That's not an indictment of you. Contrary to popular belief, motivation doesn't much come from within. For almost everybody, long-term motivation is about other people: your friends, your community, and the world at large. You'll be motivated to do something when these groups of people push you to.

And the mechanism for that push is almost always the same: status. In the long term, human beings find it very easy to do things that increase their status, and very difficult to do anything else (except for things that are inherently more pleasurable than difficult — but that generally doesn't include studying CS theory).

This is really hard on college students, because even though good grades will increase your status after college, they rarely do much for your status in college. If you're good, professors might care, but the collective student body won't.

The solution is to find people who really care about your performance in your field of study — maybe a professor's lab, maybe a group of high achievers, maybe (ideally) a club with an external goal (e.g. autonomous vehicle club) — and make those people central to your life by spending a lot of time with them. If you do, it'll become natural for you to work hard at your field. Although still, you'll only be driven to do things that directly increase your status in your group.

And of course, this solution can be hard to implement; spending lots of time with a new group of people takes its own motivation. It gets a lot easier after college, though. After college you get a job, and wherever you work, everybody will care about how you perform.

I'd say more of the motivation comes from taking control of your environment and crafting something from your own ideas, thoughts, and methods then seeing a finished product in the end. Now that is motivating. Once you have a few finished goals under your belt it just seems to flow naturally. Come up with a goal, finish goal, repeat until dead.

One of my biggest goals at the moment is to ultimately help a lot of people. I couldn't care any less about what my status is. I want that feeling that I made a positive contribution with my life.

If the company goes bust convertible debt is worth nothing, like equity.

Where's the upside? Convertible debt seems like a strictly worse investment than stock.

Here's the metagame: investing traditionally sucks for founders. Founders at the top tier of companies now have market power. A betting man might predict it is going to start sucking less for them.

Of course, somebody has to explain the game has changed to investors. Preferably, a respected someone with no immediate need of their money, whose favor investors rely on desperately for deal flow. If he is a really good communicator, he might even get them to agree that this is in their interests, since successful startups are cheap at any price and unsuccessful startups are overpriced no matter what the terms were. If he can credibly claim to represent mostly successful startups, well then, no harm to investors.

whistles

Or it's still just easier to sit and wait for startups to fall in their mouths, accepting whatever terms they might ask?

You're right though. It's the corollary of startups moving to SF because that's where the investors are.

Not entirely true. Convertible debt is subordinated debt, which means that you don't get the first choice of pickings in bankruptcy court. But you are a creditor, and so there is a possibility of getting some money returned from bankruptcy proceedings.

Where's the upside? Convertible debt seems like a strictly worse investment than stock.

Paul Graham's answer is that convertible debt is worse for the investor but better for the founder. Therefore when founders have power they will choose convertible debt, and the upside for the investor is that they have the option to participate in a potentially profitable deal that otherwise they couldn't.

If pg's theory is correct then entrepreneurs with power should choose convertible debt, and investors should express a preference for equity. And indeed it is not hard to find articles like http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/some-thoughts-on-convertible... where investors make it clear that they don't like convertible debt, and try to convince entrepreneurs that they shouldn't either. (Note, when you're negotiating with someone who is trying to convince you of what you should think, you don't have to look hard for a hidden agenda.)

In abstract theory, the extent to which investors don't like convertible debt should be reflected in their offering worse terms on convertible debt deals. Bias the terms enough, and the investor should become indifferent. However my reading of pg's observation is that different terms are being offered to different investors. So the parallel trend is that a few top angels potentially get better terms than the old equity deals, but most angels get worse terms. Which makes most of the angels even less happy.

As confirmation I note that http://www.sethlevine.com/wp/2010/08/has-convertible-debt-wo... raises the experience of an anonymous super-angel and says a year ago these caps “approximated what I’d pay in equity” that they’re now “33% higher than what I’d normally agree to pay now.”

It's (to some extent) true, and potentially interesting philosophically -- but completely meaningless from an engineering perspective.

