"Now you can do stuff that you could already do before, but you can do it with your phone. What it takes to make that work is incredible—venture capitalists have poured $672 million combined into Wag and Rover!—but the consumer impact is small. Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over."
The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET benefit to society as a whole.
An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency.
But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)
The weird thing about this line of thinking is that if you take it to its logical conclusions, you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore, because all we do is exist on this earth.
One of my early projects at Google involved latency optimization - incredibly boring, invisible stuff. At the end of the project, we'd saved maybe 20ms/search, and my boss was like "20ms/search * 3 billion searches/day = 60M seconds/day = 16K hours/day. Every day, you've saved humanity 16,000 hours of their lives."
And then I 20%'d on the PacMan doodle, which had an estimated 400 million hours of total playing time. Well, shit. There goes the next 68 years of latency optimizations.
(As an aside, this feels a lot like what Silicon Valley does. Save time on your job so you can waste it on social media, crypto gambling, or computer games. You just can't win, because there is no win condition - we'll continue to exist regardless of what we choose to do in the meantime.)
Chuckled a bit at this. The other way to interpret it is everything matters
The doodle is a net win, because it makes people happy (and they can skip it if it doesn’t). The latency makes everybody sad. You increased net happiness in the world.
That's funny, but it also sounds like a cynical way of looking at your work. Once you throw in games in the "waste of time" bucket, where do you stop? Movies? Music? Drawing? etc?
20ms sounds like very little, but have you ever tried to get anything done in a place where everybody has a lax attitude towards time?
You kinda said it - lowering latency is less about saving time, it's more about saving annoyance / making the product more pleasant to use.
I might be particularly sensitive to it - I have a strong preference for low latency and tight controls in everything including cars. Ten or fifteen seconds bootup, don't care too much. I click on a browser tab and it takes 200ms to switch - ugh, is there a better browser?
> you quickly conclude that nothing really matters anymore, because all we do is exist on this earth.
And, in some ways, it really doesn't matter, by itself. 16,000 hours. 68 years. Those are potentials, not realities. You give or waste time. But what is that time used for? Do people make any meaningful usage of it? What is meaningful?
Some will say everything is. Some nothing is. But trying to find a middle path and to keep at least some semblance of objectivity, are we making meaningful usage of our time? As a civilization, as a species, is humanity headed in any particular direction? Is it a good direction? Are we progressing?
And, more practically, if we don't have good answers to those questions, does giving people more time to waste, really matter?
That's a silly way to evaluate utility, or at least your example is. Let's shave a minute of sleep off of everyone in the world. In just one day we will gain back 14 THOUSAND years of productivity.
Adjust it slightly perhaps: create a mechanism to help people fall asleep one minute faster on average and you buy the world XX years of waking time every day...
If you could actually use that 1 more minute in a productive way, then yeah, that would be huge. If you're just forcing people to stay awake and stare at a wall then no that is not productive.
We basically do that every year, and the results don't look so promising...
"Exploiting the discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually."
Do we have an estimated cost of switching away from DST? Programmer friend and I were talking today (re: Europe) and he said it'd cost a lot of money for everybody to upgrade their libraries.
I said that its a one-time cost versus those lives (I estimated 20 a transition, for 40 a year), and those lives win even with a very high return on money now.
I would be interested to know myself. My guess is that the cost of upgrading libraries isn't that expensive. Library maintainers probably have to change things every couple of years anyways when new countries get added or a country changes timezones. Removing DST would just be yet another change but slightly larger in scale. I would assume most of the cost would be from people assuming that DST was in effect, and as a result being late to something important.
one hour of time collectively is not equivalent to one minute * 60 people's time individually.
in something like packet processing maybe so. but it doesn't generalize to waiting to get your luggage checked. it's horribly inefficient to staff for peak load. that cost will be borne by all the people that come in during the average times, for no reason.
when i go to starbucks, fuck it i shouldn't have to wait in line at all. think about the 30-60s line wait (ie, waiting just to place your order) times 300 people that might come through starbucks in an hour during peak. shouldn't starbucks just hire 2 more people and have 4 more machines so that all the time spent waiting by the customer isn't wasted????
Because shaving off a minute of sleep isn't necessarily a profitable business that needs venture capital, which is the point of the article.
There is no moat in moving something from a billboard to a smartphone app, there is no obvious way in which this 'appification' industry is actually profitable or a viable business.
One particularly prominent example being moviepass. Is there some potential gain for customers in there somewhere, yes obviously but does that mean that sending you a credit card and having investors subsidize your cinema habits is a viable business or even worthy of being called 'technology'? No.
