There absolutely is. Zero Escape is basically a series of escape room games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Escape

http://www.zerodaysfilm.com/

He outlined it very clearly as an inevitable shift from indefinite optimism to indefinite pessimism in his book "zero to one"

And Matt Taibbi was responsible for the legendary characterization of Goldman Sachs as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Stack-Building-Unbeatable-...

I also have The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and Elliptic Tales on my to-read list once I wrap up Zero.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Days

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/329336.Zero

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Charles-Seif...

- The Hard Thing About Hard Things

- Zero to One (CS 138A)

- The Facebook Effect

- The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

- The Tao of Leadership

- Nonviolent Communication

I never expected it to become the litmus test on where we stand on freedom of expression.

The author is selling his "Zero To Hero" design plans for a shockingly reasonable $10 here:
http://www.frostyfish.com/shop/aquaponics-plans-2/zero-hero-...

And if you want to buy a 4x8 kit, he also has that for about $400:
http://www.coldweatheraquaponics.com/shop/aeration-2/zero-he...

I've been wanting to try it, but have not as of yet.

Almost sounds like a comic book series. OP could be the superhero -- the ability to be contacted by Google, no matter what [bad economy, career goals, whatever].

Yes, I did not RTFA.

- Zero Hedge is good if you take it with a grain of salt

- Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture

- paul kedrosky's blog

couple others, but they interlink with each other

Edit: I mis-read, you actually are talking about Zero Days (2016), which - I meant - shouldn't be confused with an earlier documentary called Zero Days - Security Leaks For Sale.

In Zero to One there is an excellent chapter about the dark side of competition and how it makes you cargo cult your competitors instead of thinking creatively. This is an example.

Don't compete. Innovate and focus on the user and the problem domain, not the others. Otherwise you just become an inferior copy.

Windows 10 Spyware Edition is a misstep like Google Plus.

I'd wager its not an 'if' but a certainty that he knew something few others did.

The need for labor unions is a product of the free market, and a way to build a unique value proposition. With employees that are totally fungible, totally replaceable parts, the marginal value of labor itself is driven to zero. Wages become a race to the bottom, and working becomes unprofitable. But by saying "Only members of the union can work here", the union sharply decreases the available labor pool, thus creating a unique value proposition.

In other words, it's a market response to a market problem.

The people who call for "free markets" and rail against unions basically don't understand what it is they're asking for. They're in love with an ideal, not thinking about how profit actually works in the real world, as a function of economics. It's straight-up ignorance reinforced by puritan idealism.

(mods I promise I'm not here to shill this book but people keep wondering about the history and that's a great resource that I like XD)

What you said about it not being in the numeric system is definitely part of it (ex: roman numerals not having it) but also all the problems that come up with zero have to be dealt with (e.g allowing dividing by it allows you to prove anything, and there's a great proof that winston churchill is a carrot in the book showing as such), and there's some overlap with religions in fearing "nothing" and what that might mean

Now, the most difficult part, is when someone in position of power decides to keep silent — like your manager or another high profile individual. In that case, it's better to bounce, you don't want to work in an org that promotes those kind of people.

Peter Thiel said it best in Zero to One. I'm paraphrasing here, if a start up is not rewarding individuals based off of merit, but PR, then it's time to go.

Charles Seife's "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea"
(http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Biography-Dangerous-Idea-ebook/dp...)

Robert Kaplan's "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero"
(http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-that-Natural-History-ebook/dp/...)

Similar to most of the Monty Python films.

It's like a desert you can only eat in small batches but delivered in full cake size.

That all went away when I discovered Zero MQ (http://zeromq.org/intro:read-the-manual). The manual claims:

"If you've spent years learning tricks to make your MT code work at all, let alone rapidly, with locks and semaphores and critical sections, you will be disgusted when you realize it was all for nothing."

It's not exaggerating. ZMQ's multithreading is marvelous. No mutexes, no locks, no semaphores, no critical sections, no load problems - just perfectly scalable threads that work with any language on any platform. In fact it's so cool, that if you don't have a problem that needs multithreading, go out and find one.

Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking.

Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a monopoly and not a monopoly by simply increasing the definition and size of the market that the company is operating in. (And how companies will generally try to avoid being classified as monopolies this way)

e.g. Google is a monopoly if you consider online advertising as the market, but if you stretch the market to all advertising (including print, radio, TV and billboards), Google might not be considered one.

