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Two links on ads.

1. Which ad is more effective? HN discussion here.

2. This signals desperation to me for some reason:

I spent a fair amount of my youth as a basement-dwelling video game addict. Much of that time was spent playing the dorkiest of genres: Role Playing Games (RPGs). They’re a kind of video game version of choose your own adventure, except without any choice.

I know, it impressed the hell out of the girls, too.

Anyway, today Google maps today brought me back to those days:

Here’s the story of Codiqa, rejected by Y Combinator and successful almost immediately thereafter.

Of more interest is the HN discussion forum where Paul Graham muses on how they miss eventual successes:

Believe it or not I like this being the top story. We know there are lots of bugs in our process and we want to hear the bug reports.

I went back to look at the application. It fell immediately below the threshold for invitation to interviews. I.e. if even one of us had given them a grade one step better, they would have made it to interviews.

When we make mistakes, it’s usually in this phase. Most of the time when we screw up it’s by not inviting a group to interviews, rather than by interviewing them and turning them down. So this startup is exactly where a mistake would be most likely to occur: in the applications that fell just short of the cutoff for interviews.

The good news is, we’d already decided to fix this problem. We’re going to do 3 interview tracks for s2012, which will let us interview 270 groups instead of the 180 we did last time.

If we’d done that last time, we would have interviewed these guys. But last batch was the first time we did parallel interview tracks at all, and we needed to test whether it worked for 2 before we went to 3.

Counter-factuals are tricky buggers, though. What if rejection was what Codiqa needed?

The power of rejection fuels many (all?) successful people. Most famously it fueled Michael Jordan, who never missed a chance to roast in the flames of past rejection:

“There wasn’t one coach that I didn’t listen and try to learn from,” Jordan said. “They all knew more about the game than I knew, and probably still know about the game, more about the game now, than even I know at this point. But I respect them for taking the time to teach me the game of basketball. Goes all the way back to Clifton Herring, who was the first guy to ever cut me.”

Are Codiqa the Michael Jordan of startups? Likely not, but drive is the most powerful determinant of success and for some reason we find it most easily in real adversity.

Ever wondered what display screens look like at 80:1?

Remember all that cash hoarding corporations are doing, starving the economy of jobs?

Apple alone represents $64 billion or 36% of the total $179 billion increase in corporate cash since 2009. And in 2011, overall corporate cash would have actually declined by $6 billion had it not been for Apple’s $46 billion increase. Unless Apple changes its philosophy towards liquidity by instituting a one-time or ongoing common dividend, or if Apple starts to buy back stock, we estimate Apple’s cash balances could increase by more than $50 billion in 2012 and approximate $150 billion.

Supported by our expectations that consumers worldwide will continue to feast on Apple products, we expect overall corporate cash and its concentration will increase in 2012. Apple alone could represent 12% of total corporate cash, about three times more than the next cash king.

That’s the FT quoting Moody’s (via MR)

On solar power at datacenters:

The solar array requires 171 acres of land which is 7.4 million sq ft. What if we were to build an solar array large enough to power the entire facility using these solar and land consumption numbers? If the solar farm were to be able to supply all the power of the facility it would need to be 24.4 times larger. It would be a 488 megawatt capacity array requiring 4,172 acres which is 181 million sq ft.  That means that a 500,000 sq ft facility would require 181 million sq ft of power generation or, converted to a ratio, each data center sq ft would require 362 sq ft of land.

…Let’s focus instead on large datacenters in rural areas where the space can be found. Apple is reported to have cleared trees off of 171 acres of land in order to provide photo voltaic power for 4% of their overall estimate data center consumption. Is that gain worth clearing and consuming 171 acres? In Apple Planning Solar Array Near iDataCenter, the author Rich Miller of Data Center Knowledgequotes local North Carolina media reporting that “local residents are complaining about smoke in the area from fires to burn off cleared trees and debris on the Apple property.”

