Emacs, Google this - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Malabarba/emacs-google-this <comment><USER2> Similarly, I use engine-mode ([https://github.com/hrs/engine- mode](https://github.com/hrs/engine-mode)) with Emacs, which allows you to set up basically any search engine. I use Google (on C-c / g) and Github (on C-c / h), but the engine-mode readme explains how to set it up with DuckDuckGo, stack overflow, etc.

It's configurable, but results can be displayed in eww, Emacs' built-in text- based web browser.

<comment><USER3> _Emacs ' built-in text-based web browser_

Is it time to update Zawinski's Law to "Every program attempts to expand until it can browse the web."

Not that Emacs isn't already one of the best (if not the number one) examples of "kitchen sink" programs...

<comment><USER4> Emacs gets a bad rap as a "kitchen sink" program, but it isn't really, any more than something like the Bourne shell or Python. The majority of Emacs' built-ins are things like an elisp interpreter, some text processing stuff, and system libraries. Conversely, most of the really interesting things you can do with Emacs, like web browsing (eww), git repo management (magit), terminal emulation (ansi-term), etc. are really just programs written in elisp. Some of them also happen to be distributed with Emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat idea. I've been using something like this with Acme from plan9port.

Acme's plumber lets the user customize behavior on a piece of text based on its context or a program that takes it as an argument.

A previous discussion about Acme on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533156)

<comment><USER6> Seems ages ago, but I wrote a post about its extensibility here: [http://www.mostlymaths.net/2013/03/extensibility- programming...](http://www.mostlymaths.net/2013/03/extensibility-programming- acme-text-editor.html)

I explained more or less how to use the plumber and endpoints, and gave a sample shell script and a reddit browser written in python you could plug into acme

<comment><USER5> oh yea, I remember your blog. As a matter of fact, it was one of few variable resources to learn about Acme's "API". Thanks for your work =)

<comment><USER6> Yes, there are very few resources about the "API", at least the original Acme/plumber papers are easy to read... And specially, the code is very straightforward in acme, the plumber or most of Plan9

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funny, just installed it two days ago after reading [http://melpa.org/#/selected](http://melpa.org/#/selected) page which hints at it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use Launchbar ([https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html](https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html)) for this. It works system wide, I just select the word or phrase and tap the Option key once. This brings up Launchbar with that text inputted, and then I can send that off to Google, Wikipedia, the system dictionary, YouTube, or anything else. I love it because instead of having different convoluted keybindings for every different type of search (C-c / g, C-c / h, etc.) I only have one, and then dispatch off a fuzzy frecency search that takes <2 letters for the result I want. So tap Alt, Tab, g, Enter searches Google, while Alt, Tab, w, Enter searches Wikipedia, etc. It does tons more with this same paradigm, I use it more than the command line, and can't recommend it enough to people who like to optimize their computer use.

<comment><USER3> Wait -- you need an app for this now? Ever since NEXTStep, Mac OS X has had the "Services" entry on the menu which can do things like this. Is that gone now?

<comment><USER9> Services are still there. Command-shift-L Googles the selection, though I don't know how standard this is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Haha, interesting -- i've had a similar functionality that i hacked into my window manager (XMonad) forever ago. I have an arbitrary keystroke that grabs the highlighted (x clipboard) text, raises a running firefox instance, and plugs it into a StartPage search :). Especially useful when a terminal command barfs an error.

<comment><USER11> This functionality is sort of now available in the package xmonad-contrib[0].

[0] [http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad- Actions-...](http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Actions- Search.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In a similar type of helpfulness (though the Google one could replace this in certain cases) helm-dash is an excellent plugin. You can bring up the helm- dash menu and search your Dash docs for functions by name, or search for the symbol at point. I have mine configured to open the docs in my browser, pointing to the local docs.

If you use OS X, something is broken in browse-url (I think) which causes anchors to not get opened correctly (annoying), so I added this[0] snippet to allow it. Not robust at all, but you get the idea. The "open -a" gives window focus to Chrome, mimicking the built in behavior.

[0] [https://gist.github.com/asummers/8b8dfabf0e25a86ce0c320b39ba...](https://gist.github.com/asummers/8b8dfabf0e25a86ce0c320b39ba5aa29)

<comment><USER13> For context, Dash appears to be a documentation browser for OS X APIs.

<comment><USER14> Dash [1] is an OS X app for browsing documentation of many different APIs.

[1]: [https://kapeli.com/dash](https://kapeli.com/dash)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Emacs is a great operating system – it lacks a good editor, though.

<comment><USER16> I love Emacs as an editor but there's also Evil mode [1] (and I'd disagree if you told me Vim isn't a good editor).

[1] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great! Thanks for this. I had considered writing something like that for ages. Sometimes error messages seem to be created only as a key for a search on Stackoverflow.

</comment><comment><USER18> Does Google's terms of use allow this?

<comment> Styx- Two questions. Why wouldn't they, and how could they tell?

<comment><USER18> I might have gotten this wrong, but it seems emacs open a browser window with the given query, then it's ok

I was thinking it would do a curl/wget on the url then show the results on emacs

<comment><USER3> I don't understand the practical difference between your two examlpes. What does a browser do, other than essentially "run curl on the URL and then show the results"

<comment><USER18> Technically of course, there's no difference, however: [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66357?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66357?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Emacs already has webjump which does pretty much the same thing but with arbitrary webpages.</comment>


Why Are Young Billionaires So Boring? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-09/why-are-young-billionaires-so-boring <comment><USER2> So....young billionaires are boring because they're mostly in the tech industry and haven't seen as much hardship as past billionaires (because they have early access to a computer) seems to be the main thesis.

But...

1) even the hardships by old billionaires seems to be temporary or brief, i.e. Warren Buffet finding a way to make thousands of dollars through his paper route at the age of only 15

2) The writer provides a single instance of a 'boring' young billionaire, being Mark Zuckerberg

3) The writer provides multiple counterpoint examples to the thesis in the text with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin as being tech billionaires that came from nothing.

I wouldn't be too surprised if there wasn't some truth to the thesis (although 'boring' is a loaded and subjective term to begin with), but the writer does a terrible job at defending their position.

I'm seeing a lot of these poorly written articles lately. Journalists have a preconceived point they want to make, make it in the headline, and then pretend they're writing something that supports it but not really supporting their thesis at all, counting on the fact that most people are only going to skim the article and not critically evaluate it so they can put their idea into people's heads 'Hey, young billionaires are all totes boring, right?", inception style.

<comment><USER3> >3) The writer provides multiple counterpoint examples to the thesis in the text with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sergey Brin as being tech billionaires that came from nothing.

They didn't come from nothing - Elon Musk was 'bullied' but was still fairly rich. Bezos may have been adopted, but his 'new' father was an engineer with Exxon, and he went to a relatively fancy high school ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Palmetto_High_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Palmetto_High_School) ), Brin is listed as an immigrant, but his father was professor of mathematics at University of Maryland, Brin also went to a reasonably fancy high school ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt_High_School_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt_High_School_\(Maryland\)) ). To me Brin, Bezos, Musk are far shots from the article's 'earlier' examples of people like Warren Buffett who grew up with unemployed parents.

<comment><USER4> Palmetto high school is one of the better public schools in Miami but Miami public school are pretty bad and under funded. Palmetto is far from an elite high schools where only rich people go.

<comment><USER5> Palmetto is the _highest_ achieving public school in Miami-Dade county. It's no Bill Gates's Lakeside School or Zuck's Exeter, but it's where everyone in Dade County public schools who cares about academic excellence sends their kids if they can afford the nearby real estate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The simple answer is...because they're all geeks who just got lucky.

They didn't need to work their backsides off to get to where they are. They just made a semi-decent product at the right time and money was thrown at them.

There are millions who just weren't there at the right time and probably far more flamboyant ones because the longer answer is the author is probably mixing up boring with stable.

<comment><USER7> > They didn't need to work their backsides off to get to where they are.

Isn't is possible that they got incredibly lucky AND worked their backsides off?

It should be clear that (1) abundant money and (2) abundant brains and (3) abundant luck are ALL necessary criteria for out-sized successes.

<comment><USER8> This. To whatever extent Mark Zuckerberg's success is attributable to luck, let's not forget that he's still probably one of the ten smartest people in the tech industry.

<comment><USER5> > he's still probably one of the ten smartest people in the tech industry.

That's absurd.

<comment><USER9> Is it? Depends how you define smart but Zuck has consistently made unconventional moves, very young, that turned out to be wildly correct.

He started by limiting Facebook to colleges so it could scale.

He was able to attract top class engineering talent to help him.

He entered a crowded market and obliterated all his competitors entirely through having a superior social networking product.

He retained control over his own company - avoiding the kind of agist outing that Larry Page and Sergey Brin experienced (i.e. investors who demanded "adult supervision" in the form of Eric Schmidt).

