privacypoller

well, this is the general premise of actions like habitat for humanity, to get the owner/occupier to invest sweat equity over purely financial.

It probably works but the cost (and scalability) can restrict how fast/far it can be applied...

this is similar to our experience in commercial properties as well, which removes the emotionally charged aspects of "taking advantage of poor people" - landscaping, interior finishings, painting, etc are all large costs in nice retail properties, and non existent in functional light industrial or trades-oriented buildings, yet rents are generally higher for the later.

or you could use the incentive of, you know, a longer more enjoyable life...

Well if you work in any sort of specialized field or at a level beyond entry, you've got some obvious bias in your sample.

If a degree or formal education has been used as a barrier to restrict access for any time only the strongest and most driven of the degree-less are going to persevere and make it.

This reads like a variation on the "many successful products started off looking like toys" post I've seen repeatedly over the years. The problem with this theme is extrapolating that all toy markets/products will grow into sustaining ecosystems.

You can and should consider toy "beachheads" into larger and growing markets, but the idea of targeting a small/limited market is flawed IMO.

The examples presented are successful in what where HUGE markets with limiting factors. No one debated the size of the retail book business when Amazon started, the challenge was how to pay for things over the internet. Ebay provided market-making for individuals to sell stuff - anyone remember classified ads and the buy & sell? That was big business for newspapers.

I feel like there's a lot of selection bias and revisionist history in this post.

McDonalds is a great example of this. Minimum wage is headed to $15/hr and they've replaced 80% of the front counter staff with self-order kiosks. Grocery stores can have one person running 4+ self-checkout counters at teh grocery store, and the "gig economy" is just companies skirting minimum wage and benefits via contractors. It's like my childhood paper route for 50 cents an hour all over again...

You must have grown up on the coast or the island, because I grew up in the interior and they never had trees like that outside of the temperate zones. The majority of the province has logging but it is not giant, old-growth ancients and never was.

Welcome to the new society - participation ribbons for all!

I'd put a lot more effort and expect far more value out of a private, vetted startup school then I would say, this response.

>> I'm not sure how the vetting process adds any value

What? The entire point of vetting is to increase the quality of the remaining pool. You can argue how successful they are at doing this, but the intent of the process is pretty clear.

>> The way I see it, the vetting is more or less random.

Don't let YC or anybody else define you, but if you'd got in initially I bet you'd take it as a positive signal data point.

I remember at my local K-Mart the commodore products were under the glass display cases with electronics like calculators. Then they'd have a couple of spinning wire racks for the discount ($9.99 and $19.99) shareware and games. Expensive stuff (from EA or Eypx) was under the glass and you had to find an employee willing to let a kid actually touch the box...

Except good and bad are relative, not absolute. In your case you seem to be comparing to a personal notion of "good", but it's still relative.

You also state that "not everything has to be binary" and then say something can be "worst", which is the same absolute you seem to be arguing against

It's seems highly unlikely that this is some long game by Google where they're going to "bring down the man from the inside"

chill - I don't think the GP actually suggesting we form vigilante squads to hunt down sidewalk-riding vesparados (see what I did there?)

I'm somewhat skeptical that we can draw any conclusions from the total vs. finished based on gross output. Writers are often described as either those who produce prodigiously and then cut mercilessly or those who refine every line before committing and do very little editing. I think programmers are similar. Metrics on the entire set are going to be muddled at best.

I would however agree that:

* those who produce & then cull generate a lot more than we see in the end product (due to those who do little editing, probably more than 10:1)

* writers/programmers get better at their craft, reducing the chaff to wheat ratio as they practice (like the original author saw in his work)

* well understood domains or themes are also more efficient (Michael Crichton didn't throw away 90% of his output; your average CRUD app doesn't either)

Finally, the written word tends to remain unchanged once committed (revisions tend to be minor in the overall scope), while code that is used changes dramatically. Long-running projects that are successful will see their application increase and evolve accordingly, so it's likely less valuable to track change over time if you're looking for total vs. finished effort metrics.