biren34

I say that the need to start your own thing is a bug not feature. It IS a hard life, with tons of risk, change, and uncertainty. My wife hates the instability of it all. I've missed or worked through many vacations, concerts, and other things over the years.

It's not even clear that it's a good deal, when you factor in opportunity costs, hours worked, and chances of success.

So, it if you don't have to do it, don't do it. You're not going to succeed unless you are just the kind of person who can't be happy going down another path.

It all sounds harsh, but it's actually a lot better than the risk/reward offered in many other fields: acting, writing, sports, etc.

This is just how professions with tournament-style payouts work, and you either buy in or you don't. Know thyself...it never pretended to be anything else.

Huh. Didn't realize I had those two words mixed up. Thanks!

If you haven't heard of it, you've just stated the weak anthropomorphic principle.

I don't understand why so many people who care about greenhouse gases (and so love renewable energy sources) refuse to acknowledge that producing the equipment that generates "renewable" energy required massive energy investment (that came from fossil fuels).

And so there are two payback periods: one financial and the other environmental. This person extended their environmental payback period to achieve "abundance".

I have no problem with that, but the fact that it's considered "free" on the very same dimension that they originally sought to optimize--when it's clearly not free--baffles me.

I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your comment.

I'd add, though, that the entire complex of metrics we use to define "productivity" were invented to quantify and guide the improvement of things that were a problem 100 years ago

Of course the second 50 years were worse than the first 50 years, because if the people working during the first 50 years accomplished anything, then all the easy wins were taken.

And the problems being solved changed. If your entire population has moved on from the problem of producing enough to meet material needs, then of course the work being done now will score poorly. You need to update your metrics as fast as your technology changes, and we just haven't done that.

Everything you've described above is a real added value, but it's not the kind of value that the old metrics were designed to measure.

Classic case of grading fish by their ability to climb trees.

This doesn't have to be true, though it is for many.

If you can find a version of your dreams that pays the rent and puts food on the table, you can still chase them.

Your financial metabolism does go up though, and the total universe of options shrinks. Ramen profitable doesn't mean actual ramen when you've got a spouse and kids.

I found that I've gotten much further in pursuing my dreams after having kids than before. Maybe it's just coincidence, but I feel a lot of the skills I had to learn to be the kind of parent I wanted to be translated almost 1 for 1 to improving my business outcomes.

Okay at the risk of being offensive, all the comments before mine are made by overly intellectual fools.

I'm not usually so insulting--but as a father of two, if my 3 year old and 1.5 year old could only read one book, it would have to be "Oh, the places you'll go" by Dr. Suess.

Sorry to stomp on Das Kapital and its ilk, but if you get only one book, I can't imagine a better first message to convey than the endless possibilities inherent in each of us.

The world is your oyster! Even if you're old and have wasted most of what you were given. Especially today, in some of the most amazing times that have ever existed (even if you didn't draw the long straw). Today is SO much better than most of history.

I see a lot of comments about firing and chaos, but the single most important point to me is "you manage processes and lead people".

So many managers get this wrong that just fixing this one thing probably gets most startups 60% of the way there.

So...this is the kind of spider that bit Peter Parker, right?

I have no idea of what's in this bill or not, but the very concept of "cost" in this case seems misleading.

What's the "cost" of not investing in our nation's infrastructure?

Back in high school (pre-internet), we'd sign up a particular friend every time we saw one of the information collection boxes for 24 hour fitness.

He could never figure out why they just wouldn't stop calling him

I have no idea what's allowed in HN recruiting terms, but I'm working at a company that is very much worried about making sure we deliver value, and we have several positions open.

I think one of the most profound intellectual insights I've had is that the myth of Prometheus was in a sense true, but described events so old--that we wouldn't event consider the "people" in the myth (the ones who received the gift of fire) as human.

It made me realize just how much of everything I have and know is inherited, and why traditional cultures revere their elders so. Especially when the world changes as slow as it used to, your elder taught you everything that mattered, and everything that mattered was handed down across millennia.

I work with data a lot, and my main issue with hedonic adjustment is that anytime I've ever made any such adjustment to "improve" a metric that wasn't purely mechanical (like a moving average or a ratio to another number), it's just one step away from making the number say anything I want it to.

The entire concept of "fixing" a metric relies on an inhuman level of self-truthfulness to not just lead you down the path of hearing only what you want to hear.

The point of metrics is that they should slap you in the face with objective reality, and improvement is just too subjective a concept.

I think this is just an obvious example of a much larger phenomenon. The trend over the past 40 years has been to put efficiency above all--but that means there is no excess capacity left to ensure robustness. Even "normal" variation in patterns can cause outsized disruptions, especially of the extreme edge of the range only occurs on a timeframe much longer than the optimization cycles used to achieve efficiency.

Efficiency also tends favor exactly one configuration over all others, so any changes that impact the viability of that one path leave the system with few, if any, alternatives--and those tend to have been atrophied.

In each case, the specifics can be quite different, but the general principal is that, in order to avoid such periods of supply chaos and constraint, someone has to be willing to pay a higher price so that more than just the lowest-cost suppliers can survive for when they're needed.

In most situations, the periodic supply crunch may actually be preferable to the consequences of subsidizing the existence of less efficient players. But the costs of efficiency are just as real as the costs of robustness, they just tend to be paid out via a very short period of large excess of profits, as opposed to a long period of slightly better margins.

I'm not sure if the areas under the curve end up being equal, but "efficiency" can certainly be overdone to the point of being inefficient over the full cycle.