Because if you're gonna multiply the 1 minute gained by the world population, you should divide the extra good/services produced amongst the world population too. It comes out to.. goods/services worth 1 minute of extra productivity per person. All the stores in the world being open 1 extra minute feels like 1 extra minute of shopping time for each customer, not 14 thousand years.
In "poorer" economies service jobs are handled by servants, and the relationship is more personal and human. This could be good or bad depending on the "master". It has the potential to be better than an economic relationship, and may not be worse than an economic relationship if the "master" follows laws (or not, cf. Hong Kong domestics). In any case the gig economy is just replacing a "human master" with a "machine master".
Probably servants are better compensated too because the transaction has fewer middlemen.
> Instead of taking a number off a bulletin board in a coffee shop and calling Eric to walk Rufus, you hit a few buttons on your phone and Eric comes over.
And since you need someone to walk your dog every day during your two-week vacation, that would involve calling Eric, Margaret, Phillip and then in the middle of it coming up with Margo's number because Eric got cold.
I'm fine with this, but we must balance human efficiency and output against the well-being of the surrounding ecological systems. It can't just be about number of human hours.
Trove Apps | Lead Developer | ATLANTA, GA OR REMOTE | North America timezone
We’re a small team building SaaS products across various platforms. Our team of 11 is distributed in North America, Europe, and Asia.
I’m the founder. I bootstrapped Trove to just under 1M ARR in 14 months. We’re positioned for solid growth over the next few years, and I’m looking for a highly skilled lead engineer who can take over all of our development efforts as well as allow me to focus on the other aspects of the business.
A couple of things I’m looking for in a candidate (in no particular order):
- the ability to multitask in a very fast paced environment.
- highly skilled on both the frontend and backend. our stack is React + Rails.
- solid fundamental understanding of how quality software is built, and best practices.
- an understanding of UI/UX, and a keen “eye” for design. this is difficult to gauge, but its very important that we’re on a similar wavelength.
- The ability to put development efforts in the context of business and customer needs. must be able to distinguish between what is “fun” and what’s “mission critical”. this is harder than it sounds.. emotions have a way of clouding judgement.
- Fast speed and a high level of output. you should be able to deliver at least 2-3x faster than most. I work extremely fast so I expect as much from our lead engineer. I value execution much more than perfection.
Salary range: 90-120k USD with possibility of significant equity after 6 months. The equity offer will be significantly higher than those offered by VC funded startups or a comparable ARR company with our growth trajectory. I understand the key role you'll play in our growth, and am looking for someone who will be in it for the long-haul.
If you’re interested, reach out via email: <hnuser>@gmail.com.
Trove, Inc. | Full Stack Software Eng. | Atlanta, GA or REMOTE
Seeking Mid-to-Senior level Rails and React Developer. Must be able to work on both front and back end of the stack. We build various micro-saas products, and move very quickly. Small team, with the opportunity to build products from the ground up, and watch as they grow to fruition.
A quick look at humanities progress, and its fairly obvious where we're headed. there will be a day where many people won't have to work to survive. There will be an extreme amount of abundance in the economy due to technology and automation. More for everyone... :)
Whether this happens 20 years from now or 100 years or 1000 years from now is beside the point. It will happen. And therefore thinking about and preparing for this future is worthwhile.
This also begs the question, why don't companies hire more part-time programmers? In my experience it's literally an order of magnitude easier to find a quality full time gig than a part time gig. As many of us enjoy working on side projects and don't want to work 40 hours a week for somebody else, why is nearly every hiring post for full-time?
As the technical lead for an 8 person startup, my needs are for team members who can take on responsibility for part of the operation. Part time employees don't usually do this; instead you pass off well-defined projects that they can complete mostly independently. That work of carving off projects in a well-defined manner is work! Work that I have to do and I've got more than enough other work to keep me busy.
TL;DR I need a dedicated team, not low-investment part timers
Why is the assumption that someone working 3-4 days a week can't take on a large project or won't be dedicated? That seems completely non-obvious to me. Sure a project might take a week longer, but it also might not. A lot of my best work comes after extended periods of letting my subconscious mull things over.
One possible compromise I could imagine is something like three 9 hour days with an hour of emailing/communication/brainstorming the other two days. And maybe once every month or two they come to work an extra half day for an important meeting.
With a 30-50% pay cut, this setup will be positively affecting the burn rate/payroll expenses and it could easily be a better investment than the standard work arrangement. Obviously not every potential team member would be the right fit for this, but I think many would.
