The most interesting part to me was this: "He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished."
I did the same thing for 12 years as CEO of Postmates and I still do it when I work on new ideas. I thought it was something I just did. But reading this I have to assume it is more common.
1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive
2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for
1 = are all the typical family group pics, lots of posing
2 = the photos where the subjects may not even know that they are being photographed, while doing the things they are cherished for by others. Sometimes they might not even like the presented actvities, but everyone else around them appreciates it .
- Photos of people repairing their family's gadgets
- Photos of people doing mundane tasks, ironing their clothes, cooking dinner for everyone, being exhausted, reading to others...
- This is what prevails while people are still alive who remember you. What you will be remembered by. Mostly what you did for other people and how people observed you.
Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these pics, than by typical family group photos.
This was my 5th startup. During my college days I kept launching startups (Kroomsa, Precimark, MyJugaad.in). Failure of all these made me introspect and I realized I was trapped into the engineer's fallacy: build things without knowing or caring about how to market them. This pushed me to learn marketing and I fell deeper into the rabbit hole.
So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.
Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!
Congratulations! From someone who does mixed electronics+mechanical design: this is hard. There are moments of desperation where you realize that everything depends on everything else, and there is no way to achieve all of your design goals. You then have to realize that engineering is all about compromises, and move on, compromising — but this is very difficult. It's easy to get bogged down in details and dependencies and never finish the project.
It's very impressive work and it makes me so happy to see real hacker news on HN. This is real hacking.
In 2021, Ulbricht's prosecutors and defense agreed that Ulbricht would relinquish any ownership of a newly discovered fund of 50,676 Bitcoin (worth nearly $5.35 billion in 2025) seized from a hacker in November 2021.[78] The Bitcoin had been stolen from Silk Road in 2013 and Ulbricht had been unsuccessful in getting them back. The U.S. government traced and seized the stolen Bitcoin. Ulbricht and the government agreed the fund would be used to pay off Ulbricht's $183 million debt in his criminal case, while the Department of Justice would take custody of the Bitcoin.[79][80]
> their realization created a vivid mental image of the event unfolding in that space, which made the story feel more immersive.
Glad that ChatGPT, probably like GP themselves, is a visualizer and actually can create a "vivid mental image" of something. For those of us with aphantasia, that is not a thing. Myself, I too was mighty confused by the text, which read literally like a time travel story, and was only missing a cat and tomorrow's newspaper.
William Storr writes about this. His stance is humans are hard wired for status within their social group. The problem is when all your status eggs in one basket and it disappears, it’s not good for your mental health. He advocates for having your identity spread across many different pursuits and disparate social groups, although he admits he’s not very good at doing that himself.
I think his problem is his identity (founder of Loom) suddenly disappeared.
Now he needs to develop a new identity.
This is especially difficult for single founders without kids (in the sense that people with spouse/kids already derive much of their identity from those 2 things).
Selling a company isn’t all that different from going through a divorce (in the sense that your identity needs to be completely rebuilt from scratch)
Relationships are like a garden, they require continual, repeated effort to maintain.
It doesn’t need to be an onerous amount of effort, but reaching out to people to shoot the shit once even a year is often enough to maintain the relationship for professional networks at least.
In software we have an unfortunate amount of people who don’t value social connections at all so we end up with a large tranche of people who can’t get past the “but why would I talk to them without a specific reason?” argument and then lament why all of their relationships end up transactional, or even better lament why no one will help them specifically because all their relationships are transactional and they aren’t offering anything of value
What's the old saying "A friend in need, is a friend, indeed."?
I like to have personal relationships, as opposed to corporate ones.
Funny story: During the 1990s, my direct boss was a fairly low-key Japanese man. I really liked him. He was a marketing type, so we didn't really have a technical basis for our relationship. He was a decent chap, and I happily followed his orders. In return, he gave me a great deal of agency.
After he returned to Japan, we'd run into each other, from time to time, and it was always a warm, effusive greeting.
Years later, he was the Chairman of the Board of the corporation. I never leveraged the relationship, but my team was always treated well, at our level. We were a small technical team, and it would have been inappropriate to focus on us too much. I had very little ambition to go much higher up the corporate food chain, so all was fine.
Once, he made a visit to our office (the US branch). It was a really big deal, and people were snapping to attention all over the building.
He dropped by my tiny little office, to say hi. It was really amusing, to see the puzzled expressions on all the corporate bigwigs in his entourage.
Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":
- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.
- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks
Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.
Pragmatism is central tenet of Buddhism. Has been thus since Gothama. Do not "believe"; learn, try, experience and then understand. About 2000 years before Americans.
But maybe I'm biased or ignorant. Happy to be enlightened (pun intended).