He convinced Instagram to sell, and made it profitable, apparently.

He convinced WhatsApp to sell and probably will make it profitable.

How many people in the tech industry can point to such a track record at all, let alone at Zuck's age? The guy doesn't only seriously understand tech. He also understands people.

<comment><USER8> He also made the right call by going all in on mobile at exactly the right time. And he has one of the best research teams in the industry.

For whatever missteps they've made, on the balance it's been absurdly well run.

I think he easily makes the list of the top ten smartest people in tech, along with Bezos, Scott Cook, Jonah Peretti, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This story is isn't really a story. The "evidence" the author cites that older billionaires are interesting is that William Buffet great up poor and had a paper route. Extrapolating from this, apparently, the author comes to the conclusion that other billionaires must be interesting.

But think, why is it that this article only talks about billionaires everyone already knows? Why not dig into some lesser known figures on the Forbes 500 and show how interesting they are?

Probably because, as the author mentions in passing, a lot of billionaires just inherited it. Which is about as boring a story as you can get.

<comment><USER11> >This story is isn't really a story. The "evidence" the author cites that older billionaires are interesting is that William Buffet great up poor and had a paper route. Extrapolating from this, apparently, the author comes to the conclusion that other billionaires must be interesting.

While that is certainly arguable there is a bit of truth there. Many of the billionaires/venture capital types got lucky. They were in the right place at the right time to leverage their private education and college education (in most cases anyway, sure some came from nothing) to develop an app or website that they sold for a mint then shotgunned little bits of their money at many other similar types making even more money off of a small percentage.

Most of them lack any 'real-world' experience. They've never wondered how to pay the light bill, they've never had to file personal bankruptcy, they've never worked manual labor jobs, many of them have probably never worked retail jobs. Most have never lost a parent in their youth or had a parent forced into retirement early via a disability, or had a disability themselves.

There's a lot of diversity that is missing from the money-holders in the Bay Area and similar locations. Don't get me wrong, some are doing awesome stuff through things like Effective Altruism but they are severely limited on their experiences.

I've dug graves for a living, my father died 12 days before my 13th birthday, my single mother had to retire early from disability after battling thyroid cancer and then having bone deterioration issues shortly thereafter. I was delivering papers 3 cents a piece around age 10 and working as many hours as I legally could by 16. Post my bankruptcy I was working as much as 90 hours a week some weeks for the better part of a year and didn't even break a gross of 6-figures. I have a vastly different set of experiences than Altman or Zuckerberg or Moskovitz and I still do, I make 32k a year after 12 years on the job, if you look at the S&P 500 returns since December of 09 someone with 3 million invested in any one of those years in a fund has made anywhere from 1.29x to 30.36x my annual gross income. I still have to worry about every cent I make, with a fraction of their wealth they can return from a fraction of their net worth. They live in an entirely different world than I do.

Hell if one of them had 10 million in SPYD the quarterly dividend last month would have grossed them 3.11x my annual gross income. When you have that much money, you have no real fears. You don't have to worry about saving for your future, you don't have to worry about the fact you might have to work until the day you die, you don't have to worry about what happens if you get sick and it ends up costing more than insurance will cover, you don't have the fear of 'how am I going to keep a roof over my head and eat' nagging at your heels.

When you never need to work another day in your life, I imagine it's pretty damn easy to settle into complacency and get boring. When you've never had the experience of hardship, you probably don't even think about such things. You worry about which charity you're going to give all your money to when you take the Bill & Melinda gates challenge. You look for the next Uber or chat app to throw a bunch of money at instead of thinking about ways you can make massive change in your life and those close to you.

I absolutely get where the article is coming from. A lack of experience of hardships can easily make you boring because you don't know what risk actually is.

Edit:

I'd even add that I think anyone that wants to make a difference in the world, that has a net worth at or exceeding say 15 million+ should hire personal advisors from various income brackets and backgrounds. Say someone on disability (compensated with a livable wage which would exceed ant disability benefit), someone right at the poverty line, someone lower middle class. The rest they're already surrounded by, solid middle class and higher.

I think they should regularly bounce ideas off of these people and every 5-10 years replace them with new individuals with more recent experiences. Use diversity and hardship as a way to improve your ability to influence the world for the better both through your personal and business endeavors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a long, meandering article with a pretty arbitrary notion of "self- made." It wants to lament both how old-school billionaires are getting rarer and decreasing class mobility. Both points are poorly made -- I read through it and it was a waste of time.

<comment><USER13> mostly generalizations based on a handful of examples

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know if we can say Zuckberg is boring compared to Buffet - it would seem to me an intraoffice messaging system is comparable to a paper route in terms of the required skills for either profession.

In regards to the need for opportunity, I fully agree with that - I was trying to teach myself to code at an early age, but the computer I was trying to teach myself QBASIC with didn't have enough memory to load the help file, and I didn't have access to any other resources growing up in a rural community in the late 90's. Reverse engineering Gorillas and Nibbles was beyond me without outside assistance, so it was wasn't until my late twenties that I was able to rediscover the passion of my youth and turn it into a (still growing) career.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not clear from the article:

\- What hardship / not-boring is (i.e. Buffet's father became a congressman when he was still in his formative years; but that doesn't count for Bezos because his adoptive father was well-off).

\- What proportion of "old" billionaires come from it

\- What proportion of "new" billionaires come from it

\- The difference between the two proportions, and whether it is significant. A brief mention is made of inherited wealth (which is arguably the most boring, by the author's definition) but isn't discussed further.

\- Why billionaires are used as the definition, given that exclusively analyzing outliers is probably a poor way to assess class mobility.

The article optimizes for words rather than clarity of thought.

</comment><comment><USER16> Did Warren Buffet really know more hardship than today's young billionaires?

His father - one of the few college educated of his time - was already a stockbroker when Warren Buffet was a kid, and a member of the US Congress when Warren Bufffet was 12. Warren Buffet is white, male and of the "greatest generation" that went on to rule what became the most powerful country on Earth.

I get it that he wasn't born rich, but he was middle class just as much as today's billionaires.

</comment><comment><USER17> Do other countries also have an obsession with rags to riches stories?

Our rags to riches archetype is steeped in the depression as well as transformation from a rural to city existence and the emergence of commerce (as opposed to sheer manufacturing) as the driving force.

We're not there any more, the economy has evolved and different things are required and opportunities now lie elsewhere. But that's not to say rags to riches has disappeared altogether, but it's not spearheading the economy—and that's not the US only. Look st where new billionaires come from in other places as well. That has changed too.

</comment><comment><USER18> > Just above them on the list in age is Sean Parker, now 38, who took up > programming early and interned at Zynga while he was still in high school.

Well done Bloomberg.

<comment><USER19> What's the issue here? That Parker interned for Pincus directly, but not necessary for Zynga? Or that he's more well known for his role at Napster a year or two later? Or...?

<comment><USER9> Zynga was founded in 2007. If Parker is 38 now then he'd have been at high school 20 years ago, when Zynga didn't exist. It's a basic error anyone who did two seconds of fact checking on Wikipedia would have caught.

<comment><USER19> So this sentence makes the same point, but accurately, right?

"Just above them on the list in age is Sean Parker, now 38, who took up programming early and interned for Mark Pincus (later CEO of Zynga) while he was still in high school."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think when historians seek to determine exactly _why_ America failed they will have a really hard time understanding the psychology at work. After launching a wholly illegal and unnecessary war abroad that slaughtered a million innocent people and only empowered its enemies at the cost of ~6 _trillion_ dollars, the country turned inward, becoming ever more isolationist, paranoid, fearful. Rather than save its middle class or, heck, even, rebuild its crumbling infrastructure, the elites set about dismantling democratic norms and looting the republic through regulatory capture and grossly irresponsible tax cuts.

But, and this is the key question, where were the people? Why didn't they act while their democracy was dismantled and the republic handed over to the wealthy?

Historians will have to conclude that there was a marvelous delusion at work; a blind faith that the very billionaires who had engineered one catastrophe after another were actually going to swoop in and save them. The people were literally on Facebook, "liking" and sharing propaganda stories like this that celebrate the very enemies of their democracy. Having lost all faith in their own government and themselves, the people now worried that their billionaire ruling class was... too boring.

</comment><comment><USER21> This story misses a lot of points about the disadvantage that persists. It's not that the wealth gap prevents people from buying computers. This hasn't been true in US for over a decade - one can buy a fully programming capable machine for $300-$400. Better yet, you can rent Amazon or Google servers for a few cents at a time. I never imagined that as a kid.

Where there is will, there is a way. My first experience with computers was in a relic of Soviet Science agency, when I was 5. Until 2000s, it was a struggle just to get equipment to connect to the internet (pulse phone lines burned out tone dial-up modems).