I’m personally not crazy about clearing 171 acres in order to supply only 4% of the power at this facility. There are many ways to radically reduce aggregate data center environmental impact without as much land consumption. Personally, I look first to increasing the efficiency of power distribution, cooling, storage, networking and server and increasing overall utilization and the best routes to lowering industry environmental impact.

 

Here is Goldman exec resigning via the NYT. That’s burning bridges with napalm.

The article is pure theater, of course. He is pandering to a Goldman bashing audience in exchange for 15 minutes of notoriety. Only fools double-cross on idealistic grouds alone, so what does he gain from this?

Some thoughts:

1. The infamous Goldman Alumni network is closed, which shuts down quite a lot of post-bank opportunity.

2. He has gained 15 minutes of fame and will bear the standard of anti-Goldman sentiment for a while.

I bet he drives something nice and hasn’t saved enough, so the question is how might one act on #2 for a new job?

It’s either a book, a political appointment or his own hedge fund. Any other business and I’d say reality TV show.

Unlike many readers of Coming Apart, you don’t have to convince me that I live in a Bubble. I’ve known it for decades. In fact, I think my 3-out-of-20 score on the “How Thick Is Your Bubble?” quiz greatly overstates my integration into American society. I live in a Bubble Within a Bubble.

That’s Bryan Caplan.

Unlike most American elites, I don’t feel the least bit bad about living in a Bubble. I share none of their egalitarian or nationalist scruples. Indeed, I’ve wanted to live in a Bubble for as long as I can remember. Since childhood, I’ve struggled to psychologically and socially wall myself off from “my” society. At 40, I can fairly say, “Mission accomplished.”

Why put so much distance between myself and the outside world? Because despite my legendary optimism, I find my society unacceptable. It is dreary, insipid, ugly, boring, wrong, and wicked. Trying to reform it is largely futile; as the Smiths tell us, “The world won’t listen.” Instead, I pursue the strategy that actually works: Making my small corner of the world beautiful in my eyes. If you ever meet my children or see my office, you’ll know what I mean.

One aspect of the Charles Murray debate that I don’t see discussed is the increasing density of subgroups as a potential driver of social phenomena. Bubbles are getting more numerous and more esoteric. Inevitable, I say, social engineering be damned.

Of course, I find the paragraphs above appealing. No doubt Bryan’s a better Libertarian Economics PhD than he would be on his own.*

But what about the bubbles of thieves, terrorists, drug dealers and hackers (bad sense) out there? What grows in those bubbles can break out and ruin your day.

*Addendum: Paul Graham Network(s) function like this: engaged enough to solve problems, but insular enough to supercharge the network effects of smart guys in a room.

I agree with Tyler Cowen too much. But here I go again:

It’s now common that a fire chief has to have a master’s degree. That may sound silly and it would be easy to think that a master’s degree has not very much to do with putting out fires. Still, often it is desired that a firefighter is trained in emergency medical services, anti-terrorism practices, fire science (such as putting out industrial fires), and there is a demand for firefighter who, as they move into leadership roles, can do public speaking, interact with the community, and write grant proposals. A master’s degree is no guarantee of skill in these areas, but suddenly the new requirements don’t sound so crazy.

Some people focus on the signalling benefits of of college. For me college was about integrating into a Charles Murray culture, I think. Much of that is social and to get in the front door of the Charles Murray class you’ve got to have really good communication skills.

I once heard of a series of English proficiency tests at, I think, the FBI (or some similar organization). Most of these were the usual vocabulary and grammar quizzes but the last test was weird: candidates had to watch clips of late night TV monologues and explain why the jokes were funny. Ultimately, communication is about culture.

Tyler didn’t have me in the quote above until the grant writing and public speaking parts. Each of those requires the higher-class communication skills colleges are best at delivering.

The iPad 3 cometh:

While digging through our logs in preparation for our monthly browser stat report, we found 346 visits from a device with a screen resolution of 2048×1536—the exact resolution rumored for the “retina” display in the next-generation iPad. Although a screen resolution by itself isn’t much to go on, a quick search around the Web indicates that there are very few devices in current use that have this same resolution. (There is a $5,000 NEC display for medical use with that resolution.)