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Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

ianbetteridge.com

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Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#221

Post by noobermin »

Mistletoe wrote: post #88
tptacek wrote: post #26

When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with whe…

I wonder if we really will be talking about Woz vs. Jobs in 50 years? It has already been about 50 years. I don’t think that many people still talk about Rockefeller vs. Carnegie. Really the way Carnegie is still talked about is for his philanthropy and building 2500 libraries, etc. Those things remain.

Woz hasn't really left anything...that he has or will get credit for other than amongst nerds really.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#222

Post by noobermin »

andrew311 wrote: post #86

> it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though. The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way…

We should also be honest how much of it is due to HN itself (as in the existence of the website). Before it I never associated start-ups with hacking, if anything, due to free software ideology, I always thought it flirted with anti-capitalism really. But today, the hacker world seems to be centred in sf and it's likely due to reddit and HN.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#223

Post by nazka »

tptacek wrote: post #26

When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with whe…

Is the talk not recorded? If not, can he do it again? It seems people who were at the talk, talk more about the talk than this post.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#224

Post by piva00 »

iknowstuff wrote: post #207
piva00 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it. Rather sad though that instead of implementing what empirically is already known to work in so many cities there's a quest for a solution to a problem that's completely self-inflicted…

Self driving vehicles will have to morph into small autonomous buses. They should be able to run on a much higher cadence, and way cheaper, than buses driven by humans.

It will eventually come full circle to trains.

Why not just build trains? They don't need technological breakthroughs, there's existing expertise all around the world on how to build; are much more easily automated (even more underground); can transport lots more people than busses; scheduling is much easier, etc.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#225

Post by mlinhares »

steveBK123 wrote: post #152
mlinhares wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there when both react and spring were both and they were both revolutionary tools, especially spring, the only people unhappy with it were the J2EE vendors, us plebs were calling out the name of the lord. I think the problem here is the usual bloat and enshitification that these tools eventually devolve to due to their success. People get so used to them they want to use them for everything and create this univ…

With backwards looking rose tinted glasses, we can remember all the good tech people were slow to adopt. But what about all the mis-adopted or abandoned tech that blew up projects. The amount of stuff ported to NoSQL that had no business doing so. UML/Nocode tools in the 90s. A lot of the push away from Java only for a lot of performance considerations pushing devs back to it. Sorry about the projects that got force…

While UML/Nocode tools were (and remain) a mistake, I don't think NoSQL was one. I might dislike some solutions in general but stuff like Redis, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Parquet and many others have produced a renaissance in databases that we would not have seen if it was all in the hards of the relational database vendors.

MongoDB easy (in a way) replication put every single database vendor on watch and led even PostgreSQL to improve, i think we live in a different environment right now due to all the experiments the NoSQL folks made. It might not have all panned out but I think the whole thing was a huge positive for the market, people stated to experiment and try new stuff again instead of "oh it doesn't look like a relational model, it sucks".

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#226

Post by Animats »

ForHackernews wrote: post #113
TeMPOraL wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world unfortunately is lot more diverse than that. It is, but only at the surface level. 99% of the actual problem of driving in urban areas is the same everywhere on the planet, because all human cities are pretty much the same, because all humans are pretty much the same - once you start comparing with the rest of the universe , and not just with other people. San Francisco, Moscow, Cape Town and Prague are a…

Driving in New Delhi is an entirely different universe than driving in San Francisco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnPiP9PkLAs Contrary to your assertions, operating a vehicle in an environment with humans is a social problem.

That's sped up at least 5x. If you slow it down to real time, it looks no harder than Waymo videos in San Francisco. Remember that most AVs have full circle sensor coverage. They may do better than humans in situations where there's movement on all sides.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#227

Post by TeMPOraL »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #214
TeMPOraL wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nitpick on the order of "LLMs are a dead end because they can't reconsider their output before writing it". Duh, run it in a loop. Duh, attach wheels to the "scaled up drone flying cars". If that's the standard, then every plane in existence meets it.

It is not a nitpick. VTOL aircraft are not cars. Period. You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."

> You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."

Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters.

The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willing to go through enough training to be able to operate an aircraft safely. Most drivers don't even get adequate training to operate their own cars safely (drivers' license requirements are a joke), and piloting takes at least an order of magnitude more than that.

(And that doesn't even touch maintenance, which most drivers don't do, and a good fraction of those are willing to spend extra money to get their broken cars stamped as road-worthy.)

Which is why human-piloted helicopters and self-flying passenger drones are the closest we're going to get to "flying car" anytime soon; physics and human stupidity precludes anything else.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#228

Post by DidYaWipe »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #227
DidYaWipe wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a nitpick. VTOL aircraft are not cars. Period. You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."

> You might as well call helicopters "flying cars." Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters. The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willin…

Nobody says that.

And your assertion about the meaning of "car" is absurd. The meaning, which is profoundly missing in VTOLs, is a vehicle that you can drive around on ROADS, on WHEELS. Nobody cares about the private ownership. They care about rolling it down the street.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#229

Post by iknowstuff »

piva00 wrote: post #224
iknowstuff wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self driving vehicles will have to morph into small autonomous buses. They should be able to run on a much higher cadence, and way cheaper, than buses driven by humans.

It will eventually come full circle to trains. Why not just build trains? They don't need technological breakthroughs, there's existing expertise all around the world on how to build; are much more easily automated (even more underground); can transport lots more people than busses; scheduling is much easier, etc.

Big fan of trains, but obviously the world is not binary. its not one or the other and AVs stand to save a lot of lives sooner than whatever you are proposing would. Even the Dutch and Japanese drive a lot you’ll find out

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#230

Post by 082349872349872 »

aebtebeten wrote: post #219
tptacek wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe! I can't think of many times I've read something I wrote the night before, literally cringed, and thought "what the fuck". I'm enjoying it! I recommend everyone find a way to have this experience. You have to do it in good faith though or it doesn't work. What you're saying about Apple and AirBNB sounds plausible? I know next to nothing about ABNB's culture and operation. I know a fair bit about Apple's, and re…

How about this[0] for an "it's just a bunch of folks" hypothesis: Some folks internalise the goals of an organisation well, and some internalise them poorly. Among domesticated animals, dogs and horses internalise their owners goals well, and cats poorly. (even in the animal world, specific individuals all have different time constants for how long you can leave them unsupervised before they get into trouble) Most of…

Ah, never mind — if YC is about seed not growth, then "founder mode" makes perfect sense, even to me.
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