a4isms

> from a sales perspective, that’s probably not wrong.

Possibly not wrong. One scenario that happens over and over again is that we lose a deal because we didn't have feature A. So we build feature A, and we still don't win deals with it. One way this happens is when the competitor has a focus on one part of the market, and we have a focus on another.

Example: We go after SMB, the competitor owns "The Enterprise." Just building A will never break us into the Enterprise part of the market. We have to build an entire strategy around seizing part of the Enterprise market from our competitor. That strategy may or may not include A, but it is definitely more involved than "Build A and customers will come."

if we aren't going to build an entire strategy around "The Enterprise," not only can building A fail to win the business, it may cost us some of our existing SMB business. Every feature our core market doesn't want or need is additional complexity and feature surface area for our customers to absorb. They stop thinking of our product as "tailored for their needs" as it begins to bloat with features they don't need.

And worst of all, the investment in feature A means some other feature—B—that our existing customers have asked for gets punted down-calendar because we're suddenly tearing up our road map and building A because the VP Sales threw a temper tantrum about being unable to close deals without A. This is another way that chasing feature A means sacrificing value for our existing customers who are asking for feature B.

That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.

The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverer_2

The second paragraph neatly triggered my confirmation bias:

The initial version of this post opened with “You can use the wiki or a docs folder for your GitHub project, both are valid choices” but as I wrote more, I realised that there is a single reason to use a wiki, and many more reasons not to use the wiki. So many in fact, that I consider using the wiki on GitHub is an anti-pattern.

A very straightforward example of McCulloch's quote that "Writing is thinking."

And there go my Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure memories. George Carlin's Rufus was a "good 'un."

You aren't serious about high-frequency karma ("HFK") unless you colocate your equipment with the routing for your sources so you can beat your HFK competition to a submission by at least 200ms.

We will have reached HFK-ception when the bots are fighting to be the first to submit "How I used AI to build a High-Frequency Karma Farming Bot on Hacker News."

Don't talk to me about the 90s if you weren't soaking a tennis ball in lighter fluid and firing the flaming missile out of a "potato gun" made out of beer cans... in the 70s. Also something about all the kids trying to imitate Evil Knievel and jumping their bikes off ramps made out of planks and milk crates... Without protective gear of any kind.

Everyone who got out of that decade alive and with at most minimal brain damage thinks that we're too obsessed with safety today.

;-)

Another analogy can be found in the current way that automobiles are sold. For new models that are considered desirable, they maximize their margins by putting expensive limited editions with desirable badging and options on sale first. It may take a full year or more before a mainstream mass-market edition with basic features is released at a lower price.

The iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pros were released this week. The "ordinary" iPhone 18 apparently won't ship until Spring of 2027. That's the same strategy!

I can't speak for anyone else, but I suspect that Amazon are nearly continuously planning for automated deliveries. Drones? Trucks with lockers that stop in front of your house and you retrieve your delivery?

I dunno, but there's no way Bezos doesn't look at his drivers and delivery partners and think, "Your livelihood will soon be my margin."

> my TOS doesn’t matter, but theirs does?

Wilhoit Conservatism: In-groups protected by contract law but not bound by it, alongside out-groups bound by contract law, but not protected by it.

Nevertheless, you are still Wright to have your own say, and it is delightful to have commonality, no matter how "trivial."

In the 1970s, a bunch of us would have marathon sessions playing this newfangled game called "Dungeons and Dragons." It was a box set then, AD&D was yet to come. We played in a games club on Yonge Street in Toronto, and just down the street as the kind of sleazy movie theatre that played "Swedish Naturist" movies and any other porn or porn-adjacent films they could get away with.

On Saturdays, we would play until about 11:45, lock the club up, and go to the theatre, where they would show The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. It was semi-wild. A few people would be there in costume, and lots of people would shout out the most famous lines.

I enjoyed it, and ended up making a minor contribution to the atmosphere: I started brining a water pistol along, and when there was rain in the movie, I'd fire it upwards, waving it randomly so other patrons would get a little sprinkle.

People liked that kind of thing!

As posted on Mastodon: “If I see Trump start walking around in Tim Curry’s hat or shoes, there will be trouble. Terrible, retributive trouble.”

Smaller role, but he was brilliant in "Oscar" with Marissa Tomei and some guy who was nominated for an Oscar in 1977 for the screenplay to "Rocky."

Absolutely nobody else could make the word "elocution" sound so luxuriously redolent of desire.

