also in my self-interest to prevent workers from obtaining bargai
112.
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity(harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu)
1 points by walterk 18y ago|0 comments
113.
by walterk 18y ago
"People in business pursue the profit-maximizing choice, which at its worst means providing something unique enough that you can charge a monopolistic price." You're assuming they're bound by laws and aren't willing to subvert them to make
114.
by walterk 18y ago
"Comcast could screw with my cable." Was that the worst example you could think of? "The government could make me disappear." So could a private firm.
115.
by walterk 18y ago
Well, I was reading it about 4 hours ago, and I'd like to be told why one should be libertarian. :) But I'm genuinely curious to see what sort of reasoning led to Thiel's becoming a libertarian, and there's just not much to go on in the int
116.
by walterk 18y ago
I'm rather disappointed that he never gave a decent justification for libertarianism in that interview. About all he said was "Totalitarianism is bad, that's why I'm a libertarian. Also, I read Tolkien."
117.
by walterk 18y ago
It's not, really, but there's presumably a number of "good guy" geeks here who have difficulty interacting with the opposite sex. Unfortunately the hacker-entrepreneur community is also implicitly a community of guys with various inadequac
118.
by walterk 18y ago
> I challenge you to find more than a handful of English or History majors who are familiar with the works of Turing, Galois, Knuth, or Euler. The thing is, advanced works of mathematics and computer science are almost completely irrele
119.
by walterk 18y ago
One dumb use does not invalidate the whole service.
120.
by walterk 18y ago
1. Lightweight, in-browser preview of docs. 2. Embeddable docs: you don't have to leave the context in which a doc is referenced to peruse it. 3. Easy way to integrate advertising in docs. 4. Improves browsability of docs by aggregating the

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