You’ve Either Shipped or You Haven’t
scraplab.net
scraplab.net
If you do any amount of engineering or building, you will learn a lot about how the process works. On the flip side, if you have never tried to engineer anything you'll be prone to magical thinking. Too many people's mental model of engineering seems to be drawn from Green Lantern comics: If a gadget cannot do a certain thing, it must be because its builders don't have enough will to succeed. They need to want it more!
The extreme example of this problem is in science. Just about nobody in society has actually done any experimental science. Being a fan of science, reading lots of books about science, visiting science museums, or conducting demonstrations of basic procedures doesn't count. It doesn't teach you what it's actually like to explore a problem where the "right answer" is not known in advance, and every data point costs money or time, and there are more knobs than you can afford to turn, and it's hard to resist cherry-picking the data, and your first N hours of work have to be thrown away after you find the boneheaded systematic error.
This. A thousand times this. It takes like three weeks of screwing around to get something remotely valuable, and oftentimes a summary takes just a paragraph that people look at and say, "Well, yeah, duh, that's obvious isn't it?"
Only then will you truly grok Feynman's joke about mathematicians: "Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because any theorem, once proved, is trivial."
(When I first read that at age fifteen or so, it was humor. Now it is dark humor. Still funny, of course, but with richer overtones.)
Only then will you understand how James Clerk Maxwell's life work can simultaneously be one of the top ten intellectual feats in the history of mankind and something that most undergraduate physics majors learn in a semester or two.
(I'm speaking from experience.)
But it is true that we routinely use the equations to solve problems that were very difficult intellectual struggles for Maxwell. A big problem is that Maxwell was encumbered by his mathematics and notation - everything he did was later refactored to be more straightforward. The dev, grad, curl stuff we use today came later. We have Oliver Heaviside - a man whose name is now more famous from Cats lyrics - to thank for them.
Another, related, effect of most people not being exposed to engineering is a belief that engineers don't make gadgets do certain things simply because it hasn't ever occurred to them (i.e. ideas are everything, and implementation is probably trivial in comparison).
[1] Replace "Duke Nukem Forever" with your favourite overambitious project.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I was surprised to find there is no mention of this in the HN comment guidelines. Maybe it could be added?
Apologies for continuing with the meta.
Are we supposed to only find new HNers by reading through all comments? Isn't that kinda counter productive? We being startup founders and all, we have so less free time anyways.
Also,is there some way I can see who up voted my links?? Maybe I don't know of it, and that features exists, kinda like some other features on HN, which are intuitive, but not mentioned specifically, and you end up finding them by just noticing them or by some other post.
As a matter of fact, I found up voting this way. And yes, I can be considered new, because I really used to be crazy busy (Being a first time entrepreneur (founder and a single programmer) did that to me). Besides I didn't really feel like I had anything to say, so didn't used to comment much.
(No prior active forum-ish experience, HN is the first, and sadly the only one I can be regular at even now. I am sure other good forum-ish communities exist like HN....some day....)
I can appreciate where you're coming from, but it's a tad egocentric: 99% of the time, knowing the username of someone who upvoted you just won't matter that much, and would just be a distraction. Suppose a comment with 60 upvotes also got 60 replies saying nothing but "I like" or some variation. That page is now flooded with what is effectively spam, making it harder for people who are trying to contribute to and/or read the discussion.
If you want to stand out, just telling someone that you liked what they wrote isn't going to do that. You've got to write something worthy of notice.
I think we learn a lot of humility and patience, doing our startups.
(We did get a free dinner, but somewhere deep inside I wanted to do something nice to him. And although I usually never have dessert, I ordered a Tiramisu, and paid 34% tip on it, to show them indirectly that we understood.
Before when I was a student, I would have just taken the dinner free as if I was entitled to it. )
Other than that, there is no substance to this article. It's first place on HN because it give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's pandering, pure and simple.
It took me far too long to understand how important coaching is. To the dispassionate observer, a coach sounds like someone repeating the very, very obvious over and over again. Why, really, do people like the Williams sisters need a coach? Don't they understand as much about tennis and tennis training and winning tennis as anyone on earth?
And then you find yourself in the middle of the competition, and you're tired, and you're stressed, and you're at risk of losing your game, and you find that it's really good to hear the voice of a coach or a teammate, carefully drawing your attention to the specific very, very obvious thing that you need to remember right now.
But this article does interest hackers and entrepreneurs. This isn't off-topic. If the author had wanted to distill the post a little, or even expound, its thesis would have been more obvious. It's clear, though, that this is about builders, creators, hackers and inventors. The type of people who hang around here.
It's about a common experience those who've launched a service, built a product or worked on an idea share. It's an affirmation of the culture of builders, and a recognition that mistakes are made in the process of creation; fix them and move on.
Sure, it's not written as an article you'd read in Professional Entrepreneurs Monthly, but it's compelling. It's not a contentless rant, or a watery dribble of verbiage. It's interesting.
It's nice, for me at least, to hear about what others go through when forming their ideas into product. I know I've stopped working on at least one close-to-MVP product because I was unsure about it. I didn't want to launch it and see it be ridiculed and mocked: if it was good enough for me, then maybe I should just keep it to myself.
So seeing things like this are helpful. They're encouraging. I enjoy them from time to time: this isn't an epidemic that needs to be cracked down on.
It is not pandering; why would you say that without justification? Why would you tear down this product of someone else's work without one, small, paragraph; the irony is tangible here.
You like the sentiment, but you proceed to do what it damns.
But it's not just you; in fact, you less than the other comments that provoked this response. It's so easy to dismiss and ridicule; I debate: I would know. But far too often, comments are spewed out that resemble little straw men; micro-points within an article that are attacked and decimated. I am probably responsible for a few such posts myself; that's something I need to work on.
Context makes the work we live in; nothing lives in a vacuum. Arguments are no exception to this.
The article seeks to make a single point that perhaps some people, in their anger, have missed. That's all, and there's nothing wrong with that.
That even goes for 'trivial' stuff like planing a piece of wood (try it!) and plumbing. It's amazing how much skill and knowledge goes in to many things that we simply take for granted.
If you’ve been reading startup blogs for years and never started anything, it’s time to accept that your tendency is to be a consumer. It’s not to say you can’t break out of that classification by starting something, but if you haven’t done it thus far you’re not likely to do it soon without some external motivation (maybe this post?).
If you have 50 software product ideas and your hard drive is littered with folders containing 30 lines of code from each, you tend towards being a consumer (or at least a producer who has trouble finishing things).
And if you figure out that you are a producer, stop daydreaming about the day you’ll make things happen. Start making it happen in the next 30 days, or forever hold your peace.
Once again, is the ability to ship something the major distinction.
You've never been a soldier so you can't comment about war? You've never been in jail so you can't comment about incarceration?
I became a lot less harsh in my attitude towards companies I deal with after I started working on a software dev. team.
However, I'm still seething with hatred for management. Maybe if I'm an exec someday, I'll learn to empathize.
Cooking, acting, coding, shipping, public speaking, being a doctor, pretty much everything.
Perhaps the better statement would be -
You've either produced something of quality and stood behind it or you haven't.