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Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

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Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#111

Post by 96 »

prawn wrote: post #108
96 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Story time. I build an app and I got interviewed by a local newspaper: I built a web app and got interviewed by a newspaper too. The article wasn't factually wrong, but it was poorly written and the tone was bizarre at a few points. The journalist chose to take many long quotes directly from my response emails. I didn't know I would be quoted verbatim so heavily, otherwise I would've written more formally. He also…

(Also involved with creation of an app that has received press.) Assume everything you write to a journalist, unless you specify otherwise, will be used as written in their story. You should go out of your way to write statements that you expect them to fancy and essentially copy and paste. When emailing them, read back over what you've written and re-write sections to make them punchy sentences that could serve as i…

I did write most of the emails in a formal, precise way. The guy was a bit scattered, and the particular quotes he chose and their presentation was odd. But yeah, in hindsight I think he would've been happy to just have me write most of the article and send it to him.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#112

Post by dahart »

danso wrote: post #107
ak39 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to google your word "lede" in order to understand what you were saying. I found this: http://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/

Ha! That's very interesting. I mean I never knew that people tried to claim that there was some long history about the word lede ", but that's just how it was referred to in every journalism class I've taken and in the papers I worked at. I like using it because its distinct spelling makes it obviously different than all the other meanings of "lead", and journalism has all kinds of jargon anyway..."graf" (paragraph),…

There might really have been a long history for lede... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Lede&year_star...

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#113

Post by pesenti »

sama wrote: post #70

I counted at least 5 factual errors in the photo caption and first 3 paragraphs. We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda. Seems like manufactured controversy otherwise. All that said, we like hardware and we like Luke, and we're excited he's in the new batch! And we're thankful for the work he did to get our hardware program set up…

We also heard that this reporter was 'encouraged' to write this by someone from a competing accelerator with an obvious agenda

If you are making accusations against the writer you need to substantiate them. Or else it's just hearsay.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#114

Post by pbhjpbhj »

evv wrote: post #75
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I don't mind some jokes here but I can't see what the joke is you're trying to make. If it was a clearly funny comment it perhaps wouldn't fair as badly.

Its a reference to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Which is funny to me, but the parent might as well have been referencing something their mate told them; how much of the global audience on HN knows that skit. Anyway, we're well OT.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#115

Post by lnanek2 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #32
rezashirazian wrote: post #8

Still, hardware is, well, hard. Silicon Valley has produced a raft of world-changing software startups, from Airbnb (a YC veteran) to Facebook. But it's a whole lot easier to beta-test an app than to prototype and then manufacture a gadget with a bunch of moving parts. Then you have to market the thing to the masses, who are already enamored of their Apple and Samsung products. Exhibits A and B: Fitbit, the fitness t…

I don't know abut GoPro, but Fitbit deserves to fail. Their hardware is terrible . The warranty only lasts one year, yet I've had to replace both Fitbit devices I've had twice within that one year. I'm now Fitbit-less because the latest, a Charge HR, failed for the third time, and it's now out of that one year warranty. To give you an idea of how bad the Charge HR is, its charging plug attaches with metal prongs, but…

> they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100

I can say their software is in the same category from personal experience. Their Android app was written through minimum cost outsourcing, has no comments (since the developers didn't speak English well), a half dozen layers of abstraction when two would work, and is riddled with countless poorly documented strange edge cases and hacks throughout that make maintainability and enhancement a disaster.

On the user side, this is why features are rarely added and the software tends to lock up and crash a lot, and can brick devices during firmware update. Fixing even trivial bugs or adding basic features like social or counterfeit detection right takes much more work than it should since you have to navigate all that and may break something else while trying to do what you are doing.

They hired a few internal people around the time of the IPO, but they universally don't do much. The tech lead of the team generally came in, complained about some random thing that wasn't even accurate to make it seem like he did something, then left at 4PM. He wasn't in the office enough to know anything about what his team was doing.

A typical internal developer played Clash of Clans all day. When showed logs of his code not working he called meeting after meeting with management to get the guy with logs of the failing use case fired. The culture there is that there's no reason to do work there if you can office politics with your friends to get out of it.

Even given a reasonable commit adjusting timeouts to match the time taken for Bluetooth operations to the slowest observed device and fix several long running file transfers timing out by resetting the timeout each block transferred, he blew up and removed all timeouts for file transfers (bringing back the potential lock up issue) and called a half dozen meetings to fight it.

