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So Close

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Re: So Close

#181

Post by austenallred »

minimaxir wrote: post #172
austenallred wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much. And Hacker News is full of people who lob bombs at everyone who tries and fails because it makes them feel superior for never having tried, all the while vastly underestimating the difficulty of building something meaningful. Most efforts at building something great fail, so it’s easy to shit on everyth…

"Hacker News always trolls new products" and "Entrepreneurs should always ignore Hacker News because they always troll new products" are equally problematic absolutes.

On that we are agreed

Re: So Close

#182

Post by austenallred »

yawaramin wrote: post #168
austenallred wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silicon valley is chock full of know-nothing delusionals who love the smell of their own farts a little too much. And Hacker News is full of people who lob bombs at everyone who tries and fails because it makes them feel superior for never having tried, all the while vastly underestimating the difficulty of building something meaningful. Most efforts at building something great fail, so it’s easy to shit on everyth…

The thing is, I bet you they would find sympathy here if they launched, competed, and couldn't find a toehold. That would have been an honourable exit. But the way they went out here, after burning through $45m in investment funds and mismanaging a potential sale, then trying to imply blame on the would-be buyer--this doesn't look good at all. Edit: example of HN crowd sympathetic to a postmortem https://news.ycombin…

What shows us it was mismanaged? How do we know the acquiring company didn’t cold feet and bail after the founders had run out of options to hedge?

You can’t raise a round with an acquisition pending, so you kind of have to put yourself in a precarious position. Perhaps they could have done something else, but hindsight is 20/20.

Re: So Close

#183

Post by austenallred »

dang wrote: post #180
exergy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My apologies. You've a tough job as it is without me adding to your woes.

No worries! Thanks for listening. This is slippery stuff that we all need to be mindful of, especially at 4 AM. Myself certainly included.

Partially my fault as well. My apologies.

Re: So Close

#184

Post by chatmasta »

kevinburke wrote: post #130

I worked on Otto's server side software as a contractor for five months. The company had some servers written in C and exchanging messages using a custom binary protocol, designed for millions of transactions per second, when they needed only 2-3tps, readability, and the ability to make fast changes. We rewrote those servers in Go, found and fixed consistency errors in them, and actually got to the point where you co…

Sorry. That sucks. But why did you spend so long working without getting paid?

Re: So Close

#185

Post by anonfunction »

bambax wrote: post #128
anonfunction wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an interesting definition of love. May I ask if you have kids? For me, love is multi-faceted and can’t be defined as a single attribute like trust. People love food that literally kills them. You don’t always get to choose whom or what you love.

> May I ask if you have kids? Yes you may. I have 3 (8-9-12). I don't "trust" them to not eat candy that I said they shouldn't eat, but I do trust them not to kill me in my sleep -- which is what trust is about (IMHO). In fact I think I trust them more than I love them, and I love them a lot. But sometimes I'm upset with them. Being upset or angry doesn't affect trust. Trust is a kind of binary quality that is either…

So I guess you don't believe in "unconditional love"?

I just can't imagine not loving my kids even if I knew I could not trust them. Another example would be family with mental illness to such a degree you may actually fear they will kill you in your sleep, but hopefully they would be placed in a safer environment and still have their families love and support.

Re: So Close

#186

Post by anonfunction »

codinghorror wrote: post #150
bambax wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> May I ask if you have kids? Yes you may. I have 3 (8-9-12). I don't "trust" them to not eat candy that I said they shouldn't eat, but I do trust them not to kill me in my sleep -- which is what trust is about (IMHO). In fact I think I trust them more than I love them, and I love them a lot. But sometimes I'm upset with them. Being upset or angry doesn't affect trust. Trust is a kind of binary quality that is either…

Look up the marshmallow experiment.

I'm wondering how this is relevant, when I looked at the wiki article[1] it seems to be about delayed gratification.

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

Re: So Close

#187

Post by dang »

angel_j wrote: post #174
dang wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post indignant rants like this to Hacker News. It reliably leads to garbage threads, as the embarrassing sequence of 'fuck you', 'fuck you and your farts', and 'no fuck YOU' amply demonstrates below. It's cringeworthy. The users who posted those things should be ashamed of defacing HN this way, but the original fault lies with your comment, since had you posted a thoughtful one instead, those other comme…

I disagree. Civility in conversation has been a tactic used against women for centuries. "You can't talk that way! It's un-lady-like!" It is the morality of society who want to control those they oppress, by silencing them. And I didn't post from the bottom of the barrel, FYVM, I posted from the bottom of my heart.

