Reading Hacker News is not launching

http://jcromartie.tumblr.com/post/8255551864/reading-hacker-news-is-not-launching

by jcromartie • 15 years ago

133 48 15 years ago

jcromartie.tumblr.com

bfe2• 15 years ago

To be just a little contrarian to this post, I've become at peace with the idea that you should probably always spend a great deal of time, and maybe or probably even more time than you feel totally comfortable with, learning about all aspects of something new that you're trying to understand and do something with, and maybe even mentally iterate through different ideas and through a wandering exploration of the idea space while you're building your understanding of it, before you try doing the something with it.

That said, I also love the post and I've bookmarked it to look at again on the committed date to see what they've come up with.

martinkallstrom3• 15 years ago

Yeah, blogging about launching and posting it on HN is not actually launching either. But still worthwhile! Talking about launching is silver, launching is gold.

fedd4• 15 years ago

what is launch then? telling on a big conference with big fanfares?

i really want to know because i announced our project here and was ignored, so i know for sure that writing on HN is not launch

telling on blogs and forums is a way to test how needed is your solution.

my unnoticed launch maybe is gold, but massive discussion of it, testing of our technology, emerging of fans and haters - that would be, i dont know, platinum :)

ImprovedSilence• 15 years ago

ive found i learn the most from just experimenting and DOING. I can read learn python the hard way all day, but when it comes down to it, trying to do your own thing is the best teacher.

_delirium• 15 years ago

I've found that sometimes, but have also found the opposite, where 30 minutes of reading has cleared up many, many hours of confusion borne of experience. Most often it takes the form of: 1) run into variants of some minor difficulty on and off, develop a solution or workaround; 2) run into another edge case that breaks my solution, patch it, start wondering if this problem is more subtle than I'd first thought; 3) try to determine if what I'm doing is an instance of something more general that has a name; 4) finally find a chapter in Knuth that exactly explains why I've had the problems I've had, in addition to giving me a solution that covers a more general case I hadn't even run into yet.

(On the other hand, having run into the problem in various forms 'irl' probably did make reading the description/solution in Knuth more intelligible and well motivated, compared to if I had just sat down and read every one of his books first.)

bfe2• 15 years ago

But if you're reading Learn Python the Hard Way and actually doing what it says, you are doing a bunch of coding exercises including experimenting and not just reading.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

Since I've started to frequent HN, I've learnt a lot about stuff I wasn't initially very familiar with (mostly the non-technical stuff posted here). Recently, however, I find that more and more of what I read is slight variations of what I read before; I don't learn as much anymore. I think that this is not HN but me, and I think it's good.

Basically, for me, it may very well be that reading HN for the first few months is launching, but reading HN for over a year isn't.

Needless to say, it looks like I'm not launching anytime soon.

carbon8• 15 years ago

When it comes to the kinds of businesses we are dealing with here, operating and researching not only can be done concurrently, but they are often more valuable together. Particularly with tech businesses, we are often pushing some boundaries somewhere, and the only way to really figure out whether what we are reading is valid and useful is to actually put things in action. By having a business in motion, you have direct context in which to interpret information, as your research is also informed by the additional information that can only be obtained by operating in some capacity.

All of this is why the minimum viable product approach can be so valuable. In many cases, you absolutely do not need to make a huge number of decisions before operating. Treat the business as a largely blank canvas. There's a core idea, so put that out there and start experimenting.

Don't worry that you don't have all the features of a similar or competing business that's been operating for a couple years. Don't worry that you don't have everything figured out. In the kinds of business we most frequently discuss here, it really doesn't matter. You will make mistakes (and even your most competent competitors will, too). You will tweak. You can pivot. Most importantly, you can grow.

phugoid• 15 years ago

The turtle wins the race.

Startup blogs and gurus often give the sense of false urgency. But if you keep your burn rate low and stay on course, you'll probably get there just as well. Worrying about competitors beating you to market seems silly to me in most cases. Definitely in mine anyway.

You have to find time to sip your coffee, play with your kids, read HN, and maybe even pull the guitar off the stand once in a while. Did I mention the wife in there? Life is not something you'll starting living after you make it rich.

Cushman5• 15 years ago

Definitely— but that seems like maybe it's going too far the other way.

Or to put it another way— It's not a race. There's room enough on this big ol' internet for patient folks who keep up a steady pace for years, and for insatiably driven folks who hammer out a for-profit app over the weekend.

