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Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

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Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#61

Post by combatentropy »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #21

Is the Google example oversimplified, or is my history wrong? It's reduced here to a "simple database search" but I thought some of Google's novel search technology was there from the get-go, so who cares how the index was persisted?

  > Is the Google example oversimplified,
  > or is my history wrong?
  > It's reduced here to a "simple database search"
  > but I thought some of Google's novel search technology
  > was there from the get-go
The article called it "a simple database search returning ranked results based on the number of backlinks." Therein lies the rub. Larry Page came up with the idea of backlink counting, inspired I think by how in scholarly writing a measure of importance is the number of other scholarly writings that cite it. He first called it BackRub, then later renamed it to PageRank.

Of course there were other pieces of evidence in their secret sauce, and they are ever tweaking it. But I would say that backlinks made the biggest difference. In those days Hotbot and AltaVista returned a cacophony of results based on word matches in the body of the page itself. Google I believe was the first search engine that went by the text in the links of other websites pointing to it. One of Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's professors tells the story of being introduced to their prototype, searching for "Stanford," and for the first time the top result was actually stanford.edu.

A few times people exploited this. For example, someone got a bunch of their friends to link to George Bush with the link labeled "miserable failure," so that when you googled "miserable failure," the top result was George Bush. This is called google bombing.

Another part of their algorithm that proved how far off course most people, including me, thought that the Web should be organized was laid out in Sergey Brin's research pager, "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web." While everybody, including me, thought that the way to bring order to the chaos of the Web would be to somehow persuade more and more people to write better web pages (semantic HTML, microformats, etc.) Sergey Brin just took what he was given. As an example he talks about finding author-title pairs on the Web. He starts with a seed list of, say, five author-title pairs:

  Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn
  David Brin, Startide Rising
  James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
  Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
  William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
and just combing the web for patterns between the elements of each pair. Instead of pristine microformats and "proper" HTML, he takes what he gets:

  title by author (
  title by author (
  author || title (
and other patterns.

He uses these patterns to find more pairs, which he uses to find more patterns, and so on (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/421/1/1999-65.pdf).

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#62

Post by ecnahc515 »

continuational wrote: post #58
Clobbersmith wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack also has an amazing UX, I haven't used a competing product that was as enjoyable to use. Yes I know this is subjective, but of the people I know that like Slack actually love it. Whereas I've never met somebody that loves HipChat.

I'm not fond of the Slack UI. First of all I don't want to talk to "@jjm", I want to talk to John Jameson. Why can't it show me the full, human name? Second, chat is basically the hello world of push based apps, but any other update, like renaming channels, editing documents etc. aren't real time. I have to close the app and reopen it to see the update. Come on! Third, the document feature is not multiplayer. You hav…

Slack has an option to display full names, which you can set. An admin can also make that the default.

Secondarily, the reason for @username is because you basically have to use usernames of some kind to ensure you can directly refer to another user consistently. Users can also setup "highlight words" which will notify them if someone says them in a channel they're in. This could be their name for example, or other things.

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#63

Post by andy_ppp »

mandeepj wrote: post #45
andy_ppp wrote: post #32

I have this magical formula for building a startup that is 100% guaranteed to work, but no-one discusses. - Do something illegal, then lobby for your rights! - DDOS your competition - Be evil - Ignore regulations designed to protect your workforce (often referred to as 'partners', hah!) - Tell everyone you have a special insight in making successful startups - something to do with 'hustle' and 'product market fit' -…

It all sounds uberish too until you mentioned musk

These strategies are intended for individual use but can also be combined for maximum effectiveness.

Maybe you can guess which companies are currently using each strategy. I'll give you one for free; currently Tesla are being very successful with be Elon Musk and burning investor money by talking about self driving cars.

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#66

Post by barrkel »

Retra wrote: post #35
bbcbasic wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Hustle is like a heuristic or genetic search. Trying random things picked up from other companies and mutating them and trying again until certain things seem to work based on metrics. Then doing more of those things.

You can sort a deck of cards by shuffling it if you have enough time.

However, if you move randomly around a discrete 3D space, you only have a ~34% of returning to your starting point, even if you keep moving forever. The more dimensions, the lower the chances that infinite randomness reaches any given point.

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#67

Post by lmm »

anthonygore wrote: post #31

The problem with articles and discussions like this is that the "markers of success" pointed out may all be true, but incidental. Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the foun…

I've been part of at least three organizations that had a running joke of "chat programs suck, I can't believe how stupid their developers are, we could write our own that would be much better". A couple even got as far as writing and using them for a while.

But none of us actually believed it. We all assumed there had to be some good reason that all the chat programs out there were awful - almost an efficient-markets viewpoint. I think Slack's great innovation was the psychological willingness to actually just write a good chat program. (I have no idea how - or if - they figured out the money-making side of things though).

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#68

Post by [deleted] »

dasil003 wrote: post #54
taneq wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one drives me crazy. Sure, you have to be good and smart and you have to hustle, but you also have to be lucky, and luck is a bigger factor than anyone likes to admit. People who make it big forget the luck aspect and start believing that because it worked, they did everything right. They then go around dispensing questionable advice on the basis of 'it worked for them' while knowing full well that they're a mas…

I agree with you, but there's a valid psychological reason that people don't admit to being lucky more often. It's because to maximize your chance of success you have to focus on what you can control. Sitting around and looking at others to try to dissect what was luck vs skill is a sort of armchair criticism where the practitioner is immune to failure by virtue of not even trying. Ultimately the question of luck is…

[deleted]

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#69

Post by dood »

thesmallestcat wrote: post #21

Is the Google example oversimplified, or is my history wrong? It's reduced here to a "simple database search" but I thought some of Google's novel search technology was there from the get-go, so who cares how the index was persisted?

Oversimplified to the point of absurdity. The original Google was based on Pagerank [1], which came out of the postgrad research of Larry and Sergey.

They also had to build a crawler, systems to calculate pagerank on relatively huge graphs, and the search engine.

That is years of decidedly non-trival hard work, both academic and engineering - pretty much the opposite of the 'snowball' the author claims it to be.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Re: Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball

#70

Post by murukesh_s »

daurnimator wrote: post #42
anthonygore wrote: post #31

The problem with articles and discussions like this is that the "markers of success" pointed out may all be true, but incidental. Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the foun…

Step one: climb mountain Step two: build a little snowball Step three: give your little snowball a little push Step four: fret about which direction your growing snowball is going

Step one: climb mountain - Does the mountain mean silicon valley :)
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