Hacker News Reader

Particularly when you use terms like "grok" that 99.9% of the population don't understand. You need to build products for the general population, not your tech friends.

View on HN

That might explain why my bespoke fedora startup failed.

I wonder how many people know/use that word. I hear it a lot in my circles, and not just (nor mostly) from technical people.

Stranger in a Strange Land (where "grok" comes from) is a great book btw for those who haven't read it.

The only place I've encountered that word, is from reading the book, and on online tech forums. No one in my 37 years of life, has ever said that, and I've been in the IT/Web side of things for the last 20.

I recall seeing it on Slashdot back in the day (and guessing its meaning by context), but I first heard it in person from an older physicist, probably the right age to have been reading Heinlein as a youth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com