Live data from Hacker News

Follow boring advice

nywkap.com

91–100 of 100 posts

Re: Follow boring advice

#91
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reads like standard survivor bias

Yes, someone always has to be the person to point this out as if the commenter or other readers had never considered it before :) Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company? That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of the…

> far less successful than Airbnb

Airbnb probably made a bunch of people very rich, which could probably count as success, however we could also point out that they're a great example of the toxicity of VC funded startups:

1. They business model seem to be disrupting housing markets and regular neighborhoods, more than it's actually disrupting incumbents (Accor & co.).

2. 13 years after their launch, this is their bottom line:

> Net income -$4.584 billion (2020)

Which, yeah, is during the pandemic, but they've never been profitable.

Though I guess these days success is measured by how much money you can get from investors, than building an actually profitable business.

Re: Follow boring advice

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can you change your opinion at will? Can you right now choose to believe people are not responsible for their situation in life? Yes and yes. But there are consequences to the opinion you choose. If you choose to believe you have no responsibility for your situation, odds are pretty good you'll have a life of mediocrity and failure. > "Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear u…

>Not buying that. So, you are not changing your opinion. But you could if you wanted to. You could change your mind about something that you believe to be false, without any outside influence, through pure will. >If you choose to believe you have no responsibility for your situation, odds are pretty good you'll have a life of mediocrity and failure. The link is to a well known essay by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, medio…

So Clemens freely chose to write that, and you freely chose to quote it. How droll.

Re: Follow boring advice

#93
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, someone always has to be the person to point this out as if the commenter or other readers had never considered it before :) Do you have examples to share of companies who were as devoted to talking to their customers and making something people want as Airbnb, but who failed to build a successful company? That YC W09 batch had about 16 companies. They were all far less successful than Airbnb (though some of the…

> far less successful than Airbnb Airbnb probably made a bunch of people very rich, which could probably count as success, however we could also point out that they're a great example of the toxicity of VC funded startups: 1. They business model seem to be disrupting housing markets and regular neighborhoods, more than it's actually disrupting incumbents (Accor & co.). 2. 13 years after their launch, this is their bo…

You're the second person in the thread who has sought to diminish the point by tangentially invoking the controversial aspects of what they do. It's a non-sequitur. I'm not engaging with that part further, as I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425675

As for financial losses, yes of course the pandemic year was hard, but it's completely false to say that Airbnb has never been profitable or that it is not a financially strong company. Indeed they have financial strength built into the foundations of the company; they were revenue-focused and profitable in their first few months, and the very thing that made them attractive to investors was that their unit economics (dollar margin per transaction) was so strong. And they have had several profitable periods in the years leading up to their IPO. Yes they may have ended up posting losses, because they've spent heavily on marketing/growth and expansion into new product categories, but that doesn't make them a weak company, quite the opposite. If you're trying to equate them to money-sinks like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, etc, you're mistaken; they are the very antithesis of those kinds of companies.

Re: Follow boring advice

#94
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eat less calories than you burn. Spend less money than you make. Boring advice, yet the majority of people are overweight and in debt.

People don't live in a vacuum. The first advice is simple but in the real life easily will spiral into "fight all the time against the partner that insists into overfeeding you" or "move to a less contaminated area free of substances mimicking hormones" or "drive more time to reach a better restaurant near the workplace and now you have five minutes left to eat". "Spend less money than you make" can translate sometim…

Are you yet another GTP-3 bot? Because that's incoherent, irrelevant, uninteresting, and totally misses the point. It's pretty obvious on its face, it's been done many times before, and it's quite easy to spot, because the weird grammar and punctuation and logical inconsistency of your posts give it away.

Please try thinking of something original to do with GPT-3, and give proper credit to GPT-3 where it's due, instead of trying to claim what it spews out as your own thoughts.

Some constructive but boring free advice you should probably try to follow next time: If you don't want GPT-3 to write such driveling meaningless garbage out, you should try feeding it some more interesting meaningful garbage in, like so (both the input and more output examples are in the article):

GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...

I have so many inventions that I don’t have enough time to tell you about them all.

I’ll just mention a few of them.

I built a ten-million-mile-long Interdimensional Space Engine, powered by a Zipper Motor, which could travel at the speed of light, but I accidentally left it in reverse, and it has been going backward ever since, heading toward the Big Bang.

I invented the Infinitly-Tunable Infrasonic-To-Ultrasonic Reverberation Transmogrification Oscillation Oscillator, but I couldn’t get it to work properly.

I made the Jell-O-Matic Snackinator, but I couldn’t get it to work.

I invented the Roto-Rooter-Hog-Trough-Ammo-Dispenser, but it went bankrupt.