Similarly Amazon in the e-commerce market vs general retail.

That's not all of retail. It's certain categories in retail. It's significant, but Amazon has a much broader selection of products and competes in far more sectors of the retail industry than Walmart does. Also, looking forward, over the next 10-20 years and given the changes in the marketplace, who do you think is best poised to dominate retail for the foreseeable future: Walmart or Amazon?

https://blog.pipecandy.com/walmart-market-share-story/

As Peter Thiel said in Zero to One, monopolies seek to define their sectors in the broadest terms possible in order to avoid being classified as such.

The Revenge of Geography - Robert D. Kaplan

Prisoner's Dilemma - William Poundstone

The Master Algorithm - Pedro Domingos

Zero-Sum Future - Gideon Rachman

The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama

Entanglement - Amir Aczel

"A board of three is ideal. Your board should never exceed five people, unless your company is publicly held. (Government regulations effectively mandate that public companies have larger boards—the average is nine members.) By far the worst you can do is to make your board extra large. When unsavvy observers see a nonprofit organization with dozens of people on its board, they think: “Look how many great people are committed to this organization! It must be extremely well run.” Actually, a huge board will exercise no effective oversight at all; it merely provides cover for whatever microdictator actually runs the organization. If you want that kind of free rein from your board, blow it up to giant size. If you want an effective board, keep it small."
— Peter Thiel

More board members may increase intransigence, decrease oversight (cover over who is really making the decisions and who is not), and turn US corps more bureaucratic. Never-mind who is joining the board, this is going to increase board sizes, and that's pretty unfortunate for some philosophies of effective management.

If you do not believe this will increase board sizes, then you must believe that all companies are willing to fire some number of current board members to meet their quotas, which seems terribly unlikely to me.

If currently all-male (48% percent of companies have no women on their boards), requiring at least 3 on boards of 6, unless you fire half your current board, is exploding the board size by 50%. Requiring at least 2 on boards of 5, unless you fire ~half your current board, brings the number up to 7. But then you need 3 (its over 6), so you have to add one more, so a board of 5 gets a 60% increase in size to 8 people.

If you want businesses to be successful, you probably shouldn't expand their boards against their will. It is not that female representation isn't a problem, it is that an effective company structure must be foremost, ahead of any other (more arbitrary or ephemeral) requirements. Or else there won't be as many great companies to steward in the first place.

Is Zero to One worth the read?

EDIT:

From https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/about/

"Dave Van Zandt is the primary editor for sources. He is assisted by a collective of volunteers who assist in research for many sources listed on these pages."

All these fact checking organizations rely on young, inexperienced unpaid/low-paid interns to interpret complex situations and provide a final 'truth' score that is then used as some sort of authority. Insanity.

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/

The writer is under a pseudonym but clearly knows his stuff and has connections. He is so well-respected that the NYSE is actually responding to his posts with statements of their own.

People who actually put money on cryonics overwhelmingly believe it’s got a super low chance of working and that the world you might wake up in is just as likely to have endemic social problems and suffering as our current world, or possibly even be far worse in a lot of unsettling ways. People who care about cryonics spend time obsessing over crazy philosophy of mind, AI ethics, and far future forecasting ideas. They don’t go into it lightly with some fluffy ideas of waking up in a peaceful utopia.

As a result, the characters in Zero K just don’t work. Their mix of naïveté but hyper progressive awareness of scientific possibility, while also being wealthy titans of industry for decades, simply doesn’t exist inside the same person at once unless the characters are just purely vehicles for allegory and symbolism, which is hardly what has made DeLillo’s other works notable.

- Harder: Longer and more expensive iteration cycles, MVP can be expensive, manufacturing and production required to scale, expensive certification

- Easier: Raising money (sometimes) especially if you are a moonshot with a big vision. Good example is Boom Supersonic.

Good news is there has never been a better time to start a hardware company than today. Iteration cycles are becoming shorter due to advances in rapid prototyping and there is a lot of capital available, especially in electric vehicles and sustainable tech.

Peter Thiel talks a lot about this in Zero to One, but much of the innovation that’s been done in the past decades has been in the digital space. We have so many problems that require innovative hardware solutions and I think now we are just beginning to scratch the surface.