The culture there is just noxious and actively fights anyone trying to do work.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#116

Post by david-given »

danso wrote: post #107
ak39 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to google your word "lede" in order to understand what you were saying. I found this: http://howardowens.com/lede-vs-lead/

Ha! That's very interesting. I mean I never knew that people tried to claim that there was some long history about the word lede ", but that's just how it was referred to in every journalism class I've taken and in the papers I worked at. I like using it because its distinct spelling makes it obviously different than all the other meanings of "lead", and journalism has all kinds of jargon anyway..."graf" (paragraph),…

I wonder whether 'cq' is a mangling of 'sic':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

FWIW, I've never seen 'cq', but I've seen (and used myself) 'sic' lots of times; it might be a leftpondian/rightpondian thing.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#117

Post by danso »

david-given wrote: post #116
danso wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! That's very interesting. I mean I never knew that people tried to claim that there was some long history about the word lede ", but that's just how it was referred to in every journalism class I've taken and in the papers I worked at. I like using it because its distinct spelling makes it obviously different than all the other meanings of "lead", and journalism has all kinds of jargon anyway..."graf" (paragraph),…

I wonder whether 'cq' is a mangling of 'sic': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic FWIW, I've never seen 'cq', but I've seen (and used myself) 'sic' lots of times; it might be a leftpondian/rightpondian thing.

Maybe it evolved from that, but `cq` is distinctly different than `sic`. cq is used as a meta-tag in story editing systems (I have no idea what news writers did before computers) to communicate between editors. `sic` is used to communicate to the reader that that weird quote is what was actually said. I guess you could put "sic" in as meta-text that wouldn't get printed, but it still might be ambiguous as to the writer's/editor's intent.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#118

Post by internaut »

zubat wrote: post #60
WalterBright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned that when there was a natural gas explosion in the building I worked in in the 80s (nobody was hurt). I recorded several TV news broadcasts on it, and every one got the basic facts wrong in different ways. Things like one called the building a warehouse (it was an office building). There were no political issues nor agendas nor money at stake, the news reporters just didn't make any effort to be correct. I'…

I'm increasingly convinced that looking and thinking too deeply on people matters(news, history, organizations, relationships) is like staring at the sun. There's nothing much to see by focusing your gaze on it, it blocks out stuff more nearby, and you go blind in the process. Which isn't to say that being a numb automaton is ideal, either, but there is a degree of balance and good taste required to avoid converting…

That sounds like one of my pet ideas I was calling 'physical autism'.

I am convinced that we are surrounded by two kinds of autistic behavior but are conditioned to mostly notice one of them.

Social autism (the normal kind we're familiar with) is usually evident in person. It's a spectrum from debilitating to barely evident. Some people I've talked to online have been autistic and I'd never know it just by conversing. I generally prefer it this way because it removes any prejudgements. I liked the Net better before social networks made people's photos, names and assorted history available, I feel like you got to know people more intimately.

The kind of autism we mostly don't notice is physical. There are people who are experts at social interaction, but who genuinely cannot understand the physical world, they never think about it. Their world is filled with people and nothing but people. These are the people who are blinded by the sun.

All of the world's accumulated knowledge is utterly lost on them and they have no sense of an objective reality outside of the realm of relationships. In its own way, this is a disability because they can never be more than their network of connections.

Most people know people like this but think that those people choose not to be interested in X,Y,Z. I suggest that maybe they literally cannot fathom those things, or at least have a severe hindrance in their path to doing so, similar to the social autism spectrum.

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#119

Post by pavel_lishin »

function_seven wrote: post #66
pavel_lishin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't find this, but just recently I asked what it's called when you see reporters getting basic facts wrong about your area of expertise, but continue to trust their reporting in all other areas.

Answered in this thread 7 minutes after you posted :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12877188

Is there a term for not bothering to remember things, because someone will just answer for me? :P

Re: Y Combinator's Hardware Guy Leaves After 14 Months

#120

Post by CydeWeys »

lnanek2 wrote: post #115
CydeWeys wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know abut GoPro, but Fitbit deserves to fail. Their hardware is terrible . The warranty only lasts one year, yet I've had to replace both Fitbit devices I've had twice within that one year. I'm now Fitbit-less because the latest, a Charge HR, failed for the third time, and it's now out of that one year warranty. To give you an idea of how bad the Charge HR is, its charging plug attaches with metal prongs, but…

> they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100 I can say their software is in the same category from personal experience. Their Android app was written through minimum cost outsourcing, has no comments (since the developers didn't speak English well), a half dozen layers of abstraction when two would work, and is riddled with countless poorly documented strange edge cases and hacks throughout that…

Wow, thank you for the insider perspective. That's truly horrifying that a $2B company (previously $10B) that depends heavily on software outsourced so much of its core competency like that. Talk about being penny wise and pound foolish. I've worked at two ~$10M companies that used all in-sourced development (i.e. me and my coworkers) and, while not without their faults, were significantly higher functioning.

Also, how the fuck do you brick a device by updating it? Wasn't this problem solved decades ago? You upload the new image and then, only once it's completely transferred and verified, do you atomically switch over to it. Are you telling me that they really made it so that the firmware update overwrites the existing firmware, so that any interruption in the process causes it to go poof? Ugh. I know that requires double the internal memory, but c'mon, this is 2016. The cost of that is some very tiny insignificant fraction of what an RMA costs. Never before in my life have I ever irrevocably bricked a device by updating its firmware.

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