I invented the Poopy-Pam-Powder-Packet Pest Powder, but it didn’t work.

In a simulated test of the robot-run brothel, the robot-prostitutes had to satisfy the robot-customers without the help of the robot-pimps. It worked fantastically, and the results were published in the Journal of Robot Whores.

I built an Interplanetary Ice-Cream Maker that was so powerful it froze the sun, and the sun emitted an ice-cream cone that promptly landed in my mouth.

I constructed a city so large that it broke the Minsky Barrier, and had to be abandoned for the sake of the universe.

I had to be the one to create the SimCity religion, and the Sims still think of me as their god even though I do not control them.

Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website!

NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality.

SOLARIS AND MR. BINNS: This is a two-part book and one unit of the work is composed of paragraphs which are so short that they disappear while you are reading them. The other part is some two hundred pages of giant print, which makes it appear that the author is quite dogmatic and trying to impress his (if you will excuse the expression) “larger than life” personality on the reader.

Re: Follow boring advice

#95
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CICO is just physics; but you need to work BOTH sides of that equation. If you ONLY try to shift the balance to deficit by limiting intake, of COURSE your body is going to react to the new starvation environment. That's why you should moderately reduce intake while ALSO moderately increasing output (i.e. do physical activity)

Exercise also causes your basal metabolism to lower.

I don't know that to be true. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14692598/

the only study I can find that points to excercise lowering resting metabolic rate is one from 1989 that had nine subjects.

Re: Follow boring advice

#96
post #2

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

Who owns the definition of 'successful'? A low stress, high joy life is preferable to these Really Famous Names we could drop. Sure, they may go on rocket rides, but do they know any peace? Maybe.

Agreed. This purely materialistic definition of success is a very western concept.

Eastern traditions have gone beyond them a long time ago since they are much older.

Western traditions will eventually catch up.

Re: Follow boring advice

#97

I've seen PG [1] say/write versions of this: "The Y Combinator founders who followed our advice succeeded. The ones who didn't, didn't." The advice is so simple, it's hard for a lot of outsiders to believe it's worth anything. "Make something people want." "Talk to your users." "Do things that don't scale." "Keep typing and avoid dying." People hear about this and ask "You gave away 7% of your company for that?" No,…

Could someone expand on "Do things that don't scale." - that seems somewhat counterintuitive.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Re: Follow boring advice

#98
one thing that my last decade taught me (with examples from .. trading) related to his mention of acting and compounding, with a bit of dusty spiritualishness

if you find yourself in total chaos, try many small things, and don't bother with negatives and failures, just take what's nice, drop what's bad, repeat. it requires a very strange mindset.. feels almost like religious faith, but fear and self imposed negativity can be such killers .. being a tiny bit blind and hopeful is often great (hence the small things, don't hope to become usain bolt tomorrow and smile while waiting).

Re: Follow boring advice

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not buying that. So, you are not changing your opinion. But you could if you wanted to. You could change your mind about something that you believe to be false, without any outside influence, through pure will. >If you choose to believe you have no responsibility for your situation, odds are pretty good you'll have a life of mediocrity and failure. The link is to a well known essay by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, medio…

So Clemens freely chose to write that, and you freely chose to quote it. How droll.

Do you in general believe things of your own will for utilitarian reasons?

It makes me think of "The Secret" / Law of Attraction, or similar cults, though I have not actually been a target of proselytizing for those. More people than I'd realized are into it.

Re: Follow boring advice

#100
post #78
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact one of the very common risks is to mix up goals and boring advice. Say, you wanna score in a soccer match: just receive the ball, get rid of defenders in case, and kick the ball in the net——which is both true and useless. Eating fewer calories is not happening in a vacuum. It means giving up food, which is, broadly speaking, the joy of life for many people. Exercising means committing to spend time in an envi…

Eating fewer calories is not happening in a vacuum. It means giving up food, which is, broadly speaking, the joy of life for many people. Exercising means committing to spend time in an environment and doing an activity that many do not like at all——it thus means going against their desires for months, years etc. I love food. Wouldn't give it up for the world. I can also tolerate not eating anything for two days very…

"The hard part is actually starting. Once you start, everything becomes easier." - For whom?

These are those types of nuggets, and I say it as mellowly as I can, that sound good ("starting is most difficult part"), but have very little empirical, or even anecdotal, support.

Starting is on the other hand easier than sustaining calorie reduction or consistent exercise because enthusiasm makes the operations initially easier (see the subscription boom that gym every where have in September and January), but then when people start telling themselves that this was not as easy as they expected to be when unsupported by the initial enthusiasm, they quit.

Post reply on HN