10 common geek misconceptions about businesses | Hacker News Reader

10 common geek misconceptions about businesses

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13 pointsSam_Odio9 comments

11) Don't be a snob:

"I dont mean to sound condescending here, but the sad fact of the matter is that compared to you, most people are pretty dumb (look at how many people vote Republican ;-) and they care about dumb things. (I just heard about a new clothing store in Pasadena that has lines around the block. A clothing store!) If you cater only to people who care about the things that you care about then your customer base will be pretty small."

12) Don't be delusional. -- referring to #6 "a Lisper can run rings around a C programmer".

Now, before you flame me, I'm not attacking Lisp. I simply think that the framework and tools available to you are more important than the language you choose. A Lisper is going nowhere if he doesn't have good third-party tools and has to build everything from scratch.

If you posted that on reddit you would be flamed to a crisp. But you're among friends here :D

I have some experience with writing in Lisp without good libraries for what I'm doing. It turns out not to be an enormous amount of work to turn an unmaintained unusable FFI to the C library you want into a highly usable, Lispish library. It can at times even be useful for understanding said library. I'm not saying this isn't a drawback of Lisp, but it's also not as huge a barrier as some might think. FFI's have gotten good enough that it doesn't really matter that much what language the library is written in.

I hate plaigarism.

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-geek-business-myths.html

Good catch, hopefully pg will change the URL when he reads this.

I knew it sounded familiar.

N.B. Regarding the Lisp vs. C issue: the original author, Ron Garret (formerly Erann Gat) is a well-known Lisper. He used Lisp at JPL for many years before political forces rendered its continued use there untenable.

"Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

"PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[1]) and Sergey Brin "

Geez, it's only named after him. Also: text-only ads are somewhat less brilliant than any number of things msft has done. Yeah--they _work_, but they aren't brilliant, and they sure as hell aren't original. Massive parallel implementation, of course, is hardly an "idea" of google's.

I was reading this stuff with interest, then:

"A C programmer, by contrast, can't do anything useful except as a member of a team".

Don't you think this statement is a bit too strong?

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