> Lots of developers will find it much more interesting, challenging, rewarding and just plain fun to develop something from scratch, even when there are better things that already exist.
This is true; but after enough years in the industry you learn to correlate success with laziness. This is well-discussed and arguably obvious but on an emotional level it takes a long time to fully sink in. We were all once developers with outsized ambitions and awareness we can flee to greener pastures.
Since we are being pedantic, your statement may be true but it is unsupported by the data you presented. To make it simple, let's talk about the imaginary basketball league with four players, of unit less heights of 4, 4, 4, and 1. The average height is 3.25, yet 3/4 the players are taller than average.
A paid promotion of International Median is not Average Association.
> I've always fantasized about having $10M discretionary money (haven't done the math, really, just a random figure) and opening a "Arts and Sciences Academy", which would be a high school where Arts trivium (music, literature, sculpture) would be studied on equal footing and intertwined with Sciences trivium (math, physics, biology) - I know an eclectic mix.
I don't think that is eclectic at all. It ought to be that way. I attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and Arts [0] during high school and it left an indelible mark upon me. I was kicked out of my abusive childhood home at 15 after refusing to confirm the Catholic faith, and so I applied for LSMSA and got in after a few rounds of interviews with the administration.
The school is publicly funded and does not charge a tuition, and so I felt extremely blessed to be able to continue my education despite my circumstances. Most of the teaching faculty had PhDs except for the math department, who mostly had masters degrees (plenty good enough for high school mathematics).
It was very self-directed study. The courses I took included C programming, poetry, world history, chemistry, digital design, trigonometry, Russian, etc. My days were highly varied and stimulating and I loved most of the classes. The high school is a boarding school embedded within a college campus, so there was plenty access to the arts infrastructure and collegiate arts projects. Being surrounded 24/7 by interesting people was the icing on the cake. A lot of people decried the prevalent drug use and sexual promiscuity among the student body, but it's fucking high school man. I hear it was a wild time there in the 80's and 90's. I was introduced to psychedelic drugs there, which only aided in my understanding of the world and increased my love for learning. We need more institutions like this.
Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning?
For example, I have zero qualms about relying on AI at work to write progress reports and code up some scripts. I know I can do it myself but why would I? I spent many years in college learning to read and write and code. AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it. Like a farmer who tills his land by hand rather than relying on a tractor because it builds character or something. But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come...
On the other hand, if you are a student trying to learn something new, relying on AI requires walking a fine line. You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply. At the same time, if you under-rely on AI, you drastically decrease the rate at which you can learn new things.
In the old days, people were fit because of physical labor. Now people are fit because they go to the gym. I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future?
I fail to see how the Republican party is fascist. I think it's a term the Left uses to demonize their opposition. Ironically, that is kind of fascist-like.
> The term fascist has been used as a pejorative,[74] regarding varying movements across the far right of the political spectrum. George Orwell noted in 1944 that the term had been used to denigrate diverse positions "in internal politics". Orwell said that while fascism is "a political and economic system" that was inconvenient to define, "as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'",[75] and in 1946 wrote that '"Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."[76] Richard Griffiths of the University of Wales wrote in 2000 that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times".[77]: 1
I assume you have good reasons to believe Republicans are fascist. I'm simply asking you and any others who believe this to share your reasons. Is that not reasonable?
I've been reading Oliver Burkeman's latest book[1], which starts with a message a previous book of his [2] dug into quite deeply:
You can't do it all.
Just reflect on it for a moment before you continue: you can't and won't get to do it all.
You won't be all the things you dream about being, you won't get to visit all the places, read all those books, eat all those meals, have all those experiences, there just isn't enough time. And that's OK.
When I see a book or blog article called something like "500 films to watch before you die", I think: first, that's a todo list, no thanks; secondly, assuming an average run time of 2 hours, I perhaps have time in my life for 5 a week max, so this is now 2 years of my life, or if I just do one a week this is now a 10-year project. I might not even live that long, and then if I know I'm about to die I'm going to feel anxiety at an incomplete list.
Give up with the big lists and goals for this stuff. Just go do things.
Divorce is bad for WOMEN??
Divorce is a disaster for men both emotionally and financially. Even prenuptial agreements are largely useless as they are normally overturned by the court system. A serious consideration (and study) of the chances of divorce and the normal outcome of divorce would have any man reconsidering (assuming he is thinking rationally rather than emotionally).
As a chemist I know what coumarin is but had no idea of its place in the chemical industry, least of all as a substitute for vanillin which looks nothing like it. Often, two molecules that are just sliiiightly different will have entirely different functions. Here, two molecules that are completely different can be substituted in some capacity.
