131–140 of 159 posts
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I am not dying for a synopsis. But I would still like one. Mostly because I've been trying to stick all of my knowledge into draw.io diagrams. And the first step of doing that is getting a textual version of the information.
Don't just throw that random fact like it's nothing. It deserves it's own Show HN
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> “I'm not trying to be pedantic” Nobody likes to think of themselves as being pedantic. But people can choose to make an effort to avoid being pedantic. Instead you’ve chosen to use emotive words like “historical revisionism”, “fascinating”, “sad” and “oblivion” to create drama over something that, as I said in another comment, for all we know, PG may not have even properly heard. If you’re a PG fan, perhaps have a…
Fair enough. Thanks for the comment; I appreciate your perspective.
“The mistake you will most likely make as a startup founder is coming up with your own vision of what your product should be instead of getting feedback from actual users.”
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The pacemaker example doesn't resonate with me. Its a very well-posed problem - don't let the patient die. You don't have to be user to understand how to make things better. For things like personal computing its a bit different. Problems are very ill-posed and often the question is what to make. In the second category its better to start with a map of the future and refine it with user feedback. However often users…
Perhaps I should have quoted the specific point I was responding to: > You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good. That doesn't say anything about product or market. It's a very general statement that I happen to find rather dangerous in terms of hiring/employment practices. I tossed out pacemakers as a very obvious counter-example. I could come up with plenty of others--some from my own work ex…
For example, a lot of people want their salmon cooked extremely well done, when you as the chef, think this is wrong, but this is what the customer wants, so you do it anyway, but you no longer care about it.
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Oh, I had't heard of that. I haven't consulted my friend Google yet, but could you name some of those sites? Thanks.
That's one of them: https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/weekend-post/karagarg...
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Yeah, our language model needs some work. We're constantly improving our engine though. Since we are manual transcription service, we can feed back the hand-made changes by humans back into our model and re-train it. Thanks for checking it out!
No worries. You do punctuation better than youtube. I was wondering if you could do a hack which kind of combined the two results. Youtube must be doing something kind of sophisticated to get things like "Paul Buchheit" correct like doing a pre search of people connected with Paul Graham.
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I don't think there's been any "getting angry as soon as people disagree" - he's substantially edited essays in response to critiques. It's pedantry and the presumption of malice that were probably the hard things to deal with, and he just realised that his time and energy would be better spent being an attentive father and partner. Good for him.
I disagree. I think his way of having a debate is very dysfunctional. Many of his essays makes themselves hard to argue with rhetorically. He doesn't leave much room in the text itself nor in the medium for people to share their own opinion about it. And when people despite that still do write e.g. blog posts his response isn't to their argument, but that they have misunderstood what he meant. The way to make pedantr…
Was Geoff adequately prepared to host? I watched a few minutes and his introduction was pathetic. As was his setting of the agenda(which he didn't do any of). Were his discussion points later on good? If they were, I'll go back and watch the rest of this. Otherwise half of the video time (when Geoff is speaking) seems a waste to me. ;)
Was Geoff adequately prepared to host? I watched a few minutes and his introduction was pathetic. As was his setting of the agenda(which he didn't do any of). Were his discussion points later on good? If they were, I'll go back and watch the rest of this. Otherwise half of the video time (when Geoff is speaking) seems a waste to me. ;)
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Why founders? It seems like that will be true for some businesses and not others. Case by case basis.
It's true in any business where the primary risk is understanding what to build and not how to build it. That's not all businesses - for things like medical devices, avionics, high-performance computing infrastructure, self-driving cars, etc. it's very clear what the product needs to do, and not all that clear how to do it. But those businesses usually require deep industry knowledge and advanced technical education…
I really want to believe that your statement is true, but it appears to be eliding 4 dimensions into 2.
All businesses, regardless of size or type or industry, will run the risk of going out of business. Let's call this market risk [0]. Market risk is to businesses as dying is to humans, with the small difference being that businesses can postpone dying by pivoting to a different market. (Humans have not yet figured out how to postpone death and it is unlikely we ever will.)
What makes startups particularly exciting to discuss on HN is that they come with an additional challenge: technical risk.
Both risk types suffer from the what/how dilemma you pointed out: what to sell & how sell it (market risk); and what to build & how to build it (technical risk).
To mitigate technical risk is why YC strongly advises batches to camp out of SV for the first few months of the life of the company due to the agglomeration benefits -- the unusally high concentration of technical talent, relative to anywhere else in the world. This increases the odds they'd meet the kinds of technical people necessary to solve the "how to build it" part once the "what to build" part has been identified. If "how to build it" is impossible due to the laws of physics, or not yet possible due to the underlying economics, a startup can fail fast and focus on what is technically possible within the ambits of their meagre resources. With technical risks out of the way, a startup is no different from any other business.
Running a physical bookstore has nearly zero technical risk but suffers from lots of market risk due to competitive pressures from a better stocked bookstore opening next door, or from half a dozen new bookstores hoping to mop up the economic surplus rumored to be present in book selling in a highly affluent neighborhood. Or from an out-of-state competitor like an online retailer.
"What to sell" & "how to sell it" are existential questions that will always hang over the head of any business as long as there is competition.
I'd say that the primary risk of any business is understanding what to sell and how to sell it. Just ask any mom&pop bookstore that closed due to Amazon. Or Jawbone, even though they surmounted their technical risks with a ~$1bn war chest.
[0] https://brendansterne.com/2015/10/07/technical-risk-vs-marke...