The advantage I had is that I knew about computers and the power they held. I knew that math was the gateway to programming. I didn't have funds for a fancy new IBM or Apple, but I had knowledge enough to make things work.

I still meet people today on a daily basis that regard computer work as some kind of borderline magic that they can never comprehend. This is the real disadvantage.

I mostly blame our education system and the teachers that tell kids it's ok to not understand, that they are just "not good" at something.

If we can solve this attitude that mediocrity is ok, we'll make a lot of peoples lives better.

<comment><USER22> your privilege is showing ;)

Seriously though. Lots of people are living pay check to pay check and drowning in payday loans just to get through the month. $300 isn't something that they have spare to blow on a computer. In this day and age there isn't even a need to - not when they can get a €100 Android phone that will give them internet access to do everything they want.

Of course... creating a business from a phone is all but impossible and this is why we don't see many people from poor backgrounds becoming tech billionaires.

<comment><USER9> That's an absurd theory.

Firstly, you can buy computers for $30 if you need to.

But even if you want to get a laptop instead, the difference between $300 and $100 is not significant if you care about saving for it. The idea that poor people can't afford a computer is delusional - I've been to regions of Mexico and China that are dirt poor and they have flat screen TVs. In fact I've encountered lots of TVs in places much poorer than the USA. If they can buy that they can buy a different kind of screen without a doubt. Poverty is not an excuse for a lack of computer knowledge these days. Back in the 1980's, sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's a clickbait headline. The story is more reasonable, about more billionaires coming from middle class or better backgrounds.

This is what you'd expect with there being more middle-class Americans than there used to be. I don't think that makes their stories boring.

I suspect availability bias. It misses billionaires not in the tech industry, like Oprah Winfrey. (Not young, but what are some others?)

<comment><USER24> How do you define middle class? I think people going to these elite universities either are rich(!), exceptionally talented or both.

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure anyone in the rural area of my childhood would say that Zuckerberg's parents (psychiatrist, and dentist) were just "middle-class". I'm not saying he isn't talented, but he did have a software developer tutor him privately in the 1990s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What about all those Saudi princes and oil heirs. They don't seem boring.

 _In some ways, it 's great to live in the age of the nerd. And it's tough to mourn the decline of Wall Street-style corporate machismo. But a poor kid growing up today may find it much harder to emulate the life path of someone like Zuckerberg, who coded an instant messaging system before hitting puberty, than that of even Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who grew up in Brooklyn housing projects and at one point served concessions at Yankee Stadium to earn extra money._

Becoming a billionaire is a pretty high bar for success. ..what I think there are only 1000 of them.

Making a few millions is much more doable and till quite successful,. Someone could have bought Facebook stock in 202-2013 and turned $20k into $200k. Or Bitcoin. Stuff like that which does not require a genius IQ to make money . There are opportunities to make money all around.

</comment><comment><USER26> > Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader—a family man, and a donor to noble > causes.

Facebook has a magic PR team.

<comment><USER27> Indeed, that jumped out at me as well. Whoever wrote that is either on the take or terribly uninformed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hardship is still a story that is told in the Startup world, because how else can you get talented young people grinding 120h/week on $40k with a high risk of the company going broke in the next 1-24 months?

</comment><comment><USER28> > a widening chasm between the rich and everyone else also presents political > problems

This is definitely something we're already seeing, with contempt between people of different educational levels, and the rising distrust between each other.

On a related point however, I'd just like to mention that nowadays, the Internet has made learning and information sooooo much more free and accessible. Although you have to have a computer in the first place, I think simple and cheap computers like chromebooks, or perhaps the smartphone you carry, allow you access to much more information than before.

Being in a family where our earnings are below the US poverty line in a high- cost area of residence, I am deeply appreciative of the wonderful people on the Internet that have opened up their information for free access, and especially to open-source for making programs and computing infinitely more accessible.

The problem with all this of course, is that you have to have a computer and a computing device in the first place. Internet can be very expensive, and can sometimes be easy for a lot of families to cut away because it may be perceived as unnecessary. The only solution I can think to that would be to provide free internet for everyone, and educate them on how to use it effectively beyond just the social media apps. Perhaps there are better ones?

</comment><comment><USER29> A lot of the older billionaires who had more "interesting" backgrounds grew up during the Great Depression. A more likely explanation then, is that we simply didn't have a Great Depression 30 years ago for today's young billionaires to have grown up during. Zuckerberg and other young billionaires grew up in the 80s when the economy was pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER30> Barriers to building wealth always existed. Large parts of the population had no chance to do what Buffet's dad did because of discrimination and other issues back then. Today it's a matter of the level of education you can afford to have access to.

The bootstrap mythos was always just that. There is typically a large degree of privilege and luck involved.

</comment><comment><USER31> The reason this is a bad article is because you can essentially the the exact opposite article, and it'd still be as valid.

"The problem with today's billionaires is that they're too zany. The older generation of billionaires is much more stable, perhaps even a little bit boring. Look at Buffet and Gates working on eradicating disease, a boring, detailed task that improves the lives people. Look at <some other older guy> donating to <medical research>.

Meanwhile today's younger generation feels a need to be in the spotlight, gather followers, construct outlandish personas and constantly perform for the crowd. Notice Musk's launching a car into Mars orbit, Bezos' outlandish moon colonization plans, Jack Dorsey's fashion forrays, Zuckerburg's flying drone internet, Larry Page's flying cars. Where is their civic duty, boring causes, etc etc?"

<comment><USER32> Just recently Musk offered help in the Tham Luang cave rescue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> At the end of the day, a rich shopkeeper is still a shopkeeper. Nothing against shopkeepers, but I see no reason for any one of them to be more interesting than another.

"Well, I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog."

\-- Mark Twain, "The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County"

<comment><USER34> Maybe because, besides being shopkeepers, they are also human beings?

<comment><USER33> Absolutely, my point being that there's no reason to expect them to be exceptional human beings.

<comment><USER34> There's no reason to expect more of them to be exceptional human beings than any other group. There's reason to expect _some_ of them to be exceptional, just like any other group.

But I suspect that I'm not really disagreeing with you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is there such thing as a canonical definition of a boring or interesting upbringing?

Looking at my own life, some may find it fascinating, and some may find it banal.

And when I compare it to my father's or some of my friends, it can seem really tame. Compared against other friends, it could be riveting.

But I don't think I've met a person with a boring upbringing. Everyone has a story, a list of hurts and triumphs that add the seasoning of their life experience.

Assuming that the rich don't have these, or that they're required to enumerate them to the press is its own form of myopic elitism.

And, I know plenty of people with interesting backgrounds who grew up to be a net drain on society.

What are we measuring here, and really, who cares?

</comment><comment><USER36> Dustin Moskovitz (number 5 at Facebook) and his wife Cari Tuna are very non- boring billionaires.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Moskovitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dustin_Moskovitz)

They started the Open Philanthropy Project, arguably the most exciting charitable organization on the planet.

[https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reaso...](https://ssir.org/articles/entry/giving_in_the_light_of_reason)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08795-0](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08795-0)

<comment><USER5> In the article, "boring" just means poor. Zuck has his sins, but anyone who thinks Zuck is "boring" is crazy. The guy learned Mandarin as an adult, to make a business deal. That's more hustle than selling hot dogs at the stadium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "unlike yesterday's titans, the newest of generation billionaires don't have histories likely to assuage popular resentment."

Basically sums up the article. It's just another class warfare screed, full of half truths and misdirection.

</comment><comment><USER8> The barriers to entry of learning to code are falling dramatically though. When I was a kid having a computer that cost several thousand dollars was table stakes, and even then in practice most of the kids who got beyond basics had parents who were also engineers.

These days a good enough computer costs less than $500, and in the last five years the free resources on the web have gotten good enough that anyone can teach themselves without needing any expensive classes. At most you might need another couple hundred dollars worth of books. At this point English literacy is probably a bigger barrier to entry than the monetary cost.

<comment><USER2> And you can get a refurbished Chromebook for as little as $110, walk to your nearest free Wi-Fi source (Starbucks, McDonalds, local library, whatever), and go to a site like REPL.it or Codecademy and start learning how to program.

Or get a used TI-85 for ~$30 and learn that way, which is how I learned the basics of programming, 25 years ago. Back then those cost about $250, adjusted for inflation. A Chromebook is much more versatile than that.

<comment><USER5> You can't walk into McDonald's and buy an introduction to Silicon Valley investors, and a depth chart of Harvard CS grads employees. Facebook was one of a dozen competing social networks, and they won largely because of Zuck's connections to capital and talent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We seem very insistent on the value of hardship sometimes. But many of these people didn't grow up as poorly as the spirit of the article would make it seem. Seems like most had reasonable parents.

Not sure if anything really changed, billionaires were always very rare so there is going to be lots of randomness involved and it seems we just have more straightforward markers for privilege now.