But, damn, what a fine piece of writing. A seamless connection of facts and reminiscences all taking me somewhere. The author tells his family's and their extended family's story, without all the contortions and schnookery involved in "telling a story" in our marketing-besotted culture.
"Touching the product makes it different" is a remarkable turn of phrase.
I understand the frustration, but at the end of the day I think they do serve a purpose. They're not great at that purpose, but they're good enough and they generally produce false negatives (smart people fail) rather than false positives (you hire an idiot). And this makes sense, because a false negative is low cost (maybe you spend 50% longer interviewing candidates) but a false positive is high cost (you hire an idiot and have to spend months establishing that, firing them and starting the hiring process again).
The side effect of this though, is that it's an extremely painful process for the applicant. Even if you're a great software engineer, you're going to freeze up, miss something, have a bad day, and fail a few interviews. Now for most software engineers failure is an unusual and harrowing experience, so they react really badly to it. Especially ina
scenario where it's difficult to blame anyone but yourself. But just don't! It's fine! just move on, there's plenty of jobs and the interview process is a blunt tool, not a final evaluation of your worth in life.
Veritasium has a great video[1] about people’s cognitive bias towards using examples that prove their mental model, rather than using examples that disprove their mental model. But if you want to actually confirm you have accurate understanding of something, testing examples that don't fit your metal model is the workable methodology (i.e. use a null hypothesis).
Testing examples that do match your mental model only proves your model partially matches the actual model, but it does very little to actually identify misunderstandings, or improve your understanding.
Some people in that discussion wonder about "->", which is used for indirect addressing through a structure member.
When C has added structures, which did not exist in B, it has taken the keyword "struct" and also both "." and "->" from the IBM PL/I language, from which C has also taken some other features.
In general, almost any feature added by C to B was taken either from PL/I or from Algol 68. The exceptions are "continue" and the generalized "for", which did not exist in any previous language.
(However the generalized "for" of C was a mistake, because it complicates the frequent use cases in order to simplify seldom encountered use cases. The right way to generalize "for", i.e. with iterators, was introduced by Alphard in the same year with C, i.e. in 1974.) (Compare "for (I=0;I<N;I+=5) {" of C with "for I from 0 to N by 5 do" or "for I in 0:N:5 do" of previous languages. C requires typing a lot of redundant characters in the most frequent cases.)
The oldest symbol for indirection through a pointer (in the language Euler, in January 1966) was a raised middle dot (i.e. a point). This was before ASCII and ASCII did not include the raised middle dot (U+00B7), so it was replaced by the most similar ASCII character, "*".
Euler had used "@" for "address of" and indirection was a postfix operator, as it should. Making "*" a prefix operator in B and C was a mistake, which forced the importing of "->" from PL/I, to avoid an excessive number of parentheses. Otherwise "(*x).y" would have been needed, instead of "x->y". With a postfix "*", that would have been "x*.y", and "->", would not have been needed.
In CPL, the ancestor of BCPL and B, indirection was implicit, like with the C++ references. Instead of having an "address of" operator, CPL had a distinct symbol for an assignment variant that assigns the address of a variable, instead of assigning its value.
(Context — I run Buttondown (http://buttondown.email/) as a solo founder, with a handful of contractors on support/documentation but no other W2s.)
1. You need to either a) have an answer for "what happens if you get hit by a bus?" or b) create a product for customers to whom that doesn't matter. In general, people really _like_ being able to chat with the founder directly (lean into that! it's a superpower!) but feel very anxious about committing $X0,000/yr to you.
2. It will be somewhere between "vanishingly rare" to "non-existent" to feel like you are moving as fast as you should be. Instead of setting milestones and thinking about metrics, _especially_ in the early goings I'd focus on just spending as much time as you can on critical-path work (chatting with customers, chatting with prospects, improving core flows.)
3. This does not matter. I moved from Seattle to Richmond, VA last year and literally nothing changed about my business.
4. This is a very broad topic that is hard to answer concisely, but the closest answer I can give is "figure out how your first five users found your product and then figure out how to find more people like them".
5. Venture capital is a tool by which you exchange agency for large sums of money. There are a lot of great businesses that require more time, energy, and money than can be provided by a single engineer working for an indefinite amount of time; there are a lot of great businesses that can be built without those things. I would not take a lot of stock in any prescriptive answer that says you HAVE to take VC or you HAVE to bootstrap; it depends on the type of company you want to build and what you consider a successful way to spend a decade or so of your life.
Everytime github goes down, and my push/pull is rejected, I immediately assume they’ve discovered I’m incompetent and fired me. And I’m the head of engineering at my company.
I did the same thing for 12 years as CEO of Postmates and I still do it when I work on new ideas. I thought it was something I just did. But reading this I have to assume it is more common.