Silver bullets | Hacker News Reader

Silver bullets

lawnlove.com

77 pointstlb20 comments

If you're interested in this topic, might I recommend:

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Frederick Brooks (1987) - http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBulle...

No Silver Bullet Refired, Frederick Brooks (1995)

Both can be found (along with lots of other good ideas) in The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition - http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineerin...

> Press flowed effortlessly, funding fell from the sky

> Looking in from the outside, I could only assume they possessed secret advantages that I lacked access to.

Those secret advantages were just relationships with journalists and investors :)

I made the same mistake you did, where I conflated press and funding (especially early stage funding) as signals of some startup skill that must be critically important for success.

Incidentally, it was the Exec trajectory that broke me out of that thought process. When they launched, they raised a massive seed round and seemingly got press every week, and I assumed our company (somewhat a competitor) was in big trouble. But it turns out their product didn't work, and all the press and funding they had gotten didn't magically imbue them with any of the hard won insights our company had made.

Customers don't care about press, they don't care about your funding, they don't care about your growth. They care about you delivering them a product they want, and there are no shortcuts for that.

Incidentally, potential employees often don't care about this stuff, either.

It's important you have funding enough to pay them, bur dropping names of investors/board members, or sending links to techcrunch articles just doesn't impress.

I see this sort of name-dropping a lot from recruiters who understand that it impresses those with no startup experience.

"We've been on TechCrunch! Sequoia invested in us!"

Uggh, yes. I did have one recruiter even excitedly email me tech crunch links over the next few days as they got "more press".

I also "enjoy" name dropping like: "Someone on our board was like employee #17 at Amazon! He may have even talked to Jeff Bezos once!"

It can be upsetting to see other people seemingly squander those connections. When you work hard on your own thing, and it doesn't gain as much attention, maybe even releasing first and then getting eclipsed by these competitors, it's frustrating. And then you sit there and stare at your hands, not knowing what to do differently with your own stuff to make it any different. Because it has nothing to do with the stuff, just as you say. And it certainly has nothing to do with now. It's the connections, gained 6 months, 6 years ago.

"Now here’s a great paradox for you: If a silver bullet did exist, it would probably take the form of the realization that silver bullets don’t exist." -- Mind blown for the day :-)

Really loved this post when I read it the first time: http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets

Same vein.

Yeah that post has one of the best quotes ever:

"those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets."

This is a good writeup, but is anyone else getting really sick of the term "silver bullet"? I have been seeing it everywhere since 2013, and the "there's no silver bullet!" truism is growing very trite very quickly.

spot on. there is no substitute for hard work

Or, put another way, for those lacking familial wealth or connections, there is no choice but hard work.

Hard work, resourcefulness and imagination...

Silver bullets are actually only to kill vampires. The expression most people are looking for is "magic bullet".

The figurative usage of "silver bullet" isn't necessarily as old as "magic bullet," but it goes back at least to the 1950s. Plus, "magic bullet" usually has a medical connotation owing to the early use of the term by Paul Ehrlich.

More importantly, though their range of effectiveness seems to have expanded over the years, silver bullets are traditionally used against werewolves, not vampires.

Werewolves. For vampires you usually want to stake them through the heart.

Mixing those up is a good way to get a vampire or werewolf to laugh at you.

Source: I asked a werewolf one time while he was drinking a Pina Colada at Trader Vic's

Silver will harm vampires, but it will not be a one-shot kill.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SilverHasMysticPo...

Aren't magic bullets only good for killing US Presidents?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-bullet_theory

Silver bullets do exist, I just found 10 different sellers on Ebay. But steel is probably more effective.

It's good if your enemies are vampires. Aside that, not much.

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