jval

People who can't do it will tell you that it can't be done :-)

Wow, this is excellent, congrats on the release. Are you planning on adding the ability for people to feed in suggestions/feedback or is that too prone to abuse? Great seeing more cool NLP technology out there!

Sad thing about this article is that it is amazing, and yet the last thirty years has probably favoured well-credentialed people more so than any point in history. While there's an argument to be made that this is now turning around (and no doubt it should, and should have many years ago), I still think the trend is moving in favour of credentialism rather than away from it.

I don't really know what can be done about it because as Nassim Taleb put it, university degrees are like racketeering - bad for the collective but good for the individual,[0] so unfortunately I think it will continue to get worse for the foreseeable future at least. If you had disregarded everything this article said in 1985 and gone straight to HBS followed by Goldman, you would probably be sitting in your mansion right now and not care in the slightest about the credentialism problem, entrepreneurship or Silicon Valley. Obviously there's a ton of value judgments you can make about that, but the fact it is true is a huge net negative for society, as we need to align prestige and financial incentives around behaviours which are good for the collective.

Ultimately I think any solution to this problem would have to go back to the root of it, which is the increasing strength of vested interests in Western society who push for the creation of rents to perpetuate their wealth and power. Ultimately that reality is what makes rent-seeking professions so attractive, and in turn allows those professions to monopolise and 'rent seek from rent-seeking', i.e. have a monopoly over rent-extraction in the same way the law and investment banking does.

How you would solve that? ... well I don't know. Get some sort of 21st century Theodore Roosevelt, I guess.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=13012333374&story_...

The problem with all of these graphs is that the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these days are off-chain.

Coinbase can settle most trades internally and push out any 'interbank trades' onto the chain. Some of the patterns others have noticed could be them settling internal accounts, not sure though.

1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects speech (libel? slander? copyright violations?). The idea of a constitutionally protected right to free speech is to stop the government from silencing debate. But limiting people from handing money to members of congress isn't stopping your ability to voice your opinion at all, it's just limiting your ability to influence your member of congress by donating more money than the next guy. If anything it increases freedom of speech - it allows all people to voice their views in a marketplace of ideas where the amount of money in their bank accounts is irrelevant, and they are assessed on the merits of their arguments alone. The current situation allows every person to speak, but one person to hold a megaphone.

2. The problem you've identified is the fact that there is a government, or that powerful people exist. There will always be powerful people, and hopefully there will always be government, and it will always be in your interests to influence those powerful people so that they can help you out. So in any system where there is a government, there needs to be a robust system of checks and balances to ensure that representatives act in the interests of the public (which is the idea behind representative democracy) rather than the interests of their private funders.

3. Yes, of course it does, but again, that is just a symptom of checks and balances failing. In a system where there is a perfect representative democracy and a strong constitution, the people will never vote for a federal government larger than it needs to be. In the system we have now, the federal government swells in size no matter which party is in government (just depends whether it is the public service, or the military that grows). Private interests fuel this effect and governments wave their hands to make it look like cuts are being made, but they're not.

Lessig has nailed the arguments around why campaign finance reform is necessary - whether he's going to be successful is in question but I think most legal experts can see that the system is broken, with money being the core of the problem.

The ancients used to select one of their own (sometimes even their own children) and periodically sacrifice them to the gods.

The moderns instead periodically select one person and have the entire world turn on them through Twitter, having them perish in the flames of hundreds of angry tweets.

Hopefully their sacrifice will atone for all of our sins before the eyes of the gods.

I feel like the UI should be consistent dang, because I've been flagging entire threads where there's an inappropriate comment (not knowing that there was a comment flag there).

I think at the moment it's too easy to hit that flag button on the front page (as others have said, especially on mobile), so maybe it should be moved back too?

People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You can't just pan Bitcoin because some of its early adopters were idiots, a lot of the internet's early adopters were seedy criminals and pests too.

Bitcoin's community will evolve in the same way every online community does. It's found some early traction in the form of speculation which has encouraged people to buy and own Bitcoin. Now that a lot of people know what it is and own some, it's easier to test services built with BTC.

