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Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

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Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#91

Post by snovv_crash »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #37
viraptor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Low end cortex-m cores are pretty cheap these days. More modern designs and processes use silicon more efficiently, so you get more capability for the same raw material cost. Also, you can do a surprising amount with an 8-bit MCU. Lots of very capable 3D printers still run on AVR based controllers. Often times, you're limited by peripherals or memory size more than raw CPU speed. As a baseline, it's relatively easy t…

At least for drones, the move has been driven equally by flash space as compute. And the performance really has improved! Moving from fixed filters to rpm-following notch filters for example. Supporting wider range of peripherals and protocols. None of this comes for free.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#92

Post by imtringued »

wy35 wrote: post #87
vincnetas wrote: post #46

Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building a bleeding edge product and how difficult is to sell such product (probably because everyone know that using bleeding edge products is dangerous :) )

It's actually hilarious. So many people enjoy sharing their opinion on the headline rather than the content of the article.

Sometimes people just want to talk about a certain topic, regardless of the article's contents. The headline just gives them a convenient excuse.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#93

Post by snovv_crash »

neltnerb wrote: post #44
sgtnoodle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low end cortex-m cores are pretty cheap these days. More modern designs and processes use silicon more efficiently, so you get more capability for the same raw material cost. Also, you can do a surprising amount with an 8-bit MCU. Lots of very capable 3D printers still run on AVR based controllers. Often times, you're limited by peripherals or memory size more than raw CPU speed. As a baseline, it's relatively easy t…

Really... I wonder what the spare cycles are doing, whether it's truly waste and bad coding or if it's doing some kind of sophisticated predictive algorithms that we're unaware of. I do try to assume engineers did something smart, maybe there's a good reason... I really hope the reason isn't "so we could run the mainline linux kernel" or "because we needed a RTOS" or something similarly bloated.

More advanced DSP takes more cycles. Eg moving from fixed low-pass filters to motor-rpm-following-notch filters gives lower phase delay, but requires getting telemetry from motors, running multiple harmonic notch filters on each channel. Supporting a wider range of protocols and peripherals takes more flash space. And eventually, when it gets complicated enough that you can't enforce deadlines everywhere, yes, you need an RTOS.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#94

Post by Gibbon1 »

Fordec wrote: post #19
sgtnoodle wrote: post #17

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

I just went and checked, I switched our main product over from ARV Megas' to ARM Cortex in 2013. The only downside is that the ARM's don't have as good sleep current as AVR's do. And they don't have internal EEPROM.

Other than that they are faster, cheaper, and have more RAM.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#95

Post by yashap »

warent wrote: post #78
vincnetas wrote: post #46

Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building a bleeding edge product and how difficult is to sell such product (probably because everyone know that using bleeding edge products is dangerous :) )

Not even about bleeding edge products. It's a lengthy article about the pitfalls of entering a market with no market validation, which the author slapped lipstick on and gave this sexy title.

That was my take too - they built something nobody wanted, and it failed.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#96

Post by antonvs »

hn-hipsters wrote: post #79
renewiltord wrote: post #12

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…

Outdated stuff. I use the Jojoma framework to abstract away all that Kube stuff. It's trivial to use through Baobab, especially if you use the Wazabi framework-as-a-service framework (which you should). All you have is to deploy the proclets through a DMVC and it's all automagic. I iterate through 17 startup ideas a day using that setup.

Still using the JBWD stack huh.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#98

Post by royjacobs »

It's interesting that the author indicates other companies like AirTable and Notion aren't doing anything completely new, merely expanding on existing ideas.

It seems to me that their product was essentially "usage metrics, but for component systems". Somewhat novel, sure, but I'd hardly call this _completely new_ as compared to aforementioned products.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#99

Post by NickNaraghi »

fuddle wrote: post #40

Looking at their homepage it's very hard to understand what they actually provide.

My understanding: I want the components in my design system (e.g. Figma) to match the components in my front-end codebase (e.g. React) exactly, this tool helps me understand the current diff between the two.

From what I can see, the paradigm of component-based design has been growing in popularity since the tools like Figma have been improving rapidly.

In that case, it's a product for a niche and growing audience. I think the website hits some of the main points pretty well.

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