</comment><comment><USER39> The US is much richer than 80 years ago, so it's way more likely than billionaires come from comfortable middle-class families, of which there are many more now. If Warren Buffett or any of the others mentioned had been born the year Mark Zuckerberg was born, they would have probably enjoyed a similar upbringing.

</comment><comment><USER40> This article is ridiculous. Do you see many individuals in this wikipedia entry that started from a scrappy poor underclass? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#200...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#2000)

</comment><comment><USER27> > Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader

Pardon?

Zuckerberg is _anything_ but a moral leader, he's the polar opposite of a moral leader.

</comment><comment><USER41> The anodyne personas of young billionaires is probably bought, trained and presented by sophisticated handlers. I'll bet the private lives of these people are very different to the public image, which is really important in a very puritanical and judgmental western world. CF Zuckerberg

<comment><USER5> What do you think Zuck does in private? We learned about what Kalanick did, and Cuban and Trump make no secret of their lifestyles; but heard no such things about Zuck.

<comment><USER41> [https://www.npr.org/2016/10/25/499213698/whats-it-like-to- be...](https://www.npr.org/2016/10/25/499213698/whats-it-like-to-be-rich-ask- the-people-who-manage-billionaires-money)

[https://www.amazon.com/Capital-without-Borders-Managers- Perc...](https://www.amazon.com/Capital-without-Borders-Managers- Percent/dp/0674743806)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Key takeaway from this article: someone at Bloomberg had to write a story on a deadline.

<comment><USER43> Editor: We're short one tech article for our website, I need you to do it!

Intern: But I don't know anything about tech!

Editor: Neither do I, but I'm sure if we put our heads together we can come up with something good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Who cares about their boring pasts? I'm more concerned about their boring _present_. Say what you want about Elon Musk, but at least he's _up to something_. What's the point of having a billion dollars if not to develop wild ideas?

These guys are all like Samir in Office Space: "You know what I would do if I had a million dollars? I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities…"

As Michael responds, this is kind of missing the point.

Does Zuckerberg really think the best thing he could do with his life and $77 billion is to incrementally improve the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook? There's _nothing_ else he can think of to do?

<comment><USER5> You seem to be confusing Zuckerberg with Facebook, Inc, and ignoring that Musk is both 13 years older than Zuckerberg, and that bringing 4 billion people onto the internet is "interesting". Musk cares about sci-fi things like going to Mars by himself, and making luxury cars in the crowded EV market; Zuck cares about doing something interesting for billions of people on Earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So often people talk about social mobility as in people rising to the top, I'd be interested to read about those who descend; illness, bad luck, or they just don't want to be rich.

Any suggestions?

</comment><comment><USER46> Perhaps I'm just not disciplined enough with money, but I know if I had that type of cash I'd definitely be doing some really interesting things artistically to push the scope and scale of art today. I'd love to see art of 10x the scale we see at Burning Man in cities around the world. The LED "art" we see in many parts of Manhattan for example is just terrible application of a medium/technique.

I'd love to build parks and spaces for people to connect, experience joy and explore. Of course, I'd want to do participate in philanthropy too, but there's something to be said for commissioning the art to define the 21st century.

</comment><comment><USER47> Interesting how the article makes no note of the Collison brothers' and Stripe...that's a significant Valley success story that doesn't fit this mold

</comment><comment><USER48> So tech billionaires are boring and everyone else isn't? Name five non-tech billionaires who are more knowledgeable or interesting than Musk. Or Gates.

</comment><comment><USER49> They had no struggles, so maybe they're missing parts of life that let you quesion the status quo?

</comment><comment><USER50> you have to be boring to not want to just have fun past your first few millions.

elon musk is the exception, as he just made money doing fun things.</comment>


Paradox of tolerance - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance <comment><USER2> > _the society must be intolerant of intolerance_

This doesn't create a paradox unless you have an impractically broad category of "things that must be tolerated".

The US, via laws and (non-universal) social norms, has more narrowly defined the things that must be tolerated: things that cause no harm to others, where harm includes infringing on someone else's needs, rights, or safety.

Further, our government is more cautious and tolerant than our citizens must be. Citizens may treat people differently based on whether they're Nazis or not. The government may not.

This seems like the best and fairest system that's possible at the moment. The implementation is imperfect, of course.</comment>


Microsoft yanks Windows 8.1 after bricking issues - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/20/microsoft-yanks-windows-8-1-update-after-users-report-machine-bricking-boot-errors/

<comment><USER2> Windows _RT_ 8.1

<comment><USER3> Why have different names based on cpu architecture? Isn't that _way_ too inside baseball?

<comment><USER4> It is bizarre really. Apple managed to keep OSX running even in their transition from PowerPC to Intel, not sure why Microsoft decided to split Windows up quite so badly.

<comment><USER5> Apple did split OSX and iOS in much more profound ways than MS did with Windows & RT. But as usual lately, Microsoft did a terrible job with their branding, PR and product strategy, despite the underlying idea being great.

<comment><USER4> I would liken it more to the OSX PPC > Intel transition than between OSX > iOS, though both did involve porting a whole operating system to a new processor architecture. In the case of iOS, Apple had a fresh start so there was no need for inter-compatibility between mobile and desktop apps, so no transition layer was ever created. For PPC > Intel, they created Rosetta (an emulation layer that allowed the older apps to run) in order to smooth the transition, and make it somewhat transparent to the user. This was a win by all measures, users got a completely different underlying system that was faster and more power efficient, and they never had to think about it; that's not to say it wasn't slow, but it wasn't something you had to think about.

Microsoft really should have taken the route Apple did, it's the same OS on new hardware that needs an emulation layer to run old apps- and that's alright until there's native builds of the most common suite. The fact that it was barely ever mentioned in Apple's transition says that it worked, and the constant confusion RT causes shows that Microsofts didn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft should get their act together, really. I recently bought Windows 8 from Microsoft Store online for $150 and installed it on my iMac. Turns out, after installation, that it's just an update package and can't be properly activated with the included activation code (the ISO is full Windows). Now, I can't even activate it because it has 'bricked itself' in an boot/update loop of some sort. What is this nonsense Microsoft?</comment>


NACHA Same-Day ACH Gets Federal Reserve Support - <AUTHOR> http://www.pymnts.com/news/2015/federal-reserve-backs-nachas-same-day-ach/ <comment><AUTHOR> Starting Sep 2016. This should help create some interesting payment startups.</comment>


Browse the Hacker News front-page from inside Sublime - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dotty/HackerNews-SublimeTextPlugin

<comment><USER2> Just downloaded this, works really well! Nice job. Now I can procrastinate while I am working but only I'm not actually working and it still appears as though I am working because I've got Sublime open.</comment>


The Batman job offer - <AUTHOR> https://raed.it/blog/batman-aint-got-shit-on-me/ <comment><USER2> Finally a position where I can leverage my perfect command of Pascal, VHDL, and API to write content newsletters and maximize SEO visibility and acquisition.

And it's actually a paid role, too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't forget CSS, your VHDL would look ugly without that sweet CSS

<comment><USER3> Somewhere, a lonely nerd feels like this is the perfect match for his passion for VHDL/CSS. :) Or maybe he's a Verilog guy who will keep looking. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Free Contact Details in LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> https://contactz.io <comment><USER3> So, if I have a phone number on my profile which I have willingly shared to my connections but specifically not to anyone I'm not connected with - <USER2> product solicits my connections to share _my_ phone number with other people who are also not my connections?

A big no thanks from me, seems pretty damn invasive.

I also don't see a privacy policy on your page? Would you mind laying out what sort of data you are collecting and what you do with it? Are you selling this data to other firms?

Just a heads up, if you collect personal information (you do), you are required by law to have a privacy policy. Assuming you serve customers in California, EEA, Canada, and other places - you may want to abide by the requirements set out (CalOPPA, COPPA, GDPR)

[https://www.privacypolicies.com/blog/privacy-policies- legall...](https://www.privacypolicies.com/blog/privacy-policies-legally- required/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Join the Contactz business network and have other members share their contacts with you. Install a free Chrome Extension and see email and phone number near many of your LinkedIn search results.</comment>


No One Knows What They're Doing (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://jangosteve.com/post/380926251/no-one-knows-what-theyre-doing <comment><USER2> I feel like Richard Feynman always had a good take on this:

"I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell."

<comment><USER3> So what analogs can we draw between the universe and the commercial web? How is it that we don't know what we're doing when working with documented and supported tools? It's almost like some kind of separation of duties to keep us blind to the big picture. God must really hate us!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey everyone, crazy to see my article posted here again 4 years later (I can't believe it's been 4 years since I wrote that). I'm glad it's still relevant to people.