>Why is the assumption that someone working 3-4 days a week can't take on a large project or won't be dedicated?
This is because those huge projects tend to require a high degree of coordination and planning, and that means the people involved need to be available to the rest of the team. And if they're not available, they aren't involved.
Be careful with Facebook advertising. If you're not, you'll waste a lot of money very quickly.
Some guidelines:
1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks. As an example, you can choose to target only users of your audience who use Gmail. In the U.S. at least, this works because Google makes it very difficult to set up fake accounts in mass due to phone verification. There are many other targeting options as well that will significantly reduce fraud.
2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt. Your posts will show much more ROI when there is social proof.
3) Focus on post quality and virality. Posts that have low interactions are just going to be difficult to show any sort of ROI. The power of Facebook is when you combine the organic WITH the paid reach. The paid helps you initially get in front of the appropriate audience, and then when your post is shared and liked it will organically show up in the newsfeed of their friends and followers. This is where the the true power of Facebook advertising lies.
Now personally, I've seen much more ROI with Google than with Facebook. Search/purchase intent is the differentiator: visitors are coming to your site with a goal in mind. With Facebook ads, however, I've run campaigns where 70% or more of the incoming traffic bounces within a few seconds. In my experience it's much more difficult to get quality traffic from FB, but far from impossible.
Thanks for chiming in. A few comments regarding your guidelines.
1) Change your targeting to reduce fraud clicks.
- I did, and I actually had M, the Facebook Global Marketing Specialist, comment that my targeting was solid. If this becomes a game of guess-and-check, then that's borderline gambling. I had a pretty specific target group, and that got me nowhere.
Also, whenever FB responds with "you need to improve your targeting," I interpret that as "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome."
2) Always use the hack mentioned by adambratt.
- I incidentally tried that with one of my previous ads. No luck. Try try again?
3) Focus on post quality and virality.
- This sounds like a bit of 1 and 2 put together. Again, when FB gave me this canned response, it started to sound like "stop sucking, and then you'll be awesome." My messaging was both clean and direct. Even for the Japan market (with specific targeting), I wrote IN JAPANESE "whether your on the train, at home, or in school, listen to my podcast to help you improve your English listening skills." Again, nada.
Do you have any specific anecdotes with your own business and FB advertising that you could share?
Thanks for mentioning Google, I'll research it to see how it could help me.
Hi, unfortunately I've stopped Facebook advertising altogether and have not been active in it for a while. The key takeaway I learned with marketing/advertising is that its equally an art as it is a science. It's a different mindset than what I'm used to (you could say I'm a programmer). This combination of art and science is what makes marketing effectively on platforms like FB so difficult.
I can understand your frustration with FB. I was just as frustrated when I dove in. Good luck to you.
PS: It absolutely is very close to borderline gambling / borderline day-trading. However it's NOT, and that minute difference is where the arbitrage can be found. Cheers!
As the rate of innovation continues to increase exponentially, these so called "bubbles" will only grow bigger. The future will have A LOT MORE companies valued at 1000x revenue, not less. Think about all the new industries poised to exist just in the next decade: A.R. V.R. A.I., Bionics, Space, etc etc. Exciting times we're living in.
The housing bubble lasted a long time, even when people in 2004 were sounding the alarm bells. It kept going. A bubble bursting doesn't mean everything is getting wiped out, and it's nothing to fear...just something to hedge against. It does hurt people, and that's unfortunate, but it has to happen. It might even put me out of a job, I hope not, but it's very possible.
Yet as much as it hurts, it has to, and will happen. Doesn't mean it will be as bad as 2008, but it's part of the business cycle. I don't think there's any denying that valuations have gotten way out of hand, especially in the private equity and VC world. But trying to call a top is just as hard as calling a bottom, if it were easy policy decisions would be easy.
It's a "creative destruction" within the capital markets. Gets the dumb money out...funds businesses that actually make money and builds upon the rubble on a stronger, firmer foundation.
That assumes the Fed can make the economy grow with the flip of a switch, and that it could contain contagions. I'm all for taking away the Fed's discretionary powers, I think that would smooth the business cycle, but it would not eliminate it. Recessions can occur naturally.
My wife showed me a video earlier of some kids laying under a trampoline, and on top of the trampoline was balloon slowing filling with water. The kids are giggling because they know what's going to happen, they just don't know when: the balloon will pop and they'll get soaked. But the balloon continues to fill with water until it's almost the size of the trampoline top itself. It seems likes it's taking forever to fill, and the balloon is much larger than anyone in the video expected. Maybe it won't pop...and then it finally does. The inevitable happens and the kids are soaked.