I agree with this, but I think it is still an extremely difficult problem to solve. Most of the political problems we have are low hanging fruit from a technical perspective, the thing that renders them almost impossible is the fact that they run contrary to vested interests.

Part of the reason that Uber and Airbnb have succeeded where other content-based startups have failed is the fact that they are dealing with city-based, rather than federal regulations. As copyright is regulated federally, the only way to fix it is by first fixing the broken system of electoral funding that encourages politicians in DC to follow the money that flows out of the RIAA and similar cashed up lobbying bodies.

Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue themselves (like birthday gifting), then bad luck. You get the advantage of their distribution at the cost of platform risk.

If you haven't already you should read his book, Avoiding the Fall, there are a number of prescriptions inside it on how to go about rebalancing the Chinese economy. It's really well written (as is his blog, especially this post). The central thesis of the book is that the Chinese economy has low consumption as a total proportion of their GDP due to a number of hidden subsidies that transfer wealth from households to businesses and governments in China.

He argues that by removing these subsidies China can rebalance their economy from an investment driven one to a more consumption driven one and achieve a 'rebalancing'. Some subsidies are governments fixing bank interest rates for lenders and depositors (in a way that takes money from depositors to subsidise borrowers) and artificially pegging the exchange rate, which penalises households (who typically in urban settings rely on imported goods) and subsidises businesses (many of whom export their goods).

My economics knowledge is generally self-taught and I don't have the book in front of me so you'll have to forgive any errors - but hope that helps!

I feel like this pissed you off a lot, but a lot of hiring in startups has nothing to do with people's competency, and more to do with culture fit which is generally totally out of your hands and not indicative at all of your ability.

Also, people screw it up big time, often it's totally random. Maybe they ate a bad sandwich for lunch and didn't enjoy the interview as a result. Facebook famously turned down WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton back in 2009, even though they went on to acquire his company for 19 Billion 5 years later.[1] Talk about making lemonade from lemons.

I think all you can do with these things is use it as a pause to think about how you can do better, and if you can't think of anything just chalk it up as a random event, like a bird crapping on your windshield.

[1] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383

What are the "hard" problems of driver and consumer mobile app and infrastructure/coverage?

All the software in this business is commodity.

The only real defensibility at work here are the network effects, which are totally asymmetrical due to the city-focussed nature of ride-sharing.

The legislation is generally not company-specific, which makes the problem much better for followers rather than leaders. Uber enters a new city and gets hit with the upfront cost of having to fight to have legislation changed. No such problem for the followers who can wait until the battle is over and then claim the same status under the new legislation.

Uber and Lyft could do the same thing Sidecar is doing, but then they wouldn't be Uber and Lyft. They would be Sidecar. You have to choose one thesis and go for it. Sidecar is going for the variable price model and Uber & Lyft are going for the fixed price model.

Nobody is going to run the table over the other guy, investors know that and are betting that the different model will attract a subset of customers perhaps not as large as Uber/Lyft but large enough to be a big business in a huge market, maybe even IPO. Seems pretty logical to me.

Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's difficult and comparisons with other countries are not helpful in addressing those difficulties.

Sorry - edited my post to make clearer the fact that I'm not saying the US's healthcare system is good. I just think that comparisons with other countries are futile. My comment was intended to be a general one about the way politics works in the US.

Politics is all about the money. Obviously administration is worse at scale too, but it comes down to political will in having the money to do it.

The way you keep a political union together without having it break apart is by limiting the amount of things the members of the union have to share. If you start taxing rich states and funnelling the money over to poor states, you give people a reason to want to break out of the union. Ultimately people only stay if they're getting a good deal.

Taxpayers in New York will definitely be happy if their money goes into the military, as having a New York rather than a US military wouldn't work. But to have all their money go into universal healthcare in Idaho would just piss them off, because people in Idaho can pay for that themselves. That's why healthcare is largely a state matter in the US - you'll find some states have great healthcare, others don't.

I'm not saying the US can't do it better (they clearly can), I'm just saying comparisons with other countries are useless because they don't take into account the unique political realities of the United States.

The problem is that the United States isn't a 'country' in the way the UK, or Denmark, or Australia is. The entire population of Denmark is 5.59 million, the size of a single second or third tier city in the US. Australia is 22 million, the size of the NYC metro area. You can socialise and centralise healthcare in countries on such a small scale, but it becomes exponentially more difficult to do in a country like the US (pop: 313 M).

