“I know this kielbasa doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matryca is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
No doubt we're all more motivated by ego than we believe we are, but comments that take a supercilious stance and put everybody else down don't help—and are not part of the culture we're hoping for here.
IMO it’s a generally good mentality — the fact that dropbox is not that hard for your average programmer to replicate (by plumbing with existing tech) is exactly why you have so much variety in the software space.
Of course, turning a functional program into a function business is no simple feat, but no one should be looking at these things and thinking “it takes a genius with a once-in-a-lifetime idea” — because, well, it clearly doesn’t. And it’s really not the most incredible or innovative idea.
The intelligence was largely in transforming something you could do into something you could easily do — and identify that it has a potential for profit, and identify how to extract that profit, and executing on it long enough to achieve that profit.
I think that's in play either way--people need to tell or be told that their idea is actually technically challenging, unusually insightful into business or users, etc. Critics are silenced because there must be no way they've read patio11 if they're posting, etc. Capacity for mutually appreciative disagreement is low on HN.
The average business is not brilliant and yet is still not easy to execute long enough to succeed. Life is hard.
It's so bizarre to me that StumbleUpon came from the same mind as Uber (well one of the minds).
However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.
This is a horrible misreading of Kantian TI. The idea of "value" is what's worthless in itself, not objects or entities. Yes, everything is worthless in itself, but that says more about "worth" than it does about "everything", and it isn't mutually exclusive with there being things in the world that are required for human life. Value at the bottom end takes its shape from these things, and in the top end, like complex financial derivatives, is far removed from human necessities.
You're missing that we can get really close to things-in-themselves. It's like you got an erection as soon as you read that we were fundamentally separate from things-in-themselves, and just ran with it.
It can't be a 'horrible misreading of Kantian TI' because it isn't a reading of Kantian TI, in itself as distinguished from for itself and for others is a standard concept in philosophy since Kant and part of common sense language.
My point is just that value isn't some simple natural thing that you could consider as a positive fact, like you are trying to do. Value doesn't 'take its 'shape' (whatever that would mean) from necessities of human life', and has no immediate special relation to necessities.
Except investing isn't like a horse race. Each horse has a different finish line, and those finish lines are in flux during the race. Crucially, you can change your bet in the middle of the race.
It might be a startup in the colloquial sense of the word, to friends, family, etc., but I and many others here would argue that it's a small business rather than a startup.
I'm curious why he pronounces Regina incorrectly (he went to the University of Regina), when he is from Moose Jaw, a 50 minute drive away. It's really really strange. 7 year old children all across Canada know how to pronounce that city correctly...how does a guy forget something so basic?
