[MathsOX]

There was already a lengthy discussion of this piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542091

The piece aside - which I won't make a commentary on - I wonder whether this is just the right level of snark and intellectual elitism (founded or not) to be consistently popular on HN. Why it's worth dredging up, with apparently no new or novel updates, is beyond me.

[yankoff]

But is there anything wrong with his arguments? I don't understand why people get upset at this kind of thing. Why is it bad to try to critically analyze someone's idea especially when it comes to an area of your expertise?

[MathsOX]

"He starts with the assumption of 100dB as the max power but OSHA's ultrasonic recommendation[1] is actually 145dB which is 31,000x more power.. Even if you use 130dB, it's still 1,000x more power than he assumes."

It's not bad, it's that this has already been done nine months ago. The linked post isn't updated - in which case I wouldn't have a problem with it - it's just another outlet for HN to vent at the injustices of the VC world.

[dang]

> it's just another outlet for HN to vent at the injustices of the VC world

Bingo—where the primary "injustice" is that they're giving money to others and not to me.

[david927]

We're at the end of a cycle, so there's a real sense of pop investing and other characteristics that come with it, such as what happened in 1999. That annoys some people, maybe for the reason you mention, or maybe because they like technology and are ashamed that it makes us look like fools.

We both know that in a year from now (but no more than three) there will be 10% of the current number of startups, and investing will be much more grounded. It happens every 7-10 years. No need to take shots.

[dang]

I don't know that, nor do I know about cycles.

My statement was too glib (I edit most of those out, but you got me this time). I do think that one can't understand discussions like this without understanding implicit resentment. Underneath "others are stupid" lies "my intelligence goes unrecognized"; underneath "others are undeservedly rich" lies "I deserve better"; and so on. The drivers, at bottom, are personal, which explains why the discussions aren't intellectually interesting—they're driven by a different kind of interest. It also explains why people are quick to anger and/or show up with guns blazing: these feelings are already in cache. It also, sadly, explains why such posts invariably get many upvotes.

Actually, the discussion might become interesting again if people would speak openly and personally about such feelings. It's the posture of pseudo-critique that's the problem: the format of substantive discussion without the content. The real content there is the emotional charge in the language.

My point here doesn't have to do with VCs or startups or UBeam but with the quality of discussion we want on HN.

[danieltillett]

Dang I agree with you. I actually think at this point the most important thing that YC has invested in is HN. There is no other forum that has a higher signal to noise.

YC has no interest to me as an incubator, but HN has changed the way I look at the world and is directly responsible for my newest venture. I am sure there are many others out there like me.

[david927]

Thanks for writing that, Dan. It's important to clarify what we're arguing about.

Underneath "others are stupid" lies "my intelligence goes unrecognized"

Oh, but that's why it's good to check where this is coming from: It is precisely because I know what brilliant minds we have in this industry that I am disappointed. I am blown away by how much smarter others in this industry are than I am -- and that is one of the reasons it stings. Imagine you have a nephew who you know to be a prodigy and, sure enough, he ends up getting his PhD at MIT, and you're so proud of him. Then he tells you his dissertation is called 'Yo' and is 200 pages about sending 'Yo' to your friends, and how he expects will make him rich, rich, rich!

The disappointment stems from the expectation that he can do better.

underneath "others are undeservedly rich" lies "I deserve better"; and so on.

That's a very strange motivation to project on this situation that we're funding foolish endeavours and not funding truly interesting research. [By the way, projecting jealousy is one of the last tools of defence in the box and one of the lowest. It's easy to use, hard to refute and is rarely germane. Please be careful.]

My comments were made because our industry is a ship driven by greed to foolish ends. We are abundant in potential but are squandering it like spoiled grandchildren. Joe Armstrong opened last year's StrangeLoop with "We can do better." I'm sure you've heard Alan Kay's talks since, what, 1997? He's... jealous? I don't think so. He, like many of us, would just like to see progress. But we've made little-to-no progress in the last 35 years.

So when we also see what projects are funded, it's not hard to frustrated. Can you imagine a time when chemistry is exploding and yet it's hard to get funding to do medical research but there is funding, plenty of it, if you want to create better fireworks? Go to a top conference on the most innovative projects and there's not an investor to be found, but stand near someone who just made Angry Birds and you might get a concussion from the stampede.

A much lighter way of hearing what I'm trying to say is this: try to find a TV show called "That Mitchell and Webb Look", Episode 4.1, wherein a chemist who thinks he finds a cure for a disease is told by the owner, M. Ganier, that this is his laboratoire and he demands new ways to make hair silky! I think you'll find it's hysterical and at the same time -- this is how many of us feel.

You're right that you hear emotion, but it's frustration, because it's not that we can't, it's that we don't.

[dang]

> But is there anything wrong with his arguments?

Yes. His sources are a WSJ article and "the loss numbers quoted in UBeam’s patent applications". That's probably not enough information to derive an accurate description of what the company is trying to do, so there's a good chance he's dismissing a straw man.

He claims that this investment took place "without even the slightest sanity check" and that "no one is doing the hour’s worth of basic math". How does he know this? He doesn't; he assumes it. The odds are low that neither A16Z nor anyone else would have asked for a sanity check (Stanford is down the street, after all), so a charitable approach (http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html) would pause to question this assumption. For a nice example of how to think charitably, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542253 from the previous thread.

But the ranting language in the article indicates that he doesn't want to be charitable. His purpose is not to investigate wireless power transmission, it's to confirm the angry worldview he recites at the end, complete with vaccines, yogurt enemas, and clueless VCs. Such articles resonate with others with similar angry worldviews. That's the real dynamic of discussions like this. It has nothing to do with physics; physics was just the kindling this time.

Who knows if UBeam will work or will make it to market. If it doesn't, though, this will likely be for some reason other than an obviously stupid mistake that a throng of internet commenters saw through in a few minutes.

Let's not forget that investors like A16Z and others are supposed to invest in things that don't work in the end. If they don't, they're not doing their job, which is to take enough risk to reach the borderline of what's possible. (Let's also not forget how another common complaint is that VCs never invest in anything hard. Internet commenters get to have it both ways.) If they're doing their job well, the likely outcome is still that this investment will fail, because most do. In that case you can expect these sproutlings of dismissal to yield a full harvest of I-told-you-so's—but they'll still likely be wrong, because the due diligence of any VC doing a good job would include precisely the sanity checks and basic math being wielded here. Are they doing their job? I don't know, and neither does any other commenter here, and in such cases it's the Principle of Charity we should all fall back on.

Wishful thinking about the stupidity of others is a dangerous thing to take pleasure in. It stops up the mind, and makes for mediocre Hacker News threads.

[revelation]

You could use this line of reasoning to argument for being charitable to people trying to invent a perpetuum mobile.

[dang]

No, you would use it to ask if you know enough to be sure that that's really what they're trying to invent.