TristanKromer's comments

I considered adding that but to be honest, the article felt too long. I'm considering hacking a quick online version together in which case it'd be necessary to disconnect betting from the value of the market.

However, I would still probably keep the game binary win/lose and not get into dividing market share. Otherwise it simply wouldn't be as fun to play.

I'm not 100% sure but, I think you might be referring to utilitarianism, not capitalism.

Totally agree with you. Meritocracy is a great ideal to strive towards, but completely unrealistic.

We wouldn't build a bridge and assume our geometry is perfect. Bridges would fall down. We have to constantly try and measure and adjust for how closely our bridge adheres to the blueprint and adjust or refactor as we go.

I probably wasn't clear there.

It's not that the concept of meritocracy is inherently bad. It's just that it's impossible to implement unless all people are perfect, have an exact understanding of what "merit" is, have perfect information etc.

So I'm disagreeing with the idea that Silicon Valley (or Google) is a meritocracy and that the "level playing field" that some people use as an argument against diversity initiatives is actually inherently biased.

Also, I'm not saying all diversity initiatives are great. I know pretty much zero about what makes one initiative better or worse.

I see your point although it's quite depressing.

That's not an inherent property of capitalism.

Capitalism rewarded the slave trade for generations.

The invisible hand is really human preferences. That's what will determine whether a company is punished for sexism or rewarded.

Humans stopped Apartheid. Not the abstract concept of capitalism.

I would love it if meritocracy could work. Sadly, it probably won't be accomplished by humans. Maybe after the singularity. :)

That's a good point. It could be the author of the manifesto thought merit was pure coding ability and others might define it as the ability to work well in a team to achieve a collective goal.

I agree.

But since Steve is eliminating one of the biggest team factors from his class, I doubt he'd be able to get a good vantage point.

Having a shared methodology seems to be necessary, but not sufficient, for a good team. If the team can't agree on how to judge progress towards their goal (whether that's lean startup or a "field of dreams" approach) then it's almost guaranteed to implode after the first big hurdle.

Worse still is if they don't have any mechanism for judging progress. Could be dollars raised, lines of code, written, or hypotheses validated...but there has to be something to provide the team with a shared sense of accomplishment as they struggle.

Go Jay go!

Yeah, I'm sure they didn't. I think the thing that got me riled up was that so many people retweeted and liked it without thinking about what it actually meant.

Stole the idea from Hiten! The man's got the gift.

Yeah...it's a great place to meet people, but it's a bit like going to a bar and looking to get married instead of just trying to get a phone number. You're likely to be disappointed if you're expecting a diamond ring.

Granted...I also thought...wow that could be spammy.

Yeah...when I first heard about it, that's exactly what I thought.

Looking forward to it!

I would have said it's more focused on tightly customer development from my experience, despite the name. Of course, that's a part of lean startup methodology, but I tend to associated lean startup with many of the development techniques such as continuous deployment and rapid A/B testing which isn't necessarily feasible over the weekend (although I've seen some pull it off well.)

This event is being organized with a 9 day window to coordinate with the TechBA program, so that's the reason for the short notice. The blog post is marked Nov because it's a template.

In general I'd recommend plancast, meetup.com, and startupdigest to find out about events like this.

Actually, I put together a list of goings on bet April 15th and May 15th for TechBA: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=tristankromer.com_2...

Seems to be going up and down. Too much HN traffic.

Looks like the site was overloaded. You can go to eventbrite for tickets: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1535024299