If this were one of my open source projects or programming articles, I'd say, "Let me know if you have any questions." But I'm not sure I could answer anyone's questions on this subject. I'll sure try though if you do have any.

<comment><USER5> I see what you did there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "types of knowledge" sounds like Donald Rumsfeld quote who was derided for speaking of the concept since 2002 and I'm sure before then even. "known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns)

<comment><USER7> As much as I didn't care for most of the entire Bush administration it always bothered me that he was made fun of for that quote since it is actually incredibly profound (if not particularly original).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What about shit you don't know you know? There are many things we do and know that we don't understand. Very often it doesn't matter. A child does not need to be aware that their finger is narrower than their nostril to use one upon the other.

If you wait until all the studies are complete before trying to do something, you will never take action. Life is more about trial and error than knowing how everything is known.

<comment><USER9> In AI this is a little bit known as the rationality paradox. People generally agree that the following formula is the definition of acting rationally :

argmax(sum(probability_of_event * utility_of_event) given action)

So do you open a door ? There could be a bear behind the door that will eat you if you open the door. The probability of that is not zero (and even if it was, it would not matter). The utility of that is -inf. The utility of not opening the door is also -inf. There could be a bear behind you and the door could be your only way to safety.

So a rational actor would never do anything at all, as the rational function would never converge.

Ergo, nobody and nothing is rational (as soon as the world has a certain minimal level of complexity).

There are various suggestions given out of this conundrum, but none are even mildly satisfying. For example, one could claim that you don't know those odds, so you don't care. But that is the same as saying you can't really be rational, so it's not a solution.

<comment><USER10> In "The Man Who mistook His Wife for a Hat" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_fo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat)), a book on mental disorders, there is a case of a man who can only make rational decisions. He is unable to function, he can't get past what to wear or what to eat in the morning. Even this simplest decisions take him hours.

<comment><USER11> The story you mention may indeed appear in an Oliver Sacks book (I've read several, and the story is familiar to me) but it doesn't seem to be in _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_ , according to the list in the article you linked.

<comment><USER10> The book has 24 essays, they aren't all listed in the Wiki page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> An interesting addendum to Rumsfeld's categorization of knowledge is Slavoj Zizek's notion of the unknown known:

What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns," the things we don't know that we know-which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns," that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the "unknown knowns" \- the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values."

[http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm](http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm)

I agree with Zizek's assessment that unknown knowns are even more dangerous than unknown unknowns.

</comment><comment><USER13> Previous HN discussion: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121775](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121775)

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminded me of what my grad advisor used to say -

If you ask an undergrad student, the answer is always a "yes" or a "no".

If you ask a master's student, the answer is always a "may be".

If you ask a doctoral student, the answer is always "i don't know".

</comment><comment><USER15> While this is often true, I can't accept it as being as universal as claimed. Many projects, with visible success, pretty clearly require someone that knows what they're doing, or else they will noticeably fail. And they happen in environments that don't care how good your model is, and throw all kinds of kinks in your plan. Buildings, aircraft, software.

Nor does it ever connect the "recognition of what you don't know" ability back to the nurse's situation: how does that account for why she got such praise? What observable shortcomings did the other students have, and she lack, that are connected to the unknown-unknown problem?

<comment><USER4> I'll be honest, that article was written by someone not long out of college (me). In that situation, I'd say it's more true then, than when you get older and have a more experienced peer group. But of course, that more experienced peer group also tends to be much humbler and aware of their shortcomings as well, so I'd say the article still addresses that.

The way it was meant to be brought back around to the nurse's situation was that, she actually was really good at what she was doing for her level of experience and progression through schooling, despite knowing that she had a long way left to go. As to what observable shortcomings other students had compared to her, I cannot say. I wasn't in the class or at work with her. The point was that her professors and supervisors, all of which gave her praise, were probably better able to see that than she was, given their experience and level of context within the field of nursing and teaching.

The real issue, though, was in the cognitive dissonance between what she felt she was capable of and what others knew her to be capable of. This was an attempt to give at least some small explanation for that cognitive dissonance. It is possible to know more than anyone else about a given subject, and still know practically nothing about it compared to the amount of information about that subject contained within all of mankind or even the universe.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for taking the time to reply to these questions.

>But of course, that more experienced peer group also tends to be much humbler and aware of their shortcomings as well, so I'd say the article still addresses that.

I have to disagree: however humble they might be, someone on the projects I mentioned has to have a deep enough understanding to know how to handle the cornucopia of problems that can derail it: unexpected soil problems, dependencies not working like intended, aerodynamic lift not being as high as the model.

I compare it to my understanding of long multiplication, which I've tested against students new to it. "How do you do it?" Here's how. Why is it done that way? Well it's an expansion of this formula. "Why in this order?" If you don't do it that way, you're actually multiplying these other numbers; you have to correct for it like so. "What if I forget some of the entries in the multiplication table?" Then here's how you multiply single digit numbers; here's multiplication as a version of addition. "What if I forget how to add?" Break out the number line, let's review.

That kind of understanding is revealed in any large-scale, finished, working product.

>The way it was meant to be brought back around to the nurse's situation was that, she actually was really good at what she was doing for her level of experience and progression through schooling, despite knowing that she had a long way left to go. As to what observable shortcomings other students had compared to her, I cannot say.

Then I don't understand how this was supposed to reassure her; if I offered an explanation, I would test its implications against the rest of the scenario: is there a way overconfidence manifests in the typical student? Is she returning the (correct answer) "I'd have to ask someone" more often than the other students? As it stands, you've just listed something that might be consistent.

Remember, the problem is not that "she was good for her level of experience"; the problem was that "she was called the best student they'd ever had".

(I note with some irony that, for you claim to know general competence levels just after college is _itself_ seemingly outside your knowns!)

<comment><USER4> > I have to disagree: however humble they might be, someone on the projects I > mentioned has to have a deep enough understanding to know how to handle the > cornucopia of problems that can derail it

I agree with what you said, which is why I have a hard time understanding what exactly you disagree with. Are you saying that more experienced people tend to be less aware of their shortcomings? Or maybe we're taking humble to mean two different things? I'm using "humble" in the "not arrogant" sense, not the "feeling inferior" sense.

I think you can be confident in your abilities while still being humble about them, and that's really what I meant by it when referring to the more experienced peer group. In fact, the most experienced people usually have an innate sense of confidence that allows them to avoid having to constantly tell people "I know what I'm doing". They don't have to tell people, because they can show it. That's the level of humbleness (or modesty may be a better word) that I was referring to.

> Then I don't understand how this was supposed to reassure her; if I offered > an explanation, I would test its implications against the rest of the > scenario:

That is generally the next step. You make observations, develop theories to explain the observations in a consistent manner, and then devise new tests to test those theories. This post was simply at the "developing a theory" step.

> (I note with some irony that, for you claim to know general competence > levels just after college is itself seemingly outside your knowns!)

The irony is not lost on me. To be fair though, I didn't and still don't claim to "know" general competence levels, I just blogged my thoughts. Of course I could have littered my post with all sorts of qualifiers like "maybe", "perhaps", "sometimes", and "I think", but that doesn't make for effective writing. The post was not written or meant to be read in a vacuum. Context is important.

<comment><USER15> >I agree with what you said, which is why I have a hard time understanding what exactly you disagree with

The "No one knows what they're doing" bit. The people on those projects -- they know what they're doing.

<comment><USER4> Oh. Yeah, it was really meant to be taken as "No one knows what they're doing [all or even most] of the time."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see no mention of the closely related four stages of competence:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence#The_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence#The_four_stages)

<comment><USER4> I hadn't seen that before. Having just read through the wikipedia article, I'd say that my post is less about the theoretical categories themselves and more about people's inability to distinguish how their own knowledge is divided between those categories in their own minds, versus how it's divided in others. But yes, that's extremely relevant and awesome, thanks for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't know if I agree with this. The author might be incorrectly projecting his feelings onto other people. There are a fair number of people in the world who know _exactly_ what they're doing.

<comment><USER18> This falls under the "shit you know you don't know" category.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. Two of the most powerful things you can learn in life are "There's so much more to learn" and "Nobody knows what they're doing".

Early in life you get the impression that parents know everything, then it's teachers, then it's bosses. When in fact they don't.

We're not robots with perfect abilities, understanding that everyone to a degree doesn't know what they're doing gives you a different outlook on the world.

Note, that doesn't mean everybody is incompetent.

<comment><USER17> >"Nobody knows what they're doing".

How can you possibly make this assertion? I have a direct counterexample; _I_ know what I'm doing. There's a lot of stuff I don't know, but I would not describe my state of being as "not knowing what I'm doing".

>everyone to a degree doesn't know what they're doing

This is very different from "Nobody knows what they're doing". Just because no one has a perfectly clear idea of everything doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.

