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Ask HN: Why haven't you started your startup?

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Re: Ask HN: Why haven't you started your startup?

#5

Post by MattGaiser »

Risk aversion, which makes the bar for “great” near impossible to meet.

From everything to career choice to investments, I made/make a statistical and risk minimizing decision.

I ended up a software engineer looking at average outcomes and general failure points for different majors. Don’t get me wrong future employers, I do enjoy the work (as you would see on my resume), but if it had the prospects of a history major, I would not have studied it. There are people who do that they love and expect to figure it out along the way. I am not that person.

I invest in broad based index ETFs as statistically people are proven to underperform with stock picking. I have no reason to believe that I am special there, so I invest in ETFs.

Add in that early career money compounds and is worth 10x at retirement at my age.

So basically my life can be very comfortable as long as I stay the course.

Statistically startups fail. I would be risking a very straightforward and very comfortable for the chance at a yacht. And I don’t dream of the yacht.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't you started your startup?

#6

Post by ecmascript »

Most projects I decide not to pursue is that is blatently obvious that making a profit ffom them will be near to impossible.

But I have finally found an idea that is worth pursuing but I am doing that on my spare time so development is slow.Not really what you were asking but several of my projects died because I didnt have time enough for them. Im fine with that though since the competition is pretty much none, sucks and is expensive as hell. Seems like the perfect market, but we'll see.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't you started your startup?

#9

Post by lakotasapa »

Zillions of ideas. Triage is daunting. Hoping to partner up with someone who may need mutual motivation. Full stack end to end person here. Dropped out of corporate world back on 2019 due to stress. Worked at FAANG+M and miss the camaraderie and sounding board of insightful people. My toddler now goes to school so got me few hours a day but end up in analysis paralysis. Did meetups but not fruitful.

Re: Ask HN: Why haven't you started your startup?

#10

Post by mikewarot »

I'm not sure if the idea[1,2] is stupid, or brilliant... and I'm not arrogant enough to assume its brilliant. I've been nerd sniped by it though, since the 1980s.

The basics are simple enough, imagine an FPGA without any routing hardware, just a sea of 4 bit in, 4 bit out Look Up Tables (LUTs). To prevent race conditions, I'd latch the outputs of the cells, and clock then in 2 alternative phases.

This makes the thing a horrible FPGA, because latency is the one thing they fight hard to overcome, but on the other hand, it makes it very easy to reason about, and immune to race conditions, timing issues, etc. The gain is that you get almost trivial routing, and essentially all of the transistors devoted to compute.

It's what you get when you answer George Gilder's call to "waste transistors".[3]

I've got a simulator for the chip, I still need to figure out how to program it (i.e. write a compiler, debugger, etc.)

The major question.... can this architecture do an Exaflop on a cheap chip? ([1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

[2] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

[3] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gilder-4/

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