I'm familiar with that argument against civility, and even sympathetic to it, but I don't see how it applies here. We're not asking anyone to be "ladylike", nor trying to prevent anyone from voicing their experience of the world—quite the opposite.

It doesn't work, though, to invoke such noble categories as standing-against-oppression to justify ordinary internet flamebait. There's far too much flamebait out there and it's all largely interchangeable. It all leads to the QED of online fora, "fuck you". We're trying, against long odds, to have something more interesting.

If you're saying you didn't intend to post ordinary internet flamebait, I believe you. In that case it would be good to distinguish your comments from that more clearly. We only have your words to go by, not the intention behind them. If the words fit the flamebait genre, that's the effect they're going to have whether you mean them to or not. This effect is destructive on the container here, so we have no choice but to moderate it.

HN is more fragile than most people realize. Some people seem to think of it as a corridor of power, which it's a blow against oppression to trash, but that's definitely not what HN is. I think of it more as a city square or park, and when people throw garbage in it (or appear to), they're just spoiling the opportunity for others to enjoy it and maybe meet and create together. If you're trying to express something for principled reasons, as your comment seems to suggest, that's fine. There are ways of doing so that make this place more interesting and that don't require you to compromise or mute your views. Scorched earth is not interesting.

You're welcome to post from the heart here. I wish more of us would. In my experience, doing so involves taking a certain risk of vulnerability. If all you do is heap scorn on something that pisses you off on the internet—which is how your comment read to me—that doesn't feel like a heart connection. It feels like the same war most people in online forums seem captured by, and which we're hoping to find a small corner of shelter from in this community.

Re: So Close

#188

Post by mark-r »

taway20171214 wrote: post #18
twblalock wrote: post #10

If I understand the sequence of events properly, the company entered acquisition negotiations and agreed not to solicit other bids during that time. When the acquisition fell apart, the company was out of money and had to stop operations. If that's correct, it seems to me like it's something they should have known in advance -- if they knew they would be out of money by the end of the year, why would they enter acqui…

people only get backed into corners (i.e., exclusivity, compelled actions, or some kind of limitation on funding, bad pricing) when they're desperate. protip: never be desperate. easier said than done, sort of like "eliminate refined carbs from your diet" or "save enough for retirement" or "stop looking for love in all the wrong places"

The post didn't say this directly, but it could be that they had no other options. He said that they had started fundraising efforts and were resistant to an acquisition - reading between the lines, their attempts for another round of funding were shot down cold.

Re: So Close

#189

Post by dingo_bat »

jamestimmins wrote: post #144
siddharthdeswal wrote: post #136

It's good this happened, else we'd have another Juicero on our hands. Ridiculous price, beautifully over engineered product, a slight update to a centuries old problem, but at least they didn't get the opportunity to burn up as much investor money as Juicero.

That said, most people use locks multiple times a day (and keep keys with us at all times), whereas we rarely drink juice. Juicero was a high cost solution for a relatively uncommon use case. This appears to be a high cost solution for a common one. It's possible that it was overpriced, but the idea of paying $600+ for a phone would have seemed nuts years ago as well. It's easy to say something has a ridiculous price…

> and keep keys with us at all times

Except this lock also has a key. It's the $1000 smartphone you carry everywhere. That is prone to running out of charge, getting stolen, getting broken, not being in range of a signal, etc. The whole idea was bullshit from the get-go.

Re: So Close

#190

Post by dingo_bat »

rosegarden wrote: post #116

there's a ton of focus on the price, but they could have easily priced it at $499 or $399 and ended up in the same situation. the acquisition was going forward even at that product price. It clearly wasn't the price that was the issue. They were pre-revenue and the acqusition fell through - that's a very vulnerable spot for a start up.

What about if the lock was priced according to the established prices of locks?

This is a random lock of the same type: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CMMBATI/ref=abs_brd_tag...

$40 on Amazon.

So you've got a lock with bluetooth which adds utility. So double it, hell triple it. $120. I think if their product was priced at $120 we would not be looking at this result.

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