<comment><USER4> You are absolutely right about the title. Though, I should probably clarify, the more accurate title would be "Nobody knows what they're doing all the time." That was the intent when I wrote it, but it could be argued that if the title weren't a bit sensationalist, we may not be having this meaningful discussion with points and counterpoints on HN right now.

EDIT: Actually "all the time" doesn't quite cover it, I'd say it's "most of the time".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Donald Rumsfield summed this up nicely:

> _There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are > known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don 't > know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know > we don't know._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns)

<comment><USER21> It's quoted in the article, and the article draws a good rationale for why our own confidence shrinks in the face of awkward self-awareness.

Nevertheless, whenever I feel like I'm confronting bullshit artistry on a profound and deliberate scale, Donald Rumsfeld is my yard stick, and a distorted image of his smirking face is conjured in my mind's eye, and replaces the bullshit artist's face, and that quote rings through my head with lots of reverb and phased, flanged echo.

The next unit of measurement in scales of bullshit artistry, in terms of greater precision and smaller units, is Bill Clinton's debate regarding the meaning of "is":

      It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If
      the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is
      not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that
      was a completely true statement.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton#In...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Bill_Clinton#Independent_counsel_investigation)

The conversion ratio between Rumsfelds and Clinton-Lewinskies is 1 Rumsfeld = 1 Mega-Clinton-Lewinsky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think when talking about confidence or success these categories of knowledge don't account for the whole picture.

Knowledge isn't the only thing required to be successful at something, it doesn't account for skills. When I say skills I mean something that requires training over time to be able to do.

I know I don't know how to balance on a rope, if I learned successful methods for balancing on a rope I still probably wouldn't be able to do it. I wouldn't be successful until I put in the hours to dig those deep trenches between feedback and response. I might know how to finger a chord on a guitar, kick a soccer ball or make a compelling argument but I probably won't be very good at those things until I practice them

Maybe my interpretation of the word 'know' is too narrow but it seems like these 'learned skills' would fall under a seperate category of things that you can only get better at with experience.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Expose your Ignorance" is a phrase I like from the book _Apprenticeship Patterns_. I think it cuts two ways: admitting to yourself what you don't know, and admitting to the people around you that you don't know. It's hard enough to admit to yourself that you're falling short and need to dig in and come to a better understanding of a subject, but it's way more discomfiting to confess this to your team/clients (especially if you're afraid they won't be receptive).

For this reason, I've come to love the phrase "developer". I am someone who develops, and keeps developing. I am not a fixed point. And this is why you hire me. [See Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset]

</comment><comment><USER24> This is amazing...I've been trying to explain this concept for a long time, but have never come to even a fraction of the eloquence of this author.

<comment><USER25> Yep, and it seems the more experienced they are, the more likely they are to experience this. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks kind the Socratic way of perceived knowledge: "You are not able to judge me, because I know I don't know shit, while you don't know you don't know shit (yet) and I'm here to prove to you that you really don't know shit".

But of course Steve's analysis is easier to apprehend.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well said. I am always very uneasy if I feel I am the most knowledgeable guy in the room -- because I know I don't know even a small fraction of what is known. Now I know why I feel uneasy -- because I am in a dangerous setting.

<comment><USER28> I often say that if you think you're the smartest person in the room, you probably aren't. And if you actually _are_ the smartest person in the room, you need to be in a better room.

<comment><USER29> That implies that someone always is the smartest, and that person always needs a better room. If they're so smart, how come they're in crap rooms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> great read, thanks for sharing.

Reminds me of Taleb's concept of epistemic arrogance, which is more prevalant than not among educated people in my experience.

never underestimate the vastness of what we don't know that we don't know.

</comment><comment><USER31> _Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you're doing?_

No. I have to know years worth of mountains worth of knowledge and skills to get even the slightest nod from anybody. Most software people don't give away praise for free.

 _Do you feel like a fraud...?_

No. I'm a good programmer, my job is to program things, and my employers seem to have agreed. Like many people here, I've made lots of shit that works, and made lots of customers happy.

Shit you don't know you don't know only matters when it matters. And when it starts to matter, it moves into the shit you know you don't know category, and hopefully with some effort into the shit you know category.

A single human being can't know much, so out of necessity we act like a cache. We also tend to work in teams. I frequently encounter problems I can't solve, that a 3-minute back-and-forth discussion with the two nearest coworkers does solve.</comment>


How does increased stock price affect capital - <AUTHOR> For companies with high growth stock (Netflix, Amazon or Tesla), does the increasing stock price mean they have access to cheaper capital? I've seen this mentioned in the news, but I'm confused how that works <comment><USER2> An oversimplified explanation would possibly go like this:

Capital structure (i.e. proportion of debt and equity) is irrelevant in frictionless markets ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theorem)).

That being assumed, management of a company can raise capital by either issuing new shares (equity) or by taking on debt. Given that management is rational, they would issue new stocks whenever they believe the stock price is slightly over-valued by the market and always take on debt if they think the opposite.

But in reality, companies cannot always issue new shares. However, potential creditors know the company could issue shares instead of taking their debt. So, they will lower their interest offer.

Does that make sense somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> It does, thanks. So what would be a simple way to find out if Amazon, Tesla etc are getting capital. Would it be digging through their quarterly prospectus?

<comment><USER2> I guess so, yes. I believe that a significant proportion of their debt is not traded on the bonds market but agreed upon privately, e.g. with their banks. However, it must be found in their balance sheets.

<comment><USER3> Amazon's balance sheet lists $7.7b of long term debt. This increased by $5b between 2013-12 and 2014-12 [1].

The total number of Amazon shares has been slightly increasing over the last 3 years [2]. I wonder why that is? If Amazon management believes their stock price is overvalued, it could make sense to issue new shares to take advantage of that.

[1] [http://financials.morningstar.com/balance- sheet/bs.html?t=AM...](http://financials.morningstar.com/balance- sheet/bs.html?t=AMZN)

[2] [http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=AMZN](http://financials.morningstar.com/ratios/r.html?t=AMZN)

<comment><USER4> Bear in mind that prominent stocks like Amazon don't trade in their value, they trade on perceived future value and settle where that perceived value crosses with the markets risk tolerance.

Amazon has, and will continue, upward because they are capable of breaking into new markets at scale. Unlike Netflix which is quickly approaching market saturation, Amazon has virtually unbounded potential to invade untouched markets as they are currently doing with postal and produce. The result is that we can't see where Amazon's revenue will finally plateau. What we do know is that AWS profits make them extremely resilliant to taking losses in these other markets but at the same time highly vulnerable to competition from other providers like Google.

Fyi google has the better product, but it's better because it puts the kind of people who decide which to use out of work. So industry hasn't flipped yet. When they do expect Amazon to take a big hit.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  Collapsing HN comments? - <AUTHOR>

Is this possible on HN, or do you need a browser extensions/script to do it?  I'm thinking of writing a GM script to do so but I'm hoping someone else has beaten me to it because knowing myself I'd probably just get 75% through it then lose interest. <comment><USER2> Please do!</comment>


Magic sketchpad - <AUTHOR> https://magic-sketchpad.glitch.me <comment><USER2> Why does it insist on turning penis drawings into mice? It's like school again, I draw one thing in a notebook of a friend and he turns it into mouse</comment>


AngelList New Feature: Invest Online - <AUTHOR> https://angel.co/invest

<comment><USER3> Makes you appreciate the power of startups to drive innovation - <USER2> FundersClub launching half a year ago it's unlikely Angellist would have seen this as anything but a crazy idea full of legal thorns, with no pressure to innovate past their success.

Either way, fantastic to see innovators benefit all around from more access to more capital.

<comment><USER4> Naval and the angel list team were some of the people leading the fight to get the JOBS act passed in washington.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great news! There's an amazing range of funding routes now available to startups. I'm currently considering using <http://www.seedrs.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> There doesn't seem to be much information for non-accredited people wanting to invest. Is this only open to existing investors?

Edit: found more info here [http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/19/angellist-now- gives-smaller...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/19/angellist-now-gives- smaller-investors-a-piece-of-the-action-with-launch-of-angellist-invest/)

<comment><USER7> It's open only to accredited investors, because it is legally risky to accept investments from non-accredited strangers. It's commonly accepted practice to raise friends-and-family money from your existing network, but if one of those investors can claim their contact with you came from a solicitation to invest and not from some preexisting relationship, they can present legal risks down the line.

It's my vague understanding that the real issue here is "weird" non-accredited investors make the legal part of raising a VC round much harder.

<comment><USER8> Here's the AngelList take on why you want to avoid general solicitation and non-accredited investors <https://angel.co/help/regulations#gs>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best part of FundersClub is a clean cap table because all the small investors are grouped together. Will this be the same? If I understand their partnership with SecondMarket, my guess would be no.

Any more data on this?