The only thing that matters are your individual goals— is reading Hacker News too much stopping you from launching when you want to? You should probably cut down. Just the same thing as if reading Hacker News too much is stopping you from hugging your baby enough.

bignoggins• 15 years ago

I definitely recommend the slow and measured approach. Started working on my startup as a side project while still employed at BigCo. Launched, waited until $app_income >= $salary_income, then quit to do it full time. I'd argue the only reason to rush and launch something is if you have or are looking to get funding.

jpadvo3• 15 years ago

The combination of the ambiguous word "is" and the mixed capitalization styles in the title is interesting. When I first read the title, I saw it as:

   ReadingHackerNews.is_going_to_launch? # false

And wondered who the Reading Hacker News team was, and why they decided to scrap their launch. After a couple seconds I saw the forest for the trees and realized it said:

   ReadingHackerNews !== Launching       # true

Now, what's interesting is the interplay between:

   - capitalization conventions in human language
   - capitalization conventions in programming languages
   - the author's specification of [Reading Hacker News]
     in the article, that indicates that he is referring
     to it as an object in itself
   - the requirement for him to use brackets instead of
     merely case to indicate this, because he needed to
     capitalize "Reading", and "Hacker News" to be proper
     english anyway.
   - the way the brackets were left of in the submission
     title
   - the fact that programmers often use things like
     CamelCase in english to communicate concepts
     analogous to those found in programming, like
     object-ness.
   - the existence of a lot of third party HN tools, such
     that one of them could conceivably be called "Reading
     Hacker News"

There is a lot of stuff going on in this title for the brain to process. I wouldn't have noticed it at all except that my brain glitched and produced the wrong answer for a second or so.

It's crazy to think about (1) how many difficult background questions our minds silently get right, and (2) how many of these questions our minds silently get wrong.

gosub• 15 years ago

It's a garden path sentence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

jpadvo3• 15 years ago

"Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text."

Another random and crazy thought: people have experimented with textual and graphical programming languages -- I wonder what an aural programming language would be like? It's almost certainly impractical, but the idea is intriguing nonetheless.

Maybe slightly more practical would be some kind of aural complement to conventional sight-based programming systems...

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

Not really, it's just ambiguous...

StavrosK6• 15 years ago

That's really only because English is hard to parse, in other languages this is unambiguous.

jpadvo3• 15 years ago

The word "is" is overloaded pretty hard...

Cushman5• 15 years ago

"Other languages" cover a vast range of possible and required levels of ambiguity. Distilling that to "English is hard to parse" is pretty inaccurate.

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

Reading "Hacker News" is not launching—ambiguity solved.

Mathnerd314• 15 years ago

The convention is to quote article titles and emphasize site titles, so I'd recommend:

"Reading Hacker News is not launching"

Perhaps this is a good reason to use formatting in submission titles?

brackin• 15 years ago

I suppose you can read all the startup stories you like but in the end you won't learn anything unless you just jump in, see how it goes and iterate from what you learn.

I think Hacker News has taught me a lot though, i'm not saying learning from others isn't important, it is. But in the end you have to launch something and learn your own lessons.

inkaudio• 15 years ago

I agree with this post with one caveat, I've done this, I've shipped many times, all failed projects or what I consider temporary embarrassments. Shipping is not enough. People must want what you are offering, and you must have a means to reach those people. I've learned a thing or two reading hacker news, some sort of balance is important. Taking a break from news feeds to focus on your work is a good idea, but don't think launching is enough.

adam_albrecht• 15 years ago

I've been doing this with SelfControl for a long time. Really useful application

http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/

antidaily• 15 years ago

also: StayFocused for Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfm...

Toady• 15 years ago

God, I can't wait for this era of wannabe yuppies to end, yuppies reading about launching startups and talking about startups and thinking about everything in terms of startups. It's got to be the most boring tech news of all time, and I have no idea how anyone could be interested in it.

jblow• 15 years ago

Agree 100%. Not much more to say about this.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

I guess you don't have a startup?

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

May I ask why on earth you are here? This is HN, which used to be called Startup News and is run by a noted venture capitalist who works with startups night and day.

You can join the startup crowd yourself or not, as you prefer, but if you're going to voluntarily hang out in their space please refrain from trolling them.

axefrog• 15 years ago

There is nothing wrong with reading sites like Hacker News. Just do it when you need a break. i.e after you've done a whole lot of work. I'm on the couch writing this on my iPad after coming off a 10 hour coding session. Code first, hacker news second.

code_duck• 15 years ago

I sometimes keep myself from this site and others I habitually frequent though DNS, too. Handy to have an automatic script to do it! But that might be too easy. Editing /etc/hosts by hand is clunky enough that it's a commitment to do so, and takes more than a second.

All things in moderation, though. Visiting discussion sites 30 times a day, any time your attention span breaks, is not helpful. Reading once or twice a day is perfectly healthy and does help you get things done, through what you learn.

I'm at the same point now, though. I unblocked this site, Reddit and picked up another forum again a few months ago, and I feel about as the author regarding not getting things done. I've posted on social networks, I've read blogs and absorbed the essence of the zeitgeist. Time to build some products, polish 'em up and make some money.

chemmail• 15 years ago

Like most procrastinators, 90% is done in the last night. A good way to give you this boost is to tell someone about your X you are building and you will show them tomorrow or next week or whatevers. Now you have to get it up and at least decent so you don't look like a fool. It will probably put you on overdrive.

Reading Hacker News is not launching

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