I don't think the argument is whether we are or are not in a bubble. It seems pretty clear that a bubble is filling around us (whether that is a slow or quick fill is a personal point if view). The argument really should be how long do we continue to risk getting soaked versus staying dry (keeping our investments). I think some are finding a solution by removing themselves from the equation and taking their investment dollars elsewhere. And that singular act, if/when it starts to exponentially grow, will ultimately decide the timing of the burst.
I'm uncertain if this is true. The market is the market is the market. The value of a company is what investors believe it to be. In tech, unlike an industry like lets say, Automobiles, this "worth" is very difficult to quantify. Tech companies can be scaled to near infinity (Apple) or go to zero with one wrong move. Investors are placing their bets.
Whatever industry replaces "tech" as the next great revolution (perhaps AI?) will have "bubbles" orders of magnitudes greater than what we're seeing now. If you think we're in a bubble now, which we very well could be (I'm unsure), just wait for the future.
It's housing prices in Flint, Michigan. It hit a peak of $172K in 2005. By 2011 it was $106K, or about the same price as in late 1995. Currently it is at $140K, which is essentially the price in 2000. Assuming it goes at its current rate, I guess it will be about the year 2020 before it recovers to its 2005 high.
Now, it's not really fair to call this a "bubble" since externalities are at fault. However, if you look at the increase (1.6x in 10 years) against an inflation rate of 3% (1.3x), you can see that housing was over valued during that period. I'm pulling the inflation rate from http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-in..., and if anything overestimating it.
If you look at today's price it has a multiplier of 1.3 from the 1995 price, so it is still slightly undervalued, but should catch up to inflation in the next few years.
My point is that despite the credit crunch being the underlying cause of the crash, the market had been growing at nearly twice inflation for 10 years. 11 years after the crash the market is still recovering and it will be a couple of years before you get to reasonable prices. So you can go a very long time before unsustainable growth will collapse. This leads to a very, very long time for recovery.
I live in Japan. It is 2016. The market still has not recovered from 1992. If the world ever gets into an energy crunch, I think we might well look at the last 50 years or so as being a "bubble".
How does a house gain value? You can renovate it (real growth), or you can hold on to it and hope that someone will pay more for it. People don't think about it, but houses are relatively liquid assets. Let's pretend they are tulips, just for fun.
Imagine that you bought some tulips and just by hanging on to them for a while, you can realise a profit. This would be cool because everyone could put all their spare money into tulips and then turn around and sell them for a profit. Because the price of tulips keep going up (and people want to spend some of their gains on other things), eventually people will be able to buy less and less of them. However we might be able to raise salaries so that people can afford these tulips endlessly. In this way the inflation rate will exactly match the increase in price in tulips.
If we can't raise salaries to match the increase in the price of tulips, eventually people will be priced out of the tulip market and demand will dip. This will cause the price to fall. If people start to think, "Hey wait a minute. I'm not guaranteed to make a profit with these tulips after all", the price can fall a lot. If people start realising that they need to take a loss on their tulips so that they can afford to eat today, the price can tumble. How far can it fall? Mostly it depends on how clever people were for keeping the tulip bubble going. The more clever they were, the worse the potential fall. Essentially, it is likely to fall to the point at which the price of tulips escaped from inflation -- because it is a liquid asset and the need for tulips hasn't increased substantially over that time period.
Demand can influence the price of houses (and obviously did in Flint), but the degree to which the market dropped was a result of how overcooked the housing market was. Beware. Flint was never as overcooked as some markets are and people were never as clever about keeping the values high as some markets are.
Can a bubble last 10 years or more and then wipe out all of those gains? Absolutely. I only picked Flint because young people are likely to have heard of the problems there. You could also look at the housing market in London in 1991/1992.
Can the tech bubble burst and wipe out 10 years of gains? Sure. No problem. That's the only way I could interpret the person's question, "Can a bubble that has lasted 10 years still be called a bubble?" Definitely.
To be more mathematical, your property is the house plus the land under it.
People will not pay more for the house than replacement value. If you keep it in good order, you can keep that value up.
The land can't be `replaced'. So for pricing we look at the whole future income stream discounted to today's dollars at some appropriate interest rates.
That income stream is, yes, basically what other people are willing to pay to use that piece of land.
What people can afford to pay for rent is basically what's left over after they paid other things. You can see it as an auction. That's why land values in silicon valley are so high. (Exacerbated by the fact that local regulation there makes it almost impossible to substitute capital for land, ie you can't build up.)