<comment><USER8> The small investors are grouped together into a fund. So the startup only sees one new entry on the cap table. The overhead is the same as adding a single large investor to the round.

More details here <http://angel.co/help/invest>.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! This sounds great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome. I expect they will open to non-accredited investors once the regulations from the JOBS act are clarified and enacted. All in all, it's great to see choices for getting funded. Though I doubt the old-line VC firms welcome potential disruption. [AH, First Round, etc. are in the new vanguard, and are definitely _not_ old-line]

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems like a desperate, almost pathetic, attempt to copy fundersclub down to the exact numbers.

<comment><USER12> And since when is competition a bad thing ?

<comment><USER11> Competition is a good thing, obvious copying is lame.

<comment><USER13> No, it's not. It's a source of real revenue which most startups(including mine and yours) can only dream of.

<comment><USER11> Um, speak for yourself. And how exactly is this "revenue"? It's more like taking the obligations of a lot of naive investors' money, the kind of money you should normally ask of your friends and family (read mom and dad).

<comment><USER14> Your mom and dad (and the rest of your network) are almost certainly "unaccredited" investors. Soliciting their money will complicate the hell out of any subsequent fundraising, and exposes you to significant legal risk down the road.

<comment><USER15> There are legal exceptions for unaccredited family members. Soliciting their money does not complicate subsequent fundraising at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Protopiper: physically sketching room-sized objects at actual scale - <AUTHOR> http://robertkovax.com/protopiper-physically-sketching-room-sized-objects-at-actual-scale <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10482068)</comment>


Venture Firms Fret as Y Combinator Soars - <AUTHOR> http://news.genius.com/Eric-newcomer-venture-firms-fret-as-y-combinator-soars-annotated <comment><USER2> Y Combinator is in itself a venture capital firm whose genius has been to use innovative ways to capture and control deal flow for premiere startup ventures.

Back in the day, top VCs would not be caught dead investing in an early stage seed funding. It was considered undignified. These were the firms that managed the best IPOs, that spawned the greatest tech ventures, that brought a value- add to their portfolio companies that was beyond measure as they would bring their formidable network of contacts into play for the benefit of their companies. And in return for their conferring such benefits on the ventures they expected to control things, or at least to have a formidable say in how things went. Yes, at the time of a successful IPO, they would convert to common stock just like the rest of the equity holders (though even there usually with the privilege of exercising registration rights) but before that they could and would exert liquidation preferences, conversion privileges, and control mechanisms in ways that left no doubt that they had the final say on most everything. And, if their interests clashed with those of the founders, it was not the investors who suffered. Top VCs valued their reputations and would tend to play it straight in not engaging in overt founder abuse. Yet the institutional mechanisms often gave them overwhelming leverage that left founders at a severe disadvantage: 2x, 3x, or higher liquidation preferences, full ratchet conversion adjustments on down rounds, etc. Lower-tier VCs went further and engaged in overt abuse on some occasions, to the point where the name "VC" often would make founders shudder.

Before YC, the only investors who actually took only common stock for their money were unsophisticated friends and family investors who didn't even know what preferred stock was. When YC came along, it took only common stock for its investment. Investors historically would look for ways to gain clout and squeeze founders through tactics such as 2x or 3x liquidation preferences in preferred stock rights, through lopsided conversion privileges used to wipe out founder interests in down rounds, through control tactics by which founders were put in defenseless positions and booted only to have the bulk of their founders' stock bought back at forfeiture rates, etc., etc. The persons being abused in such cases were primarily founders but the tactics wound up destroying or seriously compromising the interests of anyone who held common stock in such a venture. That sort of thing could prove very effective from an investor perspective when founders had no choice but to submit if they wanted the investors' money.

So founders basically had to come hat in hand to the VCs and play the game strictly by their rules, which amounted to the rules of a stacked deck. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Money does indeed talk and, if founders wanted to take several million dollars as an investment from someone, they did what was needed to satisfy the investor requirements as they found them.

Y Combinator is an "accelerator" and all of that but what it mainly is is a VC firm that made the critical decision to align its interests with those of the founders right from the start.

So, out the window went the idea that a dignified VC would not soil its hands with a seed-stage investment. YC invested right from the start.

Out the window went the idea that a VC would take only preferred stock for its interest. YC took only common.

Out the window went the idea that a VC had to control the board, or at least had to have shared control, or at a minimum at least one board seat. YC left the board in the hands of the founders.

These innovations by themselves would likely have changed nothing but YC also built an incredible following of top founders inspired by Paul Graham and others who sought to build a network structure characterized by the highest level of talent. This too worked and YC companies thus got access to a rich treasure trove of resources that gave a value-add far exceeding that offered by a traditional VC firm. This in turn established YC as an _omnium gatherum_ of much of what was and is best in the startup world.

With its interests largely aligned with the interests of founders, and with a formidable array of top founders populating its ranks, YC has set rules and norms for startup investing to which traditional VCs have had to yield if they wanted to partake in the opportunities. These have consisted of a shaking up of all the old assumptions of what VCs did or could do, with the result that top VCs today will invest early and often in funding for startups right out the gate, that top VCs will invest in convertible notes and convertible securities (SAFEs) in ways that were once unthinkable, and, of late, that top VCs (and other investors) will have to abide by some founder-friendly rules about whether or not they are permitted to use high-pressure tactics in structuring their offers, in whether or not the are permitted to yank term sheets without consequence, and in many other areas as well.

I have no doubt that YC did all this for its own interests as well as for a broader goal of using its investments to further its idea of the startup ideal. I also have no doubt that this phenomenon is fueled by broader developments by which founders are now well-connected and able to know and understand what is going on in ways that founders in, say, the 1990s had no clue about. None of it would have worked otherwise. Yet, founders are now well-connected, they know a sucker-deal when they see it, and they know value when they see it.

YC does not offer value for everyone. Many founders have no desire to give up 7% of their company for a little cash and access to the YC network. But, for many (and especially younger) founders, the value offered is phenomenal. Hence, the huge YC draw of top-talented founders. And that is where the action is. If the traditional VCs want a part of that, they perforce must conform to YC's expectations and founder-friendly rules. And they have done so.

Top VCs will continue to have enormous clout. But it is no longer lopsided the way it was a decade ago and before. It is now far more balanced and one of the big reasons is that a different style of venture firm in the form of YC came along to set new standards that now govern a big part of how the game is played. YC rethought the rules of being a VC and did it radically differently. It has paid off. The venture business will never be the same again.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what happens when (as an industry) you don't treat people well, when you feel have the power to do as you please. Let me explain: pre-Ycombinator a lot of VCs would routinely either abuse or just simply ignore a lot of entrepreneurs. Someone can correct me but YC was a response to that. One reason everyone flocks to YC is because everyone knows that YC is fair and trustworthy. That's not the case anywhere else (at least back then).

<comment><USER4> Actually angel investing was the response to that, individuals who weren't wealthy enough to join a fund and become an LP but had enough disposable assets that if they put $50,000 - $1M at risk it wouldn't ruin their retirement if they lost it all.

One of the things that I haven't read about is what is the 'YC' of movies? In many ways the money in Hollywood is there but there isn't nearly the organization like there is at startup incubators. There are so many corollaries between the two environments I would expect something between the studios and Kickstarter to have emerged by now.

<comment><USER5> Individuals have a lot of sway in Hollywood. It's all star power. Money and talent flock to the stars, and by stars I include producers, writers and directors in addition to actors and actresses. They make money and are prestigious to work with, especially if the movie is successful. In addition to individual behavior there are also the various unions like the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild of America and organizations like the MPAA and AMPAS and in television ATAS which all wield considerable influence and money. Though it is TV and not movies, Netflix succeeded because it played by their rules.

You can't just disrupt this because it's more than wealth, it's a culture that has been around many generations now and created film making what it is today. There's an incredible gravitational well that sucks all the incredible skill and talent found in the world right into Hollywood. It's not going anywhere.

<comment><USER4> You could argue its all 'star power' in the valley too, money and talent do seem to follow people who have a couple of big exits on their resume. One of the differences though is the artistic element. Engineering startups is an 'art' but it isn't the kind that brings out the 'artist temperament' as some refer to it.

I don't have enough real knowledge about how that gets done so I can't really say if such a thing could happen, but I do see a lot of similarities between Bay Area culture and So Cal culture which are both warped a bit by their respective economic engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think traditional VC firms are competing with YC at all.

There are two "black holes" in venture capital right now. One black hole is YC + angel investment. When you're getting started, it's pretty much standard practice to go through YC and/or raise seed capital from angels to get your startup off the ground.

The other black hole are a few top VC firms (off the top of my head, a16z and Sequoia). These firms pretty much figured out that it's impossible to predict success, so they're putting large amounts of capital into companies that are already succeeding. They've essentially eliminated guessing; they can get away with it because they established themselves as _the_ VC firms you go to if your company is succeeding (so they have no issues with deal flow).

