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Comment by JohnKemeny | Hacker News Reader

But then the claim is meaningless.

No; why would it be? Not everything is fun. Fun is one more reason why I might care, but it's not automatically true. You have to show me that I'm going to have fun.

If you can't show me why it's fun, or why it's relevant in some other way, then I'm out. (And you don't have very long to do it, either...)

[Edit to reply to tikhonj, because I'm rate limited: The "value proposition" is what makes it valuable to the listener. Why should they give you their attention and time? Value is "anything that makes people interested in what you're telling them", as opposed to all the things that don't make them interested. Since the "don't make them interested" set is not empty (far from it!), then no, it's not a tautology.]

It's "meaningless" because if you broaden out the definition of "value" to "anything that will make people interested in what you're doing", the advice turns into a tautology.

It's still helpful to remind people that an audience will not care about what you are talking about until you tell them, in any way, why they should.

So describing a fun problem is implicitly telling the audience why they should listen.

And yet a lot of speakers still seem to need that self-evidently true statement pointed out to them. Tautological advice isn't necessarily bad or useless, especially for beginners.

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