The United States is an enormous country comprised of 50 separate state governments, where the powers of the federal government are extremely limited (both by the constitution itself, and by the fact that it is practically impossible to do anything at that kind of scale).

As a result, it is extremely hard to pass any sort of massive reforms. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to pass one single, uniform system of health care for all Europeans?

Talking about solutions that work well in smaller countries is all well and good, but the reality is you need different solutions if you want them to work at scale. It's the same reason why most of Facebook's backend is now written in C++ instead of PHP. It is much more painstaking to work with and harder to pick up but when you're building a huge system of interconnected parts you want something that isn't going to fall over and die suddenly.

The supposed chaos and gridlock of the US political system is a feature, not a bug. It's the reason why if you look at a list of the world's oldest nations the United States is right at the top, and is one of the largest.

EDIT: Sorry - not saying the US's healthcare system is the best it can be and didn't make that clear enough. Just saying that comparing it to other countries won't help as the US has a unique political reality.

It's sad to read stuff like this because Airbnb has enabled people like me to travel in a way I never could have previously.

I travelled pre-Airbnb in Europe and was totally screwed over by estate agents and rental professionals who take your thousands of hard-earned dollars while providing tiny photos of places that end up bearing no resemblance to the actual apartment. On Airbnb I always feel like what I see is what I get. The reviews are always honest and descriptive.

I've never damaged common property, come home at ridiculous hours or drunk, or made noise. I'm a pretty tame renter but my friends often aren't so I sympathise with people who say this is a problem.

What I don't understand is why Airbnb doesn't even make efforts to educate renters about this. They could easily add in an optional course for renters to take that educates people on rental etiquette, and awards you a 'Trusted Renter' designation in the same way they have Verified Phone and ID. A lot of people have never lived in an apartment building and simply have no idea what it is like to do so. Even a text message on check in that says try to be respectful of others in the building would go some way to stopping bad actors.

Once Airbnb is regulated it would also be super easy for them to let other people in the building complain. If legitimate complaints from other people in the building went onto profiles that would be the end of bad actors on the system, IMHO.

You're right - the class of investor has shifted away from professionals and people wanting to leave China (the aspirational Chinese migrants we are used to) to extremely wealthy corrupt officials who are dumping their money everywhere they can put it.

Because property supply is constrained but their capital is seemingly unlimited, we are seeing properties fetch prices that are totally disconnected to reality. This is happening in Melbourne, Australia too where entire suburbs that used to be 'family friendly' at $800K are now seeing properties regularly sell for $1.5M to investors on the phone.

New York Magazine called it out for what it is - money laundering.

http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-y...

I wouldn't be surprised if President Xi's rise and his crackdown on corruption is behind the flight of capital overseas.

Why are we all indebted to Assange? Nobody has any idea whether what he did had a net positive or negative affect on ours or other people's lives. There's doesn't appear to be a reason behind a lot of the leaks, and worst of all there has been little effort made to ensure people don't get killed as a result of what is being leaked. Overall I don't feel indebted to him at all.

I do think it has predictive power, in the narrow areas in which it can be applied. I think if you're a media executive and you've seen what's happened to the NYT, you know that newspapers aren't the only media vertical that is going to face the problem of disruption. Thinking behind it is probably what's driving deals like the purchase of Maker Studios by Disney[1] - if Disney just wanted to innovate they would have just invested in better digital content delivery. Buying Maker acknowledges that lots of lower quality content producers can acquire the same audiences as high quality large budget Disney productions like Hannah Montana.

You don't see disruption everywhere, for example Google and Facebook are hardly 'disruptive' as companies, but I think in the right cases the theory has predictive power and is a necessary tool in the belt of people who work in technology.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/business/media/disney-buys...

You're right, it is an inductive assertion based off the quality of the piece and its focus, the author's profession and the author's background so I'm uncertain about that. I'm more keen on highlighting the fact that I think technology is getting scapegoated as the enemy in academia because two groups of people see the problem differently and are talking past each other.

I don't disagree with you that disruption is often misapplied and mindlessly praised, I just think this article didn't do a good job of illustrating either of those points.