Then there are traditional VC firms in the middle, who can actually operate by perpetually losing money due to a slightly weird wider financial climate and the incentives of their LPs (see [http://pmarchive.com/truth_about_vcs_part1.html](http://pmarchive.com/truth_about_vcs_part1.html), [http://pmarchive.com/truth_about_vcs_part2.html](http://pmarchive.com/truth_about_vcs_part2.html), [http://pmarchive.com/truth_about_vcs_part3.html](http://pmarchive.com/truth_about_vcs_part3.html)).

So everything is much more complicated (and much more interesting) than the original post would lead you to believe!

<comment><USER7> uhhh, I think you mean "funds" not "firms." Defining 3 regions and pigeon holing firms is too much of a simplification of VC markets.

Firms raise funds, that can target specific markets/verticals, as well as company size/maturity.

a16z is a firm. They have multiple funds, including a seed fund, surprisingly named "Seed" which competes directly with YC.

[http://a16z.com/portfolio/](http://a16z.com/portfolio/)

Some Firms have only 1 fund. Firms manage and guide their funds, and charge a management fee. While managing a fund is a largely personal intensive business, much like consulting, there are some economies of scale which is why many Firms will have multiple funds. This also further protects against risk.

YC and other accelerators are Firms, potentially with multiple funds, but all of their funds are at the low/angel end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Network effects at work. VCs will probably not find it amusing if - and of course when - they realize that _they_ have been disrupted. But it is a funny kind of poetic justice.

Everything, even capital markets can be disrupted (or at a minimum greatly shaken up) by a dedicated player with a technological advantage.

And once the network effects kick in you're going to have a very hard time gaining back lost ground.

I predicted YC moving in on capital providers a while ago and I expect that trend to continue once YC has cashed out on their first batch of major hits. They'll be so flush with money that the only reasonable way to use it will be to do their own series 'A'.

Right now that's not in the cards and they should probably deny such a possibility as strongly as they could. But once the money is in they're going to be very much tempted to broaden the scope and become a two stage rocket even though there are obvious drawbacks to that strategy as well.

<comment><USER9> > They'll be so flush with money that the only reasonable way to use it will > be to do their own series 'A'.

The other way to use that money would be to have gigantic batches. Remember, pg and sama have said that they're trying to build something akin to a university with Y Combinator. Using their money to do series A's instead (which is what other accelerators are already doing) would just be so conventional, and not what I'd expect from an organization as innovative as YC.

<comment><USER10> This. I'd think batches with 200 (500? 1000? startups) will come before Series A's. If only on principle.

<comment><USER8> With batches that large the positive effects of the 'classes' model will vanish, it will also require a much more efficient way of processing the applications and that will lead to (percentage wise) more rejections of good applicants.

YC is as good as they are because they _really_ work hard on processing those applications and even though it is software assisted it is still to a very large extent handwork.

<comment><USER11> Yes, this leads to philosophical questions about the relative compounding of labor, creativity, capital and future-constraining financial instruments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> YC doesn't have anything like a monopoly on great startups. If investors can't find their own great startups they don't deserve to be successful as investors.

What all SV investors should be worried about is crowdfunding. Most of them don't have anything to offer beyond money and that doesn't count for much if users pay millions in advance.

Oculus took VC money but you can bet it was on incredibly advantageous terms due to their millions in kickstarter revenues. A16Z was merely the strongest among the weak and paid for the privilege of investing.

The fact that Oculus was immediately acquired for billions by a company Marc Andreessen sits on the board of is not necessarily a good outcome for the world. A fully crowdfunded Oculus may never had chosen that route.

<comment><USER13> Except a16z was their Series B investor, Oculus raised their Series A from a bunch of mid-tier VCs which implies it wasn't a hugely competitive round hence probably wasn't on particularly favourable terms.

By the time a16z invested Oculus had John Carmack as CTO and they already demoed to huge interest at E3. It was already a much later stage company by that point.

<comment><USER12> Their Series A was $16M at a likely ~$100M valuation. Incredibly successful by any standard and only possible because of crowdfunding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does Genius get away with copying an entire (paywalled) article with a single link back?

Perhaps the commentary is transformational enough to make it arguable legal, but it seems entirely wrong to me.

<comment><USER11> Would it be sufficient to add a Disqus widget to the article? If so, why couldn't reddit or HN repost entire articles? Perhaps The Information has licensed their content to Genius, in exchange for visibility and branded commenters.

In-place annotations are part of ongoing work at W3C ([http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/](http://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/)), and will allow bring-your-own-annotation servers. Genius.com wants to "annotate the web", making the site a possible future HN substitute. Does Genius.com plan to license guest posts, until such time as content providers enable 3rd-party annotations?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How does copyright work in a situation like this then? You're taking a paywalled (expensive paywall at that) article and posting it elsewhere. How's it not copyright infringement?

<comment><USER16> I'm guessing it'd be claimed as fair use because it's transformative.

<comment><USER11> Because of the annotations?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't use Rap Genius often, so I almost missed sama's responses.

Be sure to click on the annotations to see them.

<comment><USER18> I use Genius almost exclusively for its rap annotations, so reading news on this platform felt strange to me. While I can definitely see its merits for lyrics/poetry, I'm not sure how much I like it in this context. I think that expository/news articles should be written well-enough that annotations (other than hyperlinks, I guess) are unnecessary.

<comment><USER19> The point of this annotation was for someone who disagrees with the author to offer a point by point take down in the context of the original article.

You could understand the article (at least the view the author wants to promote) just fine without the annotation--the annotation provides a counterpoint that systematically undermines the premise of the article. [edit spelling]

<comment><USER20> Agree! I was going to reply to some of Sam's comments, but stopped because this is not at all what Genius was designed for and my reply to his comments wouldn't fit the UX.

<comment><USER21> Did you notice the comments button?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Worst user interface on the planet.

<comment><USER23> Insanely laggy in chrome on an S5. Really no excuse for that when I'm only on the page to read a few paragraphs of text...

<comment><USER24> Works fine on an S4 in Chrome as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's hard to believe credible venture institutions would be upset by these moves. I can't speak on specific deep-pocketed VCs who offer nothing more than cash -- which is not what most startups need. However, firms that offer nothing more have their fodder here to complain here as they'll have to rely on real value also to keep them in play. They'll be forced to step it up. Reminds me of Jay Z's quotes on sports agents:

[http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/07/12/jay-z- says-h...](http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/07/12/jay-z-says-hes-a- problem-for-agents/)

</comment><comment><USER26> "So it shouldn't be surprising that venture capital firms are starting to worry that YC might start elbowing into the capital allocation part of the businesses."

It seems like YC currently doesn't have the whole Investor Relations infrastructure (or mindset of dealing with pensions) to get into the mainline VC business. I do think they are protecting their franchise against poor VC behavior though.

</comment><comment><USER27> _This "signaling issue" is a huge problem, by the way—accelerators that do the Series As for their top 3 companies deeply wound all the rest._ \- Sam Altman

How is this different from a VC firm like Andreessen doing Series As for their top 3 seed companies? Isn't signaling part-and-parcel of the startup economy? Why should YC be worried about signaling when a firm like Andreessen isn't?

<comment><USER13> It is an issue. It's even worse for big VCs because they have the funds to do the follow-on for any seed company they think is doing well. So it's not just a signal of being "top 3" it's a signal of being good.

[There are other reasons why VCs chose not to do follow-on, such a conflicts- of-interest, disagreements on valuation, etc. but any other VC you speak to will ask you why your seed investor isn't following-on]

Founders will often take money from seed-only funds or will take money from several multi-stage funds in order to mitigate the signalling risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Genius seems to be getting a lot of hate here and I'm not sure why. The UI is certainly odd. To me, it feels like the design is trying so hard to be futuristic and "cool" that it trips over itself and loses some ease of use.

But come on, you can get over that, and to me this was the first use of Genius I've come across where I thought "Damn that was cool, I'll have to use this for more than the occasional lyric."

This was really cool to me because it provided an interactive forum for multiple relevant parties (Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen) to have a debate. I'll get over the funky UI for that content any day.

</comment><comment><USER29> I hope genius isn't the future of writing, that was painful to read.

<comment><USER30> I couldn't even get through it

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think VCs are used to being the only guys on the block and don't like that they aren't fully in control any more. It's the same thing that has happened to Wall St. But different in that the VCs had even more control and some back room deals going. YC isn't the the real issue. They are providing a good education and strong ideas which help to prove them to be the best of all the accelerators out there today.

</comment><comment><USER32> I really like to see one day YC goes for an IPO of its own. As long as YC keeps it's process transparent, it is really hard to beat them. As you grow YC, keep it fair and honest. Don't give into any bias.</comment>