Live data from Hacker News

Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

contrast.app

21–30 of 196 posts

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#22

Seems to be this article is about when your product is bleeding-edge tech, but people are commenting as if it were about building your product using bleeding-edge tech (in-house or otherwise). Definitely only do one of these at a time, tho :)

Yes, the article is exclusively about the trade-offs when building bleeding-edge products, like how impossibly hard it is to sell in to customers who have no idea what the product is or why it exists.

All of the comments for some reason are about not using latest-nosql-db-from-producthunt in prod.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#23
post #19

Lol. I'm an embedded engineer, and this week I'm getting my coworkers excited to upgrade part of our system to use bleeding edge technology from the mid 90's!

Just getting hardware upgraded from very early 2000s PICs to ARM chips has been a pretty big win for me

That sounds like a huge jump! Now I'm curious what kind of solutions where PIC is viable isn't an overkill on Arm? (Or are there really tiny Arms?)

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kube is great. Abstracts away lots of problems. If you make a single kube cluster (which is trivial with eksctl) you can iterate on a number of startup ideas pretty quickly on it. The kube API (the pod/deployment/service/ingress structure) is where the magic is, imho. Sure you could just make an EC2 instance, and swap in your Rails, and redirect the ALB and fix your domain CNAME, but whatever man, you can do like 4 o…

You know what abstracts away all those problems but doesn't require hours a day of mucking with scripts? Google App Engine. Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk.

Good at smaller scale, and Heroku can go pretty good at scale. But eventually you run into things that they make harder rather than easier if you need to do something which doesn't fit well with their model. Deploying onto Google Kubernetes Engine has a bit of boilerplate setup work, but after that it's not a huge management overhead considering everything it gives you.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#25
post #2

You have to toe the line a bit in startups, you want to use proven technology but leave room for the employees to feel like they are contributing to something new and unique.

Why? I would advise finding better employees who respond to contributing to a solid business, and in return their own paychecks and bonuses.

Because working at a startup is a pretty big risk and people who enjoy taking risks tend to also enjoy working with unproven technology.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kube is great. Abstracts away lots of problems. If you make a single kube cluster (which is trivial with eksctl) you can iterate on a number of startup ideas pretty quickly on it. The kube API (the pod/deployment/service/ingress structure) is where the magic is, imho. Sure you could just make an EC2 instance, and swap in your Rails, and redirect the ALB and fix your domain CNAME, but whatever man, you can do like 4 o…

You know what abstracts away all those problems but doesn't require hours a day of mucking with scripts? Google App Engine. Heroku. Elastic Beanstalk.

Okay, yeah, for sure. I think they're better options for early iteration. I guess actions speak louder than words here since my preferred operational stack is Rails + Typescript + React + Redux + Heroku w/ Heroku Postgres.

Yeah, definitely Heroku over k8s for idea validation.

I think there's definitely room in the k8s-based space for slightly past that, though.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#27
post #2

You have to toe the line a bit in startups, you want to use proven technology but leave room for the employees to feel like they are contributing to something new and unique.

There are still near infinite amount of good ideas outside of the mainstream that are new and exciting to most people, that are still well explored, have long histories and are mature.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#29

There's a distinction to be made: - If your business doesn't rely on new technology, then avoid bleeding edge tech (examples: you retail co-working space, rent apartments, do food/grocery delivery, etc.) - If your business model does rely on new technology (examples: airlines in the early 20th century, railroads in the early days of the steam engine, e-commerce in the early 2000s) then you have to work out a way to d…

>Though even in the latter scenario, it's still prudent to narrow the scope of your bleeding-edge tech as much as possible (e.g. if you're doing a cryptocurrency app, you probably shouldn't be trying to make your own NoSQL database at the same time). Nonsense, the database is the back up plan so you can pivot to a DB company if your main thing doesn't work out.

Or pivot to "we're a blockchain-based database". And when that fails, "we're a blockchain stored in a database". After that, you'll have to get creative with the neologisms: "we're the first ever datachain backed by a Baseblock".

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#30
Had a $4 mouse from the dollar store. Watched some youtube videos, and decided to splurge and bought the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Mx master 3, at $129 and 3225% more expensive. Despite all the great reviews and hype. I'm kind of hating it. Damn thing is so heavy.

It feels like I'm moving a brick around. Was going to return it, but now I'm saving it for a protest.

Post reply on HN