My understanding is that the 5-year failure rate of new businesses is about 40-50%. Given that an average 2x-year-old has a much lower chance of being successful enough in his first couple of jobs to (a) stay there for 5 years and (b) have it still be worth coming to work every day, this isn't a bad failure rate.
Fewer than half of all businesses started last time this statistic was taken will survive four years (presumably the number is lower during this business cycle). But simply being alive (or even nominally profitable) isn't the same thing as "success". It's just "not failure". What are the numbers on successful exits? Remember, we tend to read only about the successes; when we read about "failures", it's more often than not the failures of those companies lucky enough to have gotten on our radar before.
In any case, the article isn't making a case for "not doing a startup". It's making a case for being realistic about outcomes. This is a good thing. If you're going to fail, fail fast so you can move to the next thing.
Memo: Evolution is an explanation of fact and contains no moral (or religious, for that matter) position. Accepting evolution as an explanation of what happened does not require that one subscribe to so-called "Darwinist" social and economic ideologies.
If your freelance experience will set you up to get a good job, then you're not in a bad place. Most jobs available early on (e.g. out of college) suck; some jobs available later on are great. If you learn from and enjoy the people you work with, get interesting projects, and are respected, having a paid job isn't so bad.
My darkest hour was when I moved under undesirable circumstances, developed a serious health problem, lost my job, and broke up with my girlfriend in the space of 3 months, while the economy/job market was falling apart but before it started making the news (spring 2008). What was it like? Well, it ended.
Invitation-only events don't belong in the technological scene.
There is an all-out, bitter war going on between property (connections, inherited wealth, resources) and energy (talent, ambition, hard work). One is past, one is future, and each wishes to demote the value of the other. One side has power but lacks the vision and talent to use it; the other has the capability but not the means.
Nerds are supposed to be on the side of the good guys.
There is an all-out, bitter war going on between property (connections, inherited wealth, resources) and energy (talent, ambition, hard work). One is past, one is future, and each wishes to demote the value of the other. One side has power but lacks the vision and talent to use it; the other has the capability but not the means.
Sounds suspiciously like Marxism. People with wealth and connections are the bad guys, while the struggling guy at the bottom is the good guy.
What's ironic is that a) many of the people at the top started out at the bottom and earned their way to the top, and b) those at the bottom are ultimately trying to cultivate the same things: wealth and connections.
I find it incredibly naive to think that we're at some turning point in history where suddenly the world is going to become some kind of meritocracy and the people who are just starting out will behave any differently once they make it than people have been behaving forever. I also find it humorous that you think that people at the top are basically just dumb, boring people who lack vision and talent, and who have only their inherited wealth and connections to keep them on top. Give me a break.
Can we all just let go of the ridiculous cold-war era brain washing?
Claiming an idea is invalid because it "sounds suspiciously like (Marxism/Communism/Socialism/etc)" is an ad hominem. It's flawed thinking, a logical fallacy. When you do it, you're not effectively supporting your argument you're just revealing your own intellectual shallowness.
first, I did support my argument. second, I don't feel the need to disprove the same thing over and over. some theories are just wrong, and labeling them as such is not an ad hominem attack. do you feel the need to have an entire debate every time someone makes a case for young earth creationism. in my mind Marxism and YEC have about the same level of validity, which has been proven over and over; I feel no need to do so again.
that's just my opinion, and if you disagree, fine. but don't have a knee jerk reaction and assume that because I labelled something Marxist means I'm intellectually shallow.
Marxism and YEC have about the same level of validity
OK, but your reasoning is still flawed.
There is an all-out, bitter war going on between property (connections, inherited wealth, resources) and energy (talent, ambition, hard work)
If unbannable had used those ideas to underpin his arguments, attacking Marxism would make sense. But he doesn't. He just (sort of) shares one of Marx's observations & moral dispositions. Not everything that Marx claimed, observed, said or saw is disproved. To the extend that Marxism is disproved, it is the political or economic systems.
The same tactic is used by anti-evolutionists trying to draw a connection to Nazism.
This is a close cousin of a straw man. Straw man is a shallow argument.
Is that a reason to dismiss? This may be a stumble on an idea that Marx would agree with, but noone is asking you to accept marxism wholesale.
'Sounds suspiciously like..', is a defensive way of thinking. It's wanting to know who's side you are on so you know what position to hold. It's almost like being afraid of being persuaded by argument.
People with wealth and connections are the bad guys, while the struggling guy at the bottom is the good guy.
It's not that simple. There are people who have both wealth/connections and talent. There are good guys who are well-connected and wealthy.
The moral battleground is the exchange rate between these two fundamental commodities. Talent should trade very high against property, but often it doesn't. The good guys are those who are trying to make the exchange rate proper; the bad guys believe the talented exist only to serve those who are already powerful. So powerful people who use their resources to advance those who are talented are among the good guys.
Those who want talent to trade highly against property are those who believe the best and most capable should be making the big decisions. They have the interest of humanity-at-large at heart.
