Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

contrast.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 196 posts

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#121

Post by square_usual »

dheera wrote: post #68
square_usual wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you didn't buy that used, you probably should've complained to logitech. My master 2 runs ~1 month on a single charge, and when I see the third light blinking I usually just plug it into my laptop overnight. I've not had to deal with a dead battery in this mouse, ever.

Yeah it was new. Weird. Did you have to install any drivers to get it to power save efficiently? Because I run Linux and don't have any Logitech proprietary drivers installed.

Nope, and I use linux too. If you do want a driver for linux, logiops is great: https://github.com/PixlOne/logiops

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#122

Post by gverrilla »

holler wrote: post #115
meowface wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of like the classic "break one law at a time" rule. If you're hauling drugs, don't speed. Getting away with just the one thing is hard enough. I think Discord is one good example of this sort of trade-off. Single, pretty standard type of app that improves on its predecessors, with some bleeding-edge engineering: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to... >Discord has never been af…

What problem was Discord solving when they launched? Twitch already existed, Slack existed. Asking because it's a similar question I'm asking myself as I build https://sqwok.im , a news-focused public messaging app. I chose to use "bleeding edge tech", and have been challenged by peers about whether it would have been wiser to just use some off-the-shelf solution for parts of it vs architecting a fully custom a-z pla…

From my experience only, Discord was the successor to softwares like Teamspeak and Ventrillo for gamers, built as a social tech experiment. It also always had a FUN component to it, so it incentives creativity and people not taking stuff too serious. Children/teen seem to like it a lot.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#123

Post by ldeangelis »

holler wrote: post #115
meowface wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of like the classic "break one law at a time" rule. If you're hauling drugs, don't speed. Getting away with just the one thing is hard enough. I think Discord is one good example of this sort of trade-off. Single, pretty standard type of app that improves on its predecessors, with some bleeding-edge engineering: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to... >Discord has never been af…

What problem was Discord solving when they launched? Twitch already existed, Slack existed. Asking because it's a similar question I'm asking myself as I build https://sqwok.im , a news-focused public messaging app. I chose to use "bleeding edge tech", and have been challenged by peers about whether it would have been wiser to just use some off-the-shelf solution for parts of it vs architecting a fully custom a-z pla…

Discord was heavily marketed towards the gaming community that was split between Skype, Teamspeak, Mumble and maybe some others that I don't remember. All of them had some flaws while Discord just worked.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#124

Post by names_are_hard »

mrtksn wrote: post #119
wy35 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which makes me wonder, why people insist on having a headline AND an article in 2020? It only creates a confusion when most people don't bother reading articles when the headline is strong enough to inflict a response. It has become a tool to say something and deny saying it.

That got me thinking of an idea for a startup: let's build a service that allows people to broadcast headlines with no content (since no one reads the articles anyway), and then other people can reply to the headlines. To make sure that authors stick to the rules, we'll limit the length of each headline to 140 characters. Side benefit: users can post their headlines via a single SMS message.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#126

Post by mrtksn »

names_are_hard wrote: post #124
mrtksn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes me wonder, why people insist on having a headline AND an article in 2020? It only creates a confusion when most people don't bother reading articles when the headline is strong enough to inflict a response. It has become a tool to say something and deny saying it.

That got me thinking of an idea for a startup: let's build a service that allows people to broadcast headlines with no content (since no one reads the articles anyway), and then other people can reply to the headlines. To make sure that authors stick to the rules, we'll limit the length of each headline to 140 characters. Side benefit: users can post their headlines via a single SMS message.

I made a sketch of it on a napkin: https://imgur.com/UHLAdxQ

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#127

Post by timwaagh »

too bad, it sounds like something that would have been useful at larger enterprises like banks and stuff. from the time i worked for one such business i know they were constantly obsessing over their 'house-style' meaning every product has to use the same components. I think they'd appreciate something like this. Of course i don't know how easy or hard it is to implement it. user friendlyness is key with such tools.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#128

Post by OakNinja »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #117
OakNinja wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on HN once said “It’s hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don’t have”. Building software that solves a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have is also a real problem.

Yeah, creating problems in people for which you conveniently sell solutions is the job of marketing. As for building a solution to "a problem that the intended users don’t understand that they have", I'll agree that this may not be a good thing for a startup to do - but when I see how basic research is being defunded and drowned in red tape, and people saying that startups are the new, distributed R&D departments, I…

I should clarify that I see nothing wrong in solving a problem people don’t realize they have, and to be fair, this is what startups often do. However, many/most developers see marketing and sales as something unnecessary, eg. “How hard can it be”. And they realize that it’s pretty damn hard when it’s already too late.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#129

Post by wbl »

atoav wrote: post #61
deckeraa wrote: post #10

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…

There are these geniuses that can do something they never did before and create something truly amazing. But realistically even they don't manage to deliver on that the majority of the time. Even the steam engine people had to rely on known standard parts like screws and bolts and known planing or manufacturing procedures that they didn't invent. Only because they knew which forces a bolt would withstand and learned…

The standarized screw was after the steam engine. It wasn't until 1841 that Whitworth promulgated his thread. Before then every rail manufacturer had their own house standard.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#130

Post by Macha »

holler wrote: post #115
meowface wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of like the classic "break one law at a time" rule. If you're hauling drugs, don't speed. Getting away with just the one thing is hard enough. I think Discord is one good example of this sort of trade-off. Single, pretty standard type of app that improves on its predecessors, with some bleeding-edge engineering: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to... >Discord has never been af…

What problem was Discord solving when they launched? Twitch already existed, Slack existed. Asking because it's a similar question I'm asking myself as I build https://sqwok.im , a news-focused public messaging app. I chose to use "bleeding edge tech", and have been challenged by peers about whether it would have been wiser to just use some off-the-shelf solution for parts of it vs architecting a fully custom a-z pla…

* Skype sucked. Voice call audio quality was unreliable, managing lots of disparate groups sucked, if you had some random join your raid group (its initial market was FFXIV raiders as the initial team had previously worked on FFXIV utilities with guildwork) for the night you didn't really want to add them to your group chat for a voice call, it leaked information that was actively used to DoS people.

* It's users were consequently having to use multiple platforms, with teamspeak or vent or mumble for voice chat and Skype or Facebook for persistent text chat. This was inconvenient adding everyone twice.

* It's hard to explain how much it helped for the "bringing a random into your gaming group" scenario. You could just drop a link into the games text chat and people could join for the night and you didn't have to worry about if they had teamspeak or mumble or whatever installed.

* Teamspeak's free tier had a limit of like 10 users known to the server. Discord did not.

* Slack wasn't a competitor for Discord's initial market. Having to sign up for each instance was a deal-breaker. Discord originally allowed guest accounts, and I think it still does. Also the overhead to creating/managing a new server and adding people is really low comparatively.

* Discord doesn't really compete with Twitch much? People stream to their friends sure, and I have known people who had unlisted twitch channels for like jackbox in the past but that's a relatively late addition, and twitch is much more interested in the big streamers than the long tail anyway.

Obviously discord have significantly expanded their market a few times from FFXIV raiders to all mmo players to all gamers to everyone, but they started with clear problems to fix and fixed them well

Post reply on HN