But it's also very important to understand that there is a ceiling. There will be a point at which Silicon Valley startups will stop increasing salaries. People will no longer be able to buy a house. Demand will drop and so will prices. If this occurs at the same time interest rates rise, people will not be able to afford to renew their mortgage and the house of cards will tumble. If the prices are really high and nobody has paid off any of the capital on their properties (as in London in 1991/92 and Tokyo where people had multi-generational mortgages), people will not be able to afford to sell because they owe more than they can sell the house for. But they will be forced to sell because they can't afford the new mortgage. There will be a rash of personal bankruptcies and unless someone steps in, very, very nasty things will happen. In London, the Japanese bought up the land (ironically just before their bubble burst). In Tokyo the government stepped in.
I don't know when, but everything is lined up "nicely". Ridiculously low interest rates, sky high prices, insane salaries. Even if SV companies move to a cheaper location to save on salaries it could trigger the collapse. Seriously not looking forward to a time when the fed raises interest rates to protect a falling dollar... Etc.
That's why I am in favour of taxing land values (as a proxy for unearned land rent), and the central bank targeting nominal GDP levels.
The former policy dampens land price bubbles and raises taxes in the most economically efficient way possible; the latter avoids real shocks in one part of the economy taking the whole house of cards down.
Ideally, no single company would then be too big to fail.
But the term bubble, at least when used by the media, also seems to have a connotation of bursting in the near future. If someone told me tech was in a bubble, but the pop wouldn't be for another century, I would not define it as a bubble. Even if the future pop was enormous.
What if the century long bubble concluded with a pop that resulted in total economic collapse? I'm not suggesting that is likely, just that the defining characteristic of a bubble seems to be the magnitude of the fallout after the pop, not the span of time leading up to the pop.
Investors, especially those of public companies, are known to be short sighted. Typical investors would never call it a "bubble" if they felt the pop wasn't for another decade, let alone a century.
Perhaps both the magnitude and the time leading up to it are of equal importance.
It's probably better to think of bubbles as the accumulation of unsustainable behavior.
Obviously we aren't able to predict a few months into the future, let alone a hundred years, so it's hard to definitively say whether current behavior is sustainable for a hundred years or not.
It's much more reasonable/believable to say that current behavior is unsustainable for 1, 5, or 10 years.
Which brings up the interesting problem that, in theory, we can never be sure it is or is not a bubble unless we look at the behavior in the limit as t -> infinity. One problem with gauging things in the universe (or in the economic sense, the fundamentals in order to value something) is that we will likely never have the tools to do it in the "real" sense.
It hasn't lasted ten years. The last one ended with the great recession, and was of course never a bubble of the scale of the dotcom bubble. This latest semi-bubble (ie extremely elevated valuations) - caused solely by the Fed's hyper low interest rate policies pushing up all asset prices - is far more similar to 2005-2007 than 1999. The pre great recession semi-bubble in tech was also caused by asset inflation from bad Fed policy mistakes.
It's also why this latest bubble / not-bubble was popped by the first Fed moves toward hiking rates. All the panic around unicorn blood in the street started exactly in line with the Fed's moves to hike rates (nice coincidence eh). And it's also why the stock market has struggled to move higher since the Fed's QE program ended (sideways for ~19 months now). If the Fed hikes rates (which they won't in any meaningful way), it'll continue to deflate all elevated asset prices.
one could argue there was a kind of bubble of the American middle/working-class from say 1945 through the 80's/90's. and that this bubble has been deflating since, through a combination of Mexican labor immigration (both legal and non), off-shoring of jobs to China/India/etc, and the increasing automation of software and hardware whose benefits disproportionately flow towards the capitalists and the highly technical specialists like programmers. That would be a kind of bubble which lasted a half century. Period where that segment of American was "over-valued" relative to otherwise comparable people who happened to be born in other countries around the world.
But by that logic if global warming throws us back into a pre-industrial age, we could call the entire period from the industrial revolution until now a bubble. Or we could go even bigger and say if all of humanity happens to die out due to some self-created catastrophe, humanity was the bubble.
The above is a very cynical interpretation. What it fails to capture is the idea that incremental benefits multiplied by millions of people is a huge NET benefit to society as a whole.
An anecdote: Arrived at the airport the other day and the baggage claim was backed up by about 30 minutes. While 30 minutes is not a big deal, multiply it across the 300 hundred or so passengers on the flight, and you'll get about 6 ENTIRE HUMAN DAYS were wasted due to an operational inefficiency.
But hey, who needs uber when it only takes a few minutes to hail a cab? ;)