

Subway history: Don't be early - clarkm
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/09/19/subway-history-dont-be-early/

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ggchappell
Interesting article. The first comment (by "dg") is interesting, too:

> Yup. American visitors to Europe + UK often marvel at the efficient
> passenger railway system and wonder why the US can’t build something
> similar, without understanding the history of how they were built. In the
> 1800s early investors/inventors went through a railway mania, grossly
> overbuilt, and went bankrupt. The good lines were later scooped up for a
> fraction of their original cost by a 2nd round of investors, and morphed
> into today’s system. It was never economically feasible to build a passenger
> railway system without first wiping out the “too early” investors.

So while being too early pretty much guarantees failure, it seems we might
need those early people. Perhaps the recipe for an truly innovative society
necessarily includes over-encouragement of bleeding-edge innovator types.
These will almost certainly fail; however, in failing, they allow later
businesses to succeed.

Readers are invited to consider what role Y Combinator might play in this
process. :-)

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bcohen5055
This kinda sounds like dark fiber laid out during the first internet bubble.
Maybe Google fiber is like that 2nd round of railway investors.

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raverbashing
And the first social networks (Friendster/MySpace) with Facebook

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jimmaswell
It's a shame, since MySpace was so much better in a lot of ways I care about,
majorly the HTML customization.

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raverbashing
I don't recommend <blink> tags though.

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joshu
HN really, really needs to stop showing just the domain and show the full
hostname (perhaps minus ^www\d*.) instead.

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mtmail
The bugs and feature request queue got much better recently. In the past it
was just a long and disorganized comment thread.
[https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues)

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akgerber
"But before long more than a hundred decorated omnibuses were crowding the
streets of the city, with names painted on the sides, from George Washington
to Lady Washington to Benjamin Franklin. They were popular. And they caused
complete chaos. For the individual owners of the omnibuses, nothing mattered
more than the paying passenger. Drivers whipped their horses repeatedly to
speed them past a competitor to the next potential fare, even if it meant a
harrowing few seconds for those already on board. Grazing a lamppost to cut a
corner or to cut in front of a rival was fair game, and pedestrians not paying
attention could get maimed by a cornering horse or the trailing carriage."
This sounds exactly like the present situation with dollar vans on Flatbush
Avenue in Brooklyn.