2. We all met through Formula SAE in college. This is a great place to meet super talented engineers and is why Tesla, SpaceX, and the other top companies in the world recruit heavily from these programs. It teaches you both the hard skills and the soft skills. If you are still in college, I would recommend getting involved in teams like this.

3. I haven't really read anything hardware-startup specific, but I love Zero to One and find myself rereading it all the time.

Would love to hear other peoples thoughts on this as well. Good questions

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and PG is right to point out that the rewards for doing so are huge (this reads a lot like Zero to One).

But in terms of social impact I look at these ideas, with the possible exception of Moore's Law (albeit they are from five years ago) and think, meh?

How much does an incrementally better Google, a slightly faster GMail (exists, if you're willing to give up spam filtering), a replacement to Oxford/Harvard, a slightly better Netflix really get us? Certainly it doesn't seem to solve any of the major challenges that we face today.

In this light, regulation isn't an impediment to business - it's an opportunity. By making the task more difficult, we make it more profitable.

Now, I'm sure you're anxious about some sort of corruption where businesses collude with government to lock out competition. So, tell me... what is a contract? Is it anything other than a regulatory mechanism to exclude competition?

Suppose you start the BuckABucket Trash Company, and charge a buck. I hire you because you're cheap. Then you come back next week and find out I've ditched you for GayNinety Trash Company, who charges 90 cents. Sucks, right? Makes it very hard to commit capital to the business! You just bought a truck and everything. The way you prevent this behavior is by locking me into a contract - you'll take out my trash for a buck, but you get to do it for the next year. Everyone wins. I get cheap reliable trash service, you get a steady customer.

Except now we've just regulated away your competition. Funny, that.

Really, put down the right wing ideology feed about economics and think about how it actually works.

In particular:

  | The reality is, critical readers should read analytic 
  | posts and the rest of Zero Hedge* with the blanket 
  | assumption that the author is totally "conflicted."  
  | (Phrased more logically, that the author stands to 
  | benefit from being right--imagine that).

If you happen to have a collection of design/market/engineering insights that could actually inform a working solution, you'd be a fool to just dump them into the public domain as free 'ideas'.

Executing the creation of a factory to produce lightbulbs is comparatively valueless, compared to inventing the first lightbulb. It's not only easier, it's also less important to society.

New ideas are actually incredibly important, and they might even be getting harder to find [0]. As Thiel said in 'Zero to One' [1]: "Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside." Unless you have incredibly deep pockets or a monopoly, ideas are likely to be the only thing protecting you from your competition.

As an aside: the money isn't in execution, or in innovative ideas, but in the creation of economic moats [2].

[0] http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/B00...

[2] https://news.morningstar.com/classroom2/course.asp?docId=144...

https://twitter.com/#!/GreatDismal

The disjoint collection of esoteric minutia on his feed is a window into Gibson's brand of science fiction. The reason he is so good at 'seeing the future in science fiction' is that he is always converging onto an immediate moment. And I mean that in the short term, from sentence to sentence, and from novel to novel. IMHO, Zero History, Spook Country and Pattern Recognition (the Bigend trilogy) are more sci-fi than Neuromancer.

That's pretty awful, even compared to the notable lack of diversity and bro culture in some tech companies.

However, I do not agree that it's fair to call an investor's competency into question due to their political views. I agree organizations have every right to not affiliate themselves with those investors, but in the real world there are plenty of examples of investors who hold controversial political views.

Logically, there is no a priori reason why "Thiel is a good investor." and "Thiel strongly endorses Trump." cannot both be true. To go further, I don't see an a priori reason why an investor with political views that are antagonistic to the industry he focuses on cannot be a very good investor. It might not be likely, but on its own I do not agree with using politics as a criterion for investing performance. That's silly - just look at investing performance directly.

To go even further, I think it would be disingenuous for groups like YC to announce they will distance themselves from investors they disagree with because "How could they be qualified investors if they hold this opinion?" That's masking the real reason for not affiliating with them, and in my opinion they shouldn't have to mask that anyway.

I also think using that sort of language establishes a precedent that makes the industry less inclusive to people with opposing political views. Much of the tech industry is progressive and liberal, but it would be ridiculous if this was applied to potential founders. Should founders who support SOPA or Trump not be admitted to YC if they are well into a startup that will most likely become the next Google?

