I'm having hard time wrapping my head around the time-money analogy here. In the case of money, by investing it or delaying spending, you can have more of it in future. In the case of time this does not hold, because time is essentially a shrinking resource. You can't have more time in future by delaying spending or 'investing' it in the manner OP suggests.
Return on time, (ROT?), is always something other than time and thus measures of it are highly subjective. In the end, what you are spending is your life and although there might be preferable ways of doing it, I'd imagine that being the achievers they are, HN members usually err on the side of investing it. Actually PG's essay offers a nice exposition of spending time (having fun) vs investing it vs fake work:
I think Quora handles this better than HN. It gives you the option to be completely anonymous on a case by case basis, reap the benefits/upvotes even when you are anonymous. Most people on HN/Reddit resort to throwaway accounts when they want to be completely anonymous and not tarnish their username, even though that username has no connection to a real world ID.
People/usernames are brands in online discussion, so the way we generally weigh people's opinion is affected by those brands, which is kind of a function of their comment history and any IRL connections. Say, if the username is 'pg', even if it's a hit-and-run comment with not much thought put into it, you view it differently.
Buying Bitcoins while their price is so bubbly is nothing more than a gamble. Investing in other online currencies, or in companies that can help the Bitcoin economy develop, looks like a sensible use of a venture capitalist’s money.
Also from the comments section this one is particularly insightful:
If you want to value Bitcoin's potential properly you have to understand it's at minimum a decentralized payment network which will provide most of the service of retail banking offers for free or minimal fees to all the unbanked of the world. Actually considering how antiquated the banking system is, it will also offer serious competition for the already banked.
Can you imagine a world where anyone can set up a shop on the internet and instantly accept payments from all over the world to sell its product or service without any intermediary ? Well that's only one face of what Bitcoin enables. And It enables a world of possibility after that. If for people who understand Bitcoin, we can't even grasp what's going to be done with this technology. It's like trying to grasp what's going to be done with the Internet in 1990.
So you want to value Bitcoin's potential, you have to compare it to Gold as a store of value and to m1 of major currencies. Anybody that builds a model for Bitcoin's POTENTIAL without landing AT LEAST in the hundreds of billions of $ at minimum is doing something wrong.
Not everything with an exponential curve is a bubble. Technology adoption follows a S curve. And Bitcoin could be the most important technology invented since the Internet.
I agree. After talking this much about complexity, it is rather simplistic of him to praise Ritchie over Jobs in terms of impact.
On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things.
Well, actually you can't imagine what computing world would have been like unless you assume technology develops in a purely deterministic manner, in the absence of any market or cultural influences. There is a name for this line of thinking: hindsight bias[0].
Also, in the presence of this level of complexity and different layers, comparing people's impact would be necessarily subjective and rather reductionist in that, a la computers a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square sans Jobs. This would do disservice to the legacies of both Ritchie and Jobs.
Basically it sucks in your contacts from Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook etc, and schedules follow-ups for you.
Obviously, they monitor all your communications across these networks, but for me the benefit of nudging and analytics outweighs my concerns about privacy.
Here is a simple reason why these type of graphs are flawed: they ignore economics. If you've taken Econ 101, you'll know that the demand is sensitive to price and scarcity drives up prices. Present demand is meaningless while making forecasts, since future demand is a function of future prices. Plus, increasing demand would also enlargen reserve base, since operating certain low-yield mines would become profitable.
I'm curious if we can generalize even more. For example, can we call Academia a giant Ponzi Scheme that will collapse when run out of naive new recruits laboring their years away hoping to reach top of the pyramid one day?
This a solid no-nonsense list that applies well whatever your startup about is about, be it in biotech or software. "#10. The life plan has to come before the business plan." was recently discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411693
jmtame is right; work-life balance shouldn't be your top priority, it shouldn't make you question the time you are investing in your startup. as you make progress opportunity cost of your time increases, i.e. an hour of your time when you got funded is a lot more precious than an hour when you were just starting out. also, an hour you spend on the "life" side is an hour NOT spent on your startup, and the cost for this increases as you make progress.
luckily, things are dynamic and you don't have to choose between work and life or some arbitrary balance point and then live with your decision forever. rather, depending on your time constraints your radius of interaction widens or shortens. while working hectically on some feature you'll only interact with very few close friends or no one at all, and when things are going slow or when you need support, emotional or otherwise, you'll simply reach out to more people. thus, be flexible in terms of how you allocate your time but always with an eye on the prize.
It has something to do with economics of punditry. Basically, for pundits incentives are against voicing dissent. If you go against the conventional wisdom and your predictions turn out to be right, you'll still have hard time getting your voice heard, since it will probably drown in a cacophony of "nobody could have seen this coming" type mainstream media flood. On the other hand, if you dissent from the crowd and turn out to be wrong, you'll be labeled a lunatic and sent to oblivion. So the punishment and the risk you're taking by far outweighs any possible rewards. Thus we get herding; pundits' predictions will always be closer to each other than they are to the real value of the thing being predicted.
As a US-educated entrepreneur based in Europe, I disagree. Their entrepreneurial culture is what's going to save the Americans, since they have the means to innovate their way out of this meltdown; be it through web 2.0 or greentech. Generous welfare state that we have in Europe presumes presence of a stable economy generating enough surplus wealth to sustain it. If we get outcompeted, it'll be the first thing to go unfortunately. We need to figure out a way to combine best of both worlds.
These logos are "clever" in the sense that most of them employ use of negative space, i.e. the white space around black letters and figures. It's actually the first thing they teach you in design school. Still these examples are pretty neat.