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> - The founders are nice. I'm sure this doesn't always apply, but the most successful founders I know are nicer than average. They're tough, they're very competitive, and they are ruthless, but they are fundamentally nice people.

ruth·less, ˈro͞oTHləs/, adjective

1. having or showing no pity or compassion for others.

what does "ruthless" mean nowadays in valley newspeak? or did i miss a memo about "nice"..?

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There exist many football players who are very nice people. They're attentive dads and loving husbands. They're true and loyal friends. They give generously of their time and are considered pillars in the community. If you are a fraction of a second too slow, they will push your face into the dirt, commit an act of violence upon a good friend of yours, and cause a collective endeavor you deem very important to end in painful failure.

I generally treat business as more PVE rather than PVP (as you could have guessed, football is not my game or metaphor of choice), but I sometimes work with great people who have rather the opposite inclination. They're ruthless cutthroats, but I mean that in the best possible way.

This may not apply to entrepreneurs, but in my experience working in large corporations there appear to be 2 kinds of people:

1) Those who will cut you some slack if you make an error, on the understanding that we are all human and we all make mistakes and one day you may mean forgiveness yourself

2) Those who operate to extremely high standards of perfection and expect everyone else to do the same.

Type 2 people often achieve great results, until they make an error and all the people they have "punished" in similar circumstances get their revenge.

Really, it's that hard to understand what he means by ruthless in the context of a nice person?

I know plenty of doctors who are wonderful people, and who are ruthless in their work, meaning they will see it that a task gets done no matter what convoluted channels he/she must use. They're not mean people. They're not assholes, but they're serious about their responsibilities. For a founder, it could mean being ruthless in getting a meeting with an important person, or being ruthless in managing finances, or being ruthless in getting investors on the phone.

You can be ruthless in seeking success while being a nice person. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and it's not hard to see that that's what the OP was getting across.

tl;dr - In plain terms, ruthless here means being unforgivingly persistent.

In other words, he probably meant relentless

Sure. Word selection aside, we'd be better off without this forced stupidity that's become common here.

No. Without knowing a priori what the writer was trying to say, his use of the word 'ruthless' /was/ confusing, because he used it in an uncommon (and possibly incorrect) way.

And yet, @kyro and I and I suspect many others were able to understand perfectly well what @sama meant. The original comment

> what does "ruthless" mean nowadays in valley newspeak? or did i miss a memo about "nice"..?

reads as if the commenter didn't even attempt to understand what @sama meant. Instead, it appears as if he saw that what @sama wrote was technically inconsistent and glommed onto that without actually engaging with the essay. If the commenter was simply offering up copyediting advice, well, he could've left out the color ("valley newspeak", etc.).

As it stands, the comment is utterly boring and, I suspect, reflects the attitude @kyro meant to highlight with the phrase "forced stupidity." "Technically correct" is not actually the best kind of correct (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hou0lU8WMgo).

"relentless" might be a better word.

I think Collins has a more succinct definition:

  > Feeling or showing no mercy

Ruthless doesn't have to be 'towards others' - you can be ruthless in cutting unnecessary spending.

If you are ruthless in cutting unnecessary spending, you're probably going to end up cutting salaries, firing people, or going cheap on other things that actually affect staff, which is likely to be your largest expense.

The quote was either phrased worded or the author doesn't understand the word. Ruthless people are not nice.

Like you said it's unnecessary spending. Firing a slacker can be both ruthless and nice (towards employees that put in real work). There is no obligation to pay people and no right to be paid. Cutting wages is not some horrible or cruel act if it's done for good reasons.

but the point is that "ruthless" doesn't mean "great at seeking out waste" but specifically "having no compassion". it applies only where compassion would reasonably be applied by others.

Probably what Paul Graham means by "formidable."

http://paulgraham.com/convince.html

You can be kind & compassionate in your personal life and in general to other people, but ruthless when they get in the way of your business. The two traits can exist in the same person, and simply applied to different spheres of your life.

Something along the old lines of, I'll be your best bud, but if you cross me...

I wouldn't personally call someone like that a nice person.

I think it's ruthless in regards to their suppliers/competition/clients, not their employees. The reality of the capitalist system is that you can't be "nice" to your competition or suppliers.

Aren't employees a very special kind of supplier?

Ruthless can be an outlook you adopt in order to understand the field of competition. Whether or not you actually start throwing elbows sometimes doesn't matter as much as knowing which elbows you could throw if it came to it.

He probably meant ruthless with respect to competition.

> ruth·less, ˈro͞oTHləs/, adjective

Is there any software that takes IPA or ASCII IPA as inpit and gives speech as an output?

Or does IPA not work like that?

There's an immense amount of qualities not indicated in IPA, like aspiration (difference between the p's in pin and spin), vowel length (fit and feet), palatalization (the difference between the n's in nine and new), all of which are not binary but analog qualities, some of which are differences between languages and some of which just quantify interpersonal differences.

It just can't be done, I'm sorry.

You're much better of using a tts engine tuned for a certain language.

If you know that your input describes a certain language (eg English), you shouldn't be worse off starting from IPA than normal letters.

If you replace "others" with "Others" then then ruthless becomes compatible with nice.

I think he means "ruthless" the way a great athlete is "ruthless".

ah, so like lance armstrong?

No, I meant in the course of the game. In tennis, every point Roger Federer wins, his opponent loses. Every game winning jumpshot Michael Jordan made, the other team lost.

I can't imagine you'd get very far in any competitive enterprise if you spent all your time feeling bad about that.

Lance Armstrong isn't a great athlete .. he's a cheater.

> Lance Armstrong isn't a great athlete .. he's a cheater.

Going off on a tangent now but...

He's a cheater and a lying scumbag, but you can't say he isn't a great athlete. He is in fact one of the best competitive athletes the world has ever known. Even a guy who rides the Tour de France once and comes in at last place fits in that category.

Also he was consistently beating other people using the same tactics as him over a long period of time.

Among other things, Lance Armstrong is kind of a legendary asshole. (See http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112031/lance-armstrong-do..., http://sports.yahoo.com/news/lance-armstrong--arrogant-and-u..., http://www.etonline.com/news/129267_Anderson_Cooper_Calls_La..., etc etc etc)

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