Put another way, if you read Zero to One and you found it to be very insightful and full of legitimately good ideas, would you call it into question after learning that Thiel supports Trump? Doesn't that strike you as an ad hominem? Sure, Thiel's political views might be relevant or worth noting as an investor, but they certainly do not define his investment performance.

It took a long time, but for nearly fifty years this effort has carried on, successfully I think, but hardly anyone recalls that the origins of the effort were very deliberate and came about when the nighttime downtown was the precise opposite of what it is today, and few people probably think of it as involving a conscious goal then or now. They just think "that's the way Seattle is." But Seattle wasn't.

This should remind us of yesterday's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400259) about the importance of long-term planning. The good things about today came about because people decades ago consciously made efforts to make them happen. The good things that are to come—light rail, bike lanes, reasonable rents that stem from increasing housing supply—are only going to come if people consciously make efforts to make them happen.

See also Zero to One (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-an...).

Perhaps it isn't so helpful to generalize here but,

a) New businesses that are built for non-digital processes and workflows are very inefficient. Not every new small business is going to gain a decisive strategic advantage in their market. Almost none will. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be teaching students business (value of the MBA another conversation.)

b) I'm not a VC but the returns for startups is something along the lines of lose 100% of the money, may be return the investor's capital, or post a great return. All the mechanics underlying what it takes to make it to 'great return' by itself limit the number of big winners. This isn't investing in apartment buildings, creating a new food franchise, or arbitraging bonds. Most likely the "me too" trend riders will end up in the lose 100% of the money box. That is unless we get leveraged start up investing. Then it could get quite interesting.

I like Nassim Taleb's extremistan analogy for this conversation.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea - Charles Seife

Measurement - Paul Lockhart

Prelude to Mathematics - W. W. Sawyer

Proofs from The Book - Aigner and Ziegler

The Joy of x - Steven Strogatz

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension - Matt Parker

What is Mathematics? - Courant and Robbins

A History of PI - Petr Beckmann

An Imaginary Tale - Paul Nahin

e: The Story of a Number - Eli Maor

Imagining Numbers - Barry Mazur

Journey Through Genius - William Dunham

Prime Obsession - John Derbyshire

(Caution: It was written by gasp Peter Thiel.)

See Zero Tolerance for another example. I snark that the best antidote to this lack of discretion is to fire the management and replace them with a minimium wage position if they won't exercise any thought.

As for durability, I personally fail to see how google and facebook are not durable monopolies - the network effects are so strong. In google's case it is even more than that - it is almost impossible to have a product of comparable quality without the users and the information about their behaviour, which is impossible to obtain because everyone uses google. Gone are the days when good search rankings could be inferred from the link graph of the web.

Peter Thiel in Zero to One asks "What Do You Know Is True That No One Else Agrees Upon?"

Actually facebook et al. only imagine SocialVR with rooms. But rooms are a fiasco.

Do you remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lively ?
The hype on Second Life was high and google decided to enter the social VW arena. In google lively, you could spawn a new room for free, 20 users max per room. It end up with thousands of empty rooms and a bunch of full ones with everyone trying to enter those already full. It was a total failure, stopped after few months.

Every SL user know how it works: you spend a lot of time and energy organising an event, sending invitations, preparing new content, etc... Hopefully people start arriving and then you have fifty attendees and things start lagging and you need to repel new people arriving. There are maybe thousands willing to attend but no avail you will only get <100.

DiveReal have no "rooms", only one contiguous space that never gets too crowded. This makes a huge difference.

Facebook don't know that. They do not understand that with multiuser rooms they are going to have many empty rooms and few overcrowded.

But I agree with you: DiveReal has to be open to all devices. I just started with Oculus Rift because they were more developer friendly than alternatives.

Biotech's dirty secret is that biology is Not engineering (it is still a discovery science)...but the music is still playing folks, dance on!
(Sorry, it's early, I'm still pre caffeinated, and this topic always rankles me).

[1] https://askwhale.com/q/a9dc38

But I digress.

At any rate, the Japanese system clearly works, while the American system is clearly broken. One is selling the same product for half the price of the other. Assuming I'm right about the key differentiator being the Japanese price controls (I could be wrong), then it really makes me wonder why we aren't trying that. Seems like a great way to get costs under control (even shrinking), while preserving much of the complex market and avoiding radical change to almost 20% of the economy.