"1. I denote by A the amount in my selected envelope.

2. The probability that A is the smaller amount is 1/2, and that it is the larger amount is also 1/2."

If we're gonna be taking expected values we need to assume that the monetary amounts in the two envelopes are generated from a probability distribution on the nonnegative reals. Then the probability distribution for the amount of money in the smaller envelope is going to be some kind of curve (call it S), and obviously the probability distribution for the amount of money in the bigger envelope is going to be the same curve only "stretched out" and "squashed" by a factor of two (we'll call it B).

Now if you say "my envelope contains exactly A dollars," you can tell what the probability is that your envelope is the smaller envelope by comparing the relative heights of the two curves at the value A; let's denote these heights by S(A) and B(A). It is certainly possible that the two heights are the same, in which case it's fifty-fifty that you have the bigger or smaller envelope, the rest of the logic holds, and you should indeed switch, getting an expected return of 5/4 * A.

But it is obviously impossible that in general the two heights are the same for any given A, because then the two probability distributions are the same -- and that can't be true, because B is a squashed, stretched-out version of S, and for a variety of fairly obvious reasons you can't squash and stretch out a finite curve on the positive reals and get the same curve (unless that curve is 0 everywhere). And so we can't conclude that in general you should switch, which is good because if you're not allowed to look at the money before you switch it obviously doesn't matter whether you do or not (unless the people running the game are messing with you).

What do you get in return? Essentially the government receives a bunch of claim checks for wealth (remember that "money" itself has almost no intrinsic value; what we're after, from a macroeconomic viewpoint, is a maximal sustainable production of wealth). Your proposal amounts to reducing overall wealth production in exchange for increasing the government's buying power by a comparatively small amount. Forget ethical arguments against it; except in very extreme economic circumstances, it's absurd from a practical standpoint.

That's just not true in either case. If the widespread use of a substance accelerates human work (or learning) by 10% (whatever that means) but halves life expectancy, it almost certainly isn't good. That's obviously pathological but my intention here is only to show that your argument is bad, not your conclusion.

Moreover, you seem to believe that, outside of schoool, people would only take nootropics if the net benefit to humanity outweighs the net detriment; the real world, after all, isn't a competition. The problem is that it often feels a lot like one. If I'm competing with a coworker of roughly equal skill for a promotion and a nootropic is available to both of us that will increase job performance by 5% but noticeably decrease quality of life -- again, this is pathological -- we're put in a prisoner's dilemma: both of us would much prefer that neither of us take the drug if the alternative is that we both take the drug, but both of us have a strong incentive to take the drug no matter what the other one does.

There's no getting around the fact that allowing nootropics in the real world at least has the potential to instigate exactly the same sort of prisoner's-dilemma-esque mental arms race that allowing nootropics in schools generates. Some of the side effects of that arms race might be good, sure, but some of them might be very bad. This issue isn't anywhere near as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.

All that said, I do think that HNers are way too quick to upvote comments that happen to support their previously-held beliefs even when those comments are extraordinarily lacking in nuance (see: the score on your post). But I don't think that's ever gonna change.

You might enjoy imagining a forum where smart people anonymously engage in civilized discussion without need for the kind of lowbrow pleasure-center-stimulation that the current karma system provides, but I doubt such a thing could exist; if it did, it would probably be much less exciting than HN. Smart people who enjoy good discussion are still people, and most of what people do is seek out easy rewards.

You've built something almost impossible here: a place where it's very rewarding to say interesting things and very unrewarding, generally, to say uninteresting things. Don't look this gift horse too directly in the mouth. If you kill the point display on comments I think you'll kill a lot of the content on this site.

Not to mention that, though it's easy to make fun of people who get too sucked in to internet arguments, there's frankly nothing wrong with people going out of their way to correct other people and that kind of behavior is pretty fundamental to crowd conversations like HN. It's probably annoying that jacquesm's popular approval forced you to respond to him, but I (and others) enjoyed reading your comment; I think you'd be hard-pressed to show that you writing it was a net loss activity.