I think the NYT article I cited did a much better job of addressing both points.

Poor critiques of disruption like this one are only going to come thicker and faster now that many academics are starting to feel threatened by MOOCs and online learning.

Critiques of disruption have been around for years, most notably from within the HBS faculty itself. Porter was quoted recently in the NYT as saying: "If Clay and I differ, it’s that Clay sees disruption everywhere, in every business, whereas I see it as something that happens every once in a while... And what looks like disruption is in fact an incumbent firm not embracing innovation [at all]."[1]

The NYT article cited is in many ways a much better illustration of what I think Lepore is trying to get at in this article, namely that disruption is not a universal theory of technology in business. That's a view I'm very sympathetic towards. Lepore ends up making the bigger claim that the theory has no predictive power and is only a useless after the fact justification for why businesses perform in certain ways. I think that's totally unjustified. If business theories were as certain as calculus we'd all be rich, but none of them are. That doesn't make them useless, and the theory of disruption certainly isn't so vague as to be useless.

Because Lepore isn't across the field in any detail, the article ends up being a mix of side swipes at Christensen and caricatures of people in the startup community. When you have to go through the bibliography of someone's book to find fault with the choice of a reference to a tangential point (as the author has done here), you start to come across as ranting rather than making a point of any value.

I think the second last page is revealing though, as the author (who is an American History professor at Harvard) takes aim at the application of disruption to universities. There's a big problem here, because most academics are pedagogues who love education for the sake of education, and can't accept or can't see that for most people, university is a job certification factory rather than a place of intellectual inquiry. I read a lot of MOOC and disruption-hate from academics, and much of it tends to stem from this problem. We're talking each other and I'm afraid it's only going to get worse.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/business-school-d...

I've always been puzzled by people who hate on recruiters contacting them through LinkedIn.

If you dislike it so much, why don't you delete your LinkedIn profile? It's obviously there to facilitate exactly this kind of behaviour, so I don't see why there's any issue around it.

To the contrary, I see these kinds of complaints as being a common form of humblebragging in the developer community. It comes across as: 'Gosh, isn't it tough being contacted by these recruiters all the time because my skills are under such high demand in the labor marketplace. Deleting that one email every few weeks sure does some serious damage to my psychological well-being.'

The substance of this article is about email spam generated by LinkedIn itself. I think we should focus on that, and on the broader issue of where the limits are for email invitations in web applications. The issue this has highlighted (for me at least) is that it is easy to do damage to the reputations for others by putting their names on emails they didn't ask to be sent. This doesn't just mean losing users, it actually means souring and sometimes ruining the valuable relationships that users have with their colleagues and friends. There's a lot of trust and power inherent when someone else's name is put on an email and that isn't something to be sneezed at.

Would it be that difficult to add in an 'Abusive Off' feature? You can just flick it off and any tweets containing blacklisted words vanish.

Would be extremely valuable for people who come under attack, I imagine. A lot of people who are obscenity averse might like to enable it too. Heck, I might even enable it myself when reading the activity on some hashtags.

This is a great post, thanks for the insight. I notice you work with writers and the press, most of whom I imagine would be living in NYC if not the East Coast cities. Do you think there's an advantage to being closer to that? Or do you think that any advantage you get from being closer to those you work with is outweighed by the skepticism you get from other people around you?

I was watching an interview where the Airbnb guys said they were constantly flying to NYC because many of their early customers were there and I was wondering why they didn't simply relocate together, although perhaps the positivity and accessibility of expertise outweighs the burden of travelling.

Also - in your opinion, do you think New York could ever replicate the SV mentality, even just in its own tech scene silo (obviously Wall St bankers will never adopt it), or do you think this is bound to fail?

Wow, I had no idea this was such a breakthrough. I'm not in the industry and I barely know anything about this, but can you explain what it is about recovering the booster that is such a huge breakthrough? Haven't we had recoverable space equipment for ages (e.g. space shuttle?) Forgive what is surely an ignorant question.

2024: a post-industrial dystopia where the global economy runs on a cryptocurrency called 'Bitcoin', people wear computers on their faces and the Wall Street Journal has been reduced to reprinting tweets as news.