Not that it matters, but my use case for Nitter and XCancel was to provide a link to accompany a screen shot when discussing a tweet on Mastodon. Now I'lll just use a screen shot, there is zero chance I will send them direct traffic of any kind.

I chose the names from The Flintstones, although the joke is not from the show.

Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.

An old variation:

Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"

"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."

Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."

Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."

This is well before most HN readers' time, but Michael Milken, the "Junk Bond King," was handed a $600,000,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentance for insider trading and racketeering. He was also barred from reëntering the securities industry. When he was released from prison after serving less than two years, he became a "consultant" charging a flat $25 million fee for his services, which avoided the ban on working in the securities industry.

Trump pardoned him in 2020. Consequences are incredibly elastic for people at the top of the food chain.

> Demanding similar changes at the thousands of smaller airports where A320-class planes land would be a non-starter.

Perhaps similar:

One of the reasons the Vickers VC10 was so successful in the 60s and 70s was that it could operate from short runways, high ambient temperatures, and high altitudes compared to other jets of its era.

It was far easier for carriers like BOAC to fly those into Britain's former colonies than it would have been to magically expect all those colobnies to update their airports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickers_VC10

p.s. As a boy, I flew to West Africa in 1970 on a VC10. Now I know some of the backstory.

My 2c:

The goal is longer, thinner wings than usual. Long and thin wings are far more efficient—think gliders and the U2. But beyond a certain width, those wings become incompatible with existing airports and other facilities for handling commercial aircraft. So the idea is to mount folding extensions that are extended for flight, but likely fold when being hangered or navigating taxiways.

In 2001, OG Business of Tech blogger Joel Spolsky famously said about Napster:

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

He was right. It was a service issue, and when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, the mainstream happily ponied up 99 cents a song because they could type the name of that song and then listen to it on their phone, Mac, or Windows computer right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

Another—very old—rationale:

People write code differently when they know that it will be reviewed by people who will not only comment on it, but also form long-term impressions of the submitter's competence and fit based on the code that is reviewed.

Excellent!

With people I'm invested in, like a community (which includes co-workers), I start with some experience that they are good people, which provides an incentive to ask whether options 2 or 3 (or both) would work. Option 3 in particular leaves open the possibility that I will be convinced to support what they have in mind once we move from "that seems unreasonable" to "this is aligned with your values, could it align with some of mine?"

Here's a simple idea: You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

And three interpretations to consider:

0: The default: That person is irrationally attached to being wrong. Best to walk away, argumentation will be futile, and I have a life to lead.

1: Whoa! Sometimes that person is me.

2: If they didn't reason themselves into it, how did they get into it? What if their position represents their values, not some perfectly architected strategy for maximizing some hypothetical measure of rightness? In that case, if I wish to discuss it with them, I should be talking about their values and my values and where they intersect, rather than arguing right and wrong?

I have personally found all three of the above useful at one point or anther.

Feels like "I Don't Hire Unlucky People" all over again, but with extra tokenmaxxing steps.

https://neonrocket.com/2014/05/rescued-from-the-ashes-i-dont...

There is something of a tradition in the design world to use theft-shaped words for things we collect for inspiration/ideas. A piece of advice I followed in the 80s and 90s when paper was still a thing was to have a "Swipe File," which was a collection of things you saw and liked, on paper.

In my own case as a designer of desktop apps, my Swipe File was not just digital screen shots of parts of apps that I admired, but I physically printed them out as well so I could spread them on a desk, floor, and walls when brainstorming.

That word "Swipe" also inspired the name of a design store catering to creative professionals in my home town, Toronto:

https://www.swipe.com/about

The easiest metaphor for HN's evolution is that of gentrification:

An outsider community forms in a down-market neighbourhood. Lacking money and power, it makes its own culture. That becomes "hip," and those with money start buying property in that neighbourhood, displacing the very people who made it hip to begin with.

As with "hackers," so also with artists, musicians, bicycle messengers, dirtbag rock climbers, frisbee players, &c. &c.

In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:"

https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)

Jef was a huge proponent of incremental search. That hasn't become mainstream-ubiquitous, but it is certainly code-editor-ubiquitous. Jef being an extremist, he wanted incremental search as the only mechanism for moving the cursor.

I have tried editing using only incremental search, and it was awful right up until the moment when I reached for it first instead of wanting a mouse or arrow key and then remembering I was only supposed to use incremental search.

From that moment on, I sailed along just fine. Does that mean it might have "won?" Certainly not, but all the same... Success in software design is absolutely not any kind of meritocracy outside of the tautological "If it won, it must have merit, winning is the metric for merit."