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Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

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101–110 of 247 posts

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#101
post #5

For me, it's this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.

Predates HN, but the famous Slashdot review of the first iPod is one of those “moments in history” events when nobody really had any inkling of the coming change

> No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#103
post #5

For me, it's this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.

One of the things I look for when getting into a new venture, investment, etc is that most people don’t understand how it would succeed. If I have a deep, realistic understanding of how it will work, that’s all I need. Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does, but you know they will all see your reality as the truth with time.

Another way to think about it is that no product is ubiquitously liked by the entire population. One important part of developing a new product is figuring out who your target audience is. Their feedback is likely relevant to you, but the feedback from someone who'd never use it anyway can probably be taken with a grain of salt. It's very common for people to think that, for something to be successful, everyone must appreciate it. However, that's not true. For instance, there are lots of things I don't see the point of (like tiktok or instagram); yet, they're very successful products. I'm just not the target audience.

That said, I don't even think his main point was really invalid. Dropbox didn't really replace pendrives, people are still carying those around. As pointed out, connectivity is still an issue and people want to have an offline backup.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#105
post #17
post #13

User mikekchar on the value of ideas: My advice is to lower the value of ideas. A lot of time people think, "If only I had a good idea I would be successful". You will see other people saying things like, "Buy my good idea!". But really, good ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas, bad ideas... it actually doesn't make much difference. What makes the difference is execution and timing. For things that take a long time,…

Good comment. Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.

I think the best way to evaluate an idea is to ask if you'd use it yourself. If it solves a problem for you, there will be others that want it - nobody is unique. It's when you think you know how to solve someone else's problems that things go wrong - collaboration is important in that case.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#106

One of my favorites is a super-long one by a user named bane, about three solutions to speeding up computing: (1) "high" (more RAM, CPU), (2) "wide" (more machines), and (3) "deep" (refactoring), which is what he recommends first. More than once he has rewritten something that was running slowly even on the latest and greatest architectures (perhaps partially because of that), to running on a single machine, even an…

This is now my favourite comment!

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#107
post #10

A commenter talked about his experience with testicular cancer and encouraged other 20-34 year old men to check themselves. So I did, found a lump, and because I found it early it was removed with no further issue. So that's definitely one of my favorite comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120102

Are there any other checks that one could easily do that could help with detecting these kind of random diseases early?

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#108
post #5

For me, it's this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.

The comment is interesting because it's such an exception. This community is almost fatally optimistic and has blind spots where skepticism and criticism could be. Our website should have the X-files "I want to believe" poster as the HTML background. My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.

I was curious about this so I dug up an early comment thread about Theranos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349

There is some optimism about the Theranos mission, and a lot of skepticism about their implementation. Most of the comments are centred around the composition of the board and (correctly) surmise that the lack of medical expertise is a huge red flag.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#109
On what should you be:

> This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends. His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".

> But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469831#up_469940

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#110
post #60

"The contrarian dynamic" by dang, from around a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 > The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1]. The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are…

Usually people who design interaction spaces know something about human behavior, spectrum of personality types/needs, social psychology, group dynamics etc and then design the space.

But what has happened in the tech world, is obviously the reverse.

All kinds of contrived/arbit spaces have been created and then behavior of the lab rats within are studied.

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