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Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

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Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#101
post #99
post #50

Maciej Ceglowski has a good bit in one of his idlewords posts about how the "what makes hackers tick" genre is full of pieces that are really "how to be someone just like the author". There's probably nobody that remark applies to more than ESR, and ESR is probably not someone you'd want to work to resemble more closely. So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good id…

I had to wiki ESR, I'd needed to remind myself who he was. And, tptacek, guess whose name I stumbled upon while I was reading his wiki page? Incidentally, I think that section of the wiki is poorly written. I'm left even more confused due to lack of context.

I agree; obviously, I didn't write it. Feel free to delete it.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#102
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!" If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?

The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things that could all individually pan out (or not); or which could all be multipliers for one-another (or not.) If, in the end, you succeed, you end up believing that everything you tried was a necessary part of your success. When, in actuality, you might have succeeded despite some of those approaches, rat…

"The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things..."

This sounds like quite the qualifier...which is fine, but I think it's important to take your response/reasoning into a much more narrow hypothetical.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#103
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!" If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?

I've worn a tiger-warding talisman around my neck for years, and so far I haven't been attacked by a tiger. Is it fair of me to assume that this talisman works, and that I can safely climb into a tiger enclosure?

I would think unless and until you have tested that hypothesis (wearing of the talisman in a tiger rich environment) it's an invalid conclusion.

Now if you have successfully avoided tiger enclosures and subsequently not been attacked by any tigers, (regardless of what you are wearing) that method probably works ;)

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#104
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things that could all individually pan out (or not); or which could all be multipliers for one-another (or not.) If, in the end, you succeed, you end up believing that everything you tried was a necessary part of your success. When, in actuality, you might have succeeded despite some of those approaches, rat…

"The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things..." This sounds like quite the qualifier...which is fine, but I think it's important to take your response/reasoning into a much more narrow hypothetical.

I mean, we're talking about advice for running a startup here—an entrepreneur would be an idiot to not do everything possible to give themselves multiple independent avenues to success (e.g. do multiple forms of inbound advertising; attempt product-market fit with multiple markets; etc.)

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#105
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. But the OP isn't asking for help themselves, and has said nothing about needing help themselves. Maybe they already understand the business side?

Well, it could be a case of "My wife gets upset when I cheat on her. How can I make her understand that it's not a big deal?". I am not saying that it is but I do think that Stephen Coveys famous "seek first to understand, then to be understood" quote holds a lot of truth. In order to communicate your own perspective on something to someone, you need to have a sense of how theirs differs to yours.

Sure, but then... what's the second step? Because that's what the OP was asking for here.

IMHO it's kind of against the Principle of Charity to assume that someone asking a question about how to do part N of a multi-part process, hasn't already figured out how to do the previous N-1 parts of that process. They must have, to get to the point where they're motivated enough to reach out for help with part N.

In programming terms: if I'm writing a compiler, and I'm asking about codegen, the Principle of Charity would suggest that I've already solved enough other compiler-writing problems that I have an input to feed to a codegen pass!

Ignoring the Principle of Charity in cases like this can lead to some really useless/unproductive advice.

For example, I've been writing a research decompiler for an ISA that has less embedded information than usual (e.g. no reified CALL/RET ops, just plain branch instructions.) It needs some weird heuristics to derive subroutines from coroutines, and to properly scope variables. This means that I can't immediately derive an interprocedural SSA form for the variables, in order to help calculate a dominator tree. So I want to ask people how to calculate a dominator tree from stack variables, because having something like that would help as an input into those heuristics.

But every "solution" on StackOverflow-like sites insists that the context of the problem—the assumptions it makes—are impossible/invalid. They try to mentally rewind to step 1 themselves, and then can't understand how I solved it (because I didn't write out the textbook worth of novel algorithms I used to solve step 1 in the problem description), so they don't even believe there is a step 2. Rather than just... attempting to help me with step 2. Which doesn't actually require any understanding of step 1, other than its outputs.

It's sort of the opposite of the XY problem. Rather than the parent problem X being best solved through a different strategy that avoids problem Y, people believe that the parent problem X itself is unreasonable, because they model an X that is solved through Y as requiring that the solution also flow through a previous sub-problem Z; and they think that Z is something that people just don't bother to do, so nobody could actually be asking in good faith about XY.

I've also suffered through this with doctors, who literally won't believe me when I list off the entire sequence of steps they would try and say that I've tried them to no avail. I only go to the doctor when I run out of ways to try to solve the problem myself, so if I'm here, it's because the problem is a zebra instead of a horse! A horse, I would have fixed on my own!

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#106
post #5

I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting. Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlati…

> Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Are there any good resources for learning more about this?

any ABET-accredited engineering curriculum ought to do.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#107
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know of any resources (books preferably) on learning to understand the business and emotional side that you are referring to?

“The Innovator’s Prescription” (Clay Christensen) explains the Innovator’s Dilemma better than the original book and introduces jobs-to-be-done with the milkshake story. “Creativity Inc.” (Ed Catmull) explains how Pixar manages people & throws in a few insights from mature (post Apple firing) Steve Jobs. “Managing the Design Factory” (Don Reinertsen) explains how to prioritize projects and analyze a business for bott…

Thank you. I am already reading Creativity Inc. at the moment and I am greatly enjoying it. I will check out the others as well.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#108
post #5

I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting. Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlati…

"well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!" If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?

It certainly worked for them. But results are not typically indicative of risk, so anyone doing X may doom themselves by doing something that doesn't work in their special context.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset?

#110
Founders need to be technical about something. The idea of a "non-technical" founder is nonsense. I have seen it and they were basically a VC with expensive friends just creating a job for social reason to get them out of the house.

Technical need not mean "code". It could be a medical expert working with a wide array of people to build something. Or a tax-expert. Or an employment expert etc.

Founder is what "product manager" should be. Instead it seems "product manager" is just some glue person at a large organization who is usually not great at accessing optionality and time and money costs.

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