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Comment by maxbrown | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but have a negative reaction to your comment. Yes, similar "lessons learned" are proliferated throughout the startup world, primarily because these are some of the hardest things about building a successful business even if you already know that they're the hardest things. This is clearly just a self-reflective piece, entitled "lessons I learned" not "lessons you should learn". If the rest of us want the story, or the reminders, great. If not, no sweat. The ad hominem is a little rough.

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Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem: They are specifically criticizing the message, not the speaker.

And their point is valid: There is a wide "startup" belief that you needn't know the market or domain, the customers, etc. You just need to find a domain name and make a web page and customers will come and somehow a business will fall together. Only the overwhelming odds are that it will face likely failure.

Another trait of many of these types of posts is what idlewords points out: The tendency for people to generalize lessons. This is the risk of the dirty sushi restaurant with poor service that inevitably fails, but then writes a broad treatise about how the area won't support sushi restaurants. We see this constantly among such "lessons learned", where macro inputs are often substituted for micro failures.

Many of the start-up lessons here are those preached by Eric Reis, Steve Blank, and others. I don't think this is a broad treatise on how food start-ups won't work.

Also:

..."things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." ...

...classic marketing grad trying to do startup things...

...over-exuberant and irresponsible entrepreneurs...

not sure how you don't see this as ad hominem critical.

Ad hominem is an attack that discredit the argument by trying to discredit the person writing the message (ie. "You didn't success why should I listen to you"), mostly by attacking the credentials of the person.

An attack on BOTH the writer and the argument, as unnecessary critical or negative as it could be, is not an ad hominem attack, and by no mean make the criticism an invalid one. Especially if the criticism of the writer comes because of the writing (ie. "from what you've done, it seems like you're too inexperienced and naive etc...")

(I'm sorry that this is really off topic ...)

This is pretty much the opposite of an `ad hominem` attack.

Wait, what? I thought I was cynical about startups, but I've never noticed this wide belief that you can get a startup off the ground simply by standing up a web page.

Some good examples of that:

Using mailchimp and wufoo-

https://medium.com/who-what-why/from-a-mailchimp-email-and-w...

Built a Facebook page-

http://wpcurve.com/y-combinator/

    > Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem

    >> "things no responsible person"

Calling someone irresponsible seems pretty ad-hominem.

Calling someone irresponsible is not, in and of itself, an ad hominem argument.

Saying a position should be rejected because it is presented by someone who is irresponsible is ad hominem.

Ad hominem argument isn't the same thing as a personal attack; its the fallacy of arguing that a position should be rejected because of the personal characteristics of the person presenting it.

Don't call things ad hominem that aren't, you dumb jerk.

I see what you did there! Genius.

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