And to me this is the essence of hacking and hacker culture, not “how do I create MVP from my idea and become an entrepreneur” or “this and that in company XYZ” mindset.
So glad to see people doing silly things that in fact require skill. This is why I come to hackernews.
The concern is in the appropriation of the term 'hacker'.
He's not putting anything or anyone down, he's saying that this is hacking, and MBA posts of acronym soup aren't.
I think his implied conclusion is probably wrong-ish (both are arguably right for HN, even if I vastly prefer this), but he's right in that this is hacking.
One could argue anything they like, it doesn’t mean their argument (or sophistry in general) leads to a better acquiring of knowledge through discussion.
In my opinion, the gp’s discussion is one worth having.
hacking culture was not just about the skills it takes to participate, it was also about values. One of them, openness and sharing information. open protocols over closed walls.
entrepreneurship today in particular in tech often tries to capitalise on the latter rather than the former, at least most of the time. Adopting the aesthetics of hacker culture to further institutions that could not be more damaging to an open ecosystem is already more common than actual 'hacking'.
All business is based on some kind of upper hand right? Secrecy is usually the root of that upper hand.
Sometimes you can reveal your "secret sauce" but patents/copyright/regulation will protect it from being stolen. So the "secret sauce" is still what separates you from the other businesses...
It makes sense in my head, but maybe I'm rambling... I'll try and write a blog post to explain my thoughts a bit better.
Can you think of a business that is entirely transparent?
Being a successful business doesn’t mean that you must be secretive about your business operations. I don’t think it requires an “upper hand” either. Those may be key to out-competing other businesses in some way, but that is different than being successful. (Capital culture makes us think of a “successful business” as one that makes insane amounts of money, rather than one that achieves a goal.)
Of course, all businesses realistically will have some secrets, but those may often be separate from the business operations. For example, it would probably be very difficult to be public about all of your HR details, or expose all of your internal phone numbers/emails/physical addresses (humans just like basic privacy).
But many local businesses can probably operate just fine without being very secretive. There was a place in my hometown I loved that served shakes, cheese sticks, and cheeseburgers. I don’t think he did anything special that needed to be kept secret. People just like a nice diner with a decent burger.
Startup culture is basically the opposite of hacker culture. As kick hints to, the term has been appropriated. This site has been dubiously hackish from the start.
Hacking together a product takes intelligence, creativity and persistence. Hacking together a company takes empathy, honesty, respect, humility, etc. It's about the people and building a team. I don't associate this with "hacking" at all.
The point is that the original topic is against "startups" where in this example, 99% of work was done inside precisely an organization like a startup, and only the resting 1% being work of a student who simply applied a ready-made solution to his situation. The point is, regardless of hacker culture, there is nothing wrong with startup culture, it often produces great products and technology.
Your FAQ says Comma "openpilot performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC)" and my 2020 Corolla is supported-but it already has those features. I read through the site and I don't see the value proposition. Is it that Comma does a better job of it?
I think Scott Galloway has some very valuable input on this topic. I might do it a disservice by trying to to;dr it here but basically there is very little if any room for innovation left when the big monopolies are currently very efficient in “featuring” your whole startup and through economies of scale (not having to turn a profit) they’ll eliminate you from the market it acquire you if they like the talent.
I see your point and I agree with it. But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd be way richer right now if I had just taken a job at some bigco. Or kept doing consulting.
I don't feel that what I'm doing right now (building a startup because I can) is fundamentally different from my demoscene past (coding computer graphics because I could). Sure, some startups make some people obscenely rich, but the vast majority don't :-) It's not too different from art or AI hobbying or gaming or game modding in that sense.
> But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.
It is - Tikej's point isn't that it's not a skill - but rather that it's not the right place to share these. Think of the difference between a "Startup News" and "Hacker News". Hacker news used to be very deep on tech topics, now those deep topic have become more rare.
I remember an early pg quote where he noted that being a hacker isn’t supposed to be limit to coding or tech even, but all topics that hackers are drawn to and can ply their hacking in. Social hacking to bootstrap a userbase is a on-topic as far as that quote is concerned [edit: errant autocorrect]
Indeed, we’ve come full (half?) circle. IIRC, it was renamed to Hacker News in part to discourage meta-discussion on intellectually stimulating posts, questioning why the front page had so many posts that weren’t about startups. Now we are instead discussing startup post fatigue.
Interesting the idea that the original plan was that your votes count for more if you vote for the right kind of stories. Would seem to create an echo chamber effect where what’s already popular stays popular and new stuff doesn’t.
It's impossible to say without trying it, and we never did. (Edit: actually I remember a conversation with pg where he said he did experiment with it, but dropped it. I don't remember why though. Maybe I'll ask.)
You could make the opposite argument: the "right kind of stories" includes being unpredictable (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so up-weighting votes from users who are good at picking those would lead to a less predictable, more interesting front page. Conversely, the median vote tends to be for the same few hot topics, leading to a more samey (as well as more sensational) front page.
My bet is that it wouldn't change much either way, because the problems with voting seem to flow from the voting mechanism itself, not from which users are doing it. Internet upvoting is the ultimate reflexive reaction, which excludes reflection, and reflection—the slower cognitive process which considers something before reacting to it and is thus able to see something new—is the quality that picks up on uncorrelated bits and makes for good taste. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
If that's true, then instead of trying to squeeze more signal out of upvotes we should add a new mechanism that encourages reflection over reflexivity. Flagging is closer to that than voting is, so something like an up-flag might be worth trying: i.e. "this deserves extra attention because of how good it is".
Thanks for the thoughtful response dang. Perhaps a blend is useful - it's good to have quick takes on articles, but the current voting structure incentivises quick takes over thoughtful responses.
In many cases, writing a quick comment to get position in the discussion and then editing or self-replying might be the only way to get engagement from other thoughtful commenters. And a response that takes more than a few hours (or in some cases, minutes) to compose is likely to have very little engagement at all.
There is a comment feed, but it's heavily biased towards more recent comments and doesn't have enough context to be useful in many cases. Perhaps the "exalt / flare" system that you suggest could help to flag up more interesting comments in a slower stream.
At the moment, unless you check your own comments or look out for your karma and investigate any changes, you're likely to miss out even on replies to your own comments, let alone interesting comments on older articles.
The thing that immediately came to mind for me was 'flare', partially for the obvious "Oh wow it basically perfectly fits with the intention of it!" but also for alliterative reasons: flag / favorite / flare
Maybe I'm a terrible person but the experiment this suggests to me is a ranking where only flagging is allowed. A brutal agoge which only the best stories survive.
I imagine the OP is just bored of the generic startup technology churn cycle. It can feel as though the majority of "tech stack" articles on HN are just Yet Another Web Application Tool. We have solved making web applications so hard that we have ascended to meta-tools, tools that manage our tools or use our tools for us.
It is refreshing to be reminded of the myriad of ways computers can interact with the world! I recently refreshed my love for technology by getting into 3D printing, it's nice to have a tangible result for my efforts behind the keyboard. The machine is surprisingly rudimentary as well, and reminds me of old school CNC machines, so it's relaxing in the way driving a classic car can be. You can understand all the parts and their purpose intuitively, as they operate in the real world.
So glad to see people doing silly things that in fact require skill. This is why I come to hackernews.
Keep up great work with this wonderful attitude!