I think "critical utility services" touches on the importance, but doesn't go far enough. I believe a health care system that denies care purely out of poverty is immoral. A health care system that is the primary cause of bankruptcy for the middle class is immoral. A system that traps employees in jobs they hate, for fear of losing (or even changing) their insurance is both immoral and un-American - what's more American than quitting your job to get a better one, or start your own business? So our system is not just an economic failure, it's a moral failure. It's a stain on our honor and an insult to our values.

In conclusion, I do not give a fuck about "free market" here. I am not putting economic ideology ahead of moral imperatives, and I'm not choosing ideology over observable facts. If I wanted to choose ideology over economic reality, I'd be a communist.

Is this something you have personal experience in? I ask because a lot of people relate this concern because they read about it in Zero Hedge, which is regarded by people in the industry as (as someone here once put it) "a conspiracy theory site without the theories".

Zero to One

Starts with why

EMyth revisited

Black Mirror is more of modern Twilight Zone. Really tight stories exploring a narrow ideas quite well. The only exception is probably "White Bear".

Zero Theorem is kind of the opposite: it felt completely unfocused until the end. I usually hate characters that only exist to deliver exposition but I was thankful for Management's monologues and the dialog with Leth's supervisor. The story felt frozen in place whenever they weren't on-screen.

The diagrams are MUCH better in Zero To One - the class notes had slightly unwieldy prose to convey the same concepts without using diagrams at times.

All that said, I preferred the class notes. Reading Zero To One I personally felt I didn't get much from it that wasn't in the original notes. I find it a little surprising that it took a whole 18 months to have a rehash of the notes released.

Somewhere along the way we fell into stasis. We have a bunch of a problems in society and in the world. They need to be solved. These days the only two dynamic areas are philanthropy and startups. Almost everything else - US federal, state, and local government, large legacy businesses, small businesses, the UN, the EU, NGOs - are stagnant.

I just watched an excellent documentary called "Zero Days" (https://weshare.me/823adb83b8e98628) this morning about the whole Stuxnet (aka Olympic Games) debacle. They really are playing with fire.

As a reader I like finding publishers like that because it reduces the noise for me considerably and improves discoverability: browsing http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-titles or http://www.zero-books.net/forthcoming-titles.html is actually manageable. With a few such publishers (I follow about 5 semi-regularly) you can keep abreast of a lot of interesting things happening without having to recognize the individual authors or do extensive research on them; I outsource the job of doing that to the publisher.

4. Companies increasingly occupy Extremistan, where a large portion of their financial performance comes from one-off, Black Swan events. Both the GAAP and non-GAAP numbers are true but useless; the future cash flows of the company depend upon unforeseeable events in the future.

The description that the article gives of the non-GAAP results supports this. Take, for example, a lawsuit against the company that results in a $5B judgment, payable out over many years to survivors of an environmental disaster. GAAP results include this lawsuit, non-GAAP results exclude it. Which more closely represents the future financial performance of the company, from the POV of a long-term value investor? Well, that depends whether there will be future lawsuits like this one. It depends whether the verdict will be reversed on appeal. It depends how many survivors survive.

The same goes for things like severance pay and patent lawsuits. Increasingly, it also applies to "normal" business, things like product introductions and the price of oil.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel mentions (and decries) that an increasingly large portion of America is adopting an "indefinite" worldview, where the future cannot be known and it's futile to try to predict it. I'm not sure folks really understand the potential implications of this shift. Does "investing" have any meaning when the assumption is that returns will be dictated by large, random events? Does "meaning" have any meaning? What does it even mean to be rational, when reason is a tool we use to predict and our assumption is that events are unpredictable?

One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early 20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs, scientists and technologists in such a small window of time.

If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we had hundreds of Elon Musks.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-16/erdogans-counter-co...

Also some arguing it was a false flag operation https://www.reddit.com/r/Turkey/comments/4t2pso/this_coup_re...

Dunno but something seems a bit off to me. How did they have a list of 2,745 judges to purge and 140 appeals court members to arrest the next morning? You'd think it'd take some time to figure that stuff if they hadn't been planning it.