Those who want the reverse are those who have power but lack talent, and their supporters.
One way to do so is to let people trade their talent for property that they use as they see fit. If they're good and not just lucky, they'll succeed again, getting more property over which to make decisions.
However, that method seems to be in conflict with "talent should trade highly against property".
> They have the interest of humanity-at-large at heart.
Invitation-only events are not only for people with "property". They also allow those with "energy" to keep an event from being diluted by those without it. Why shouldn't a group of hackers be able to get together with people they choose? Wouldn't the YC weekly dinners fit this category?
I'm obviously a fan of HN and by proxy, YC... but to be a devil's advocate...
The people at the HN weekly meeting didn't choose to get together with each other, the rich guys who gave them money chose them and told them to be there.
In contrast, superhappydevhouse is open to anyone who shows up.
As one of the organizers for superhappydevhouse, one of my main goals is to keep it from ever becoming an invitation only event. I share a lot of sentiment that Fred Wilson expressed in his blog post.
As superhappydevhouse has grown in popularity and size, this has made finding venues more difficult, we've been extremely fortunate and have had many generous people open their homes and businesses to us.
The "dilution" issue that mellis mentions above has also been a concern, fortunately this hasn't been a difficult issue to address. All that we've needed to do so far is to explicitly state what sort of event we are holding ("A party for hackers and thinkers") as well as discouraging corporate self-promotion and recruiting.
I don't think TED is as hard to get into as it seems. You just need to have the $4,000, apply right after they open applications and make yourself sound interesting on your application.
> One side has power but lacks the vision and talent to use it; the other has the capability but not the means.
Classic sour grapes. Poor guy. In his universe the power fairies just wander around granting power to dolts. Meanwhile untapped capability just sits around wasted.
Newsflash. Folks with actual useful capability don't stay "propertyless" for long - they produce, which gets them property, which lets them do more, getting them more property, and so on. Yes, there's some luck, but the luckiest people are those who have the moxie to take advantage of the luck that comes their way and they make more.
Yes, some folks are born into money. If they're not capable, they lose it.
For this sort of comparison, mostly-functional multi-paradigm languages like SBCL and Ocaml should be run through the benchmarks twice; once with imperative code, once in the functional idiom. The often-repeated complaint (of which I'm skeptical) about functional languages is that they're only efficient when ugly imperative features are used, and it would be good to confirm or dispel that suspicion.
It's more complicated than "functional is slower than imperative". Functional data structures are sometimes less immediately efficient, but add persistence (since they're immutable, they share subsections of the data structure, and/or have access to snapshots of past versions of the structure being modified). Whether this gives you needed features or just means extra work and cache misses depends on what you're doing. If you have a functional data structure and you want to add "undo" or backtracking, you're already most of the way there, while adding this to an imperative data structure means extra work to keep track of state changes.
_Purely Functional Data Structures_ by Chris Okasaki is, by far, the best collected resource, if you want to read further. (His thesis (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf) is the kernel of the book.) Also, the fourth chapter of Developing Applications with Objective Caml (English translation: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/) discusses functional and imperative styles' strengths and weaknesses.
Reducing everything to runtime benchmarks obscures how, in practice, the trade-off is often more like "it was a huge pain in the ass to get working without bugs, but it's 2% faster" versus "it took twenty minutes and was correct on the first try". (Also, whether or not you use it in production, OCaml rules for prototyping complex data structures, in the same way Erlang does concurrency and C++ does linking errors.)
I read that essay, and I think the reason for their existence is simpler: they make face-on mating more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, which facilitates pair bonding.
One disagreement I have with the OP is in the assertion that permanent breasts would be a necessary disadvantage, ignoring the size issue. Permanent breasts probably evolved gradually, from unnoticeable to male-like to small to the size they are today. A prehistoric hominid female who sprouted D-cups among her flat-chested peers would be at a disadvantage for the reasons the OP gave-- she'd appear infertile at all times-- but the permanent-breasts/no dichotomy is false. The change almost certainly occurred incrementally.
No. I had a friend whose high school life was literally ruined by cheating.
He was a "pathological cheater": smart, and in the top 5 of the class by his own steam, but had a tendency to cheat on everything, even practice PSAT tests administered by the school. He cheated on an essay contest, his winning entry was published (oops!) and he was called out quite publicly when the paper published a retraction.
Rather than own up to it, he made up a bullshit story about how his story was only superficially similar. In fact, it was word-for-word identical, with the title changed.
He changed schools in order to avoid a failing grade for cheating on an exam (and mounting humiliation) to a Catholic school. He was supposedly kicked out of that school for (you guessed it) cheating.
My understanding is that the 5-year failure rate of new businesses is about 40-50%. Given that an average 2x-year-old has a much lower chance of being successful enough in his first couple of jobs to (a) stay there for 5 years and (b) have it still be worth coming to work every day, this isn't a bad failure rate.