Do you even lift?

http://blog.borud.no/2013/11/do-you-even-lift.html

by bborud • 13 years ago

187 53 13 years ago

blog.borud.no

PaulHoule• 13 years ago

I miss Pointcast and I wish there was something like it today.

sard420• 13 years ago

Kindle?

bane• 13 years ago

I think RSS ended up filling that niche to a point, and Google Reader was the best mechanism for consuming it.

shanselman• 13 years ago

Totally. RSS was the beginning of RSS, in my mind, and I said so in 2003: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/RememberPointcastSmellsLikeRSS...

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

I thought it was neat at the time, but I also remember discontinuing use really quickly. I used it to watch stock market data and other stuff, but found it was more useful for me to just browse to my Datek page (this was long, long ago before Datek was acquired and eventually became TD Ameritrade) or the Motley Fool (back before the Fool started sucking and became yet another big finance media channel), and dig down into the research.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

Most people who lift are overcompensating one thing or another.

bmelton• 13 years ago

I downvoted you, and for a lot of reasons.

Mainly, because I very distinctly got the sense that you didn't read the article, but I find the idea that people who lift are doing so to ameliorate some other inadequacy that they feel.

I don't "lift" in the traditional sense, but as someone whose close circle of friends has recently undertaken a workout mantra, I'll share with you that the number one motivation is "to live longer".

sanoli• 13 years ago

I think you mean people who bodybuild, which is a different thing. When you, like many other people, hear the word "lifter", you picture a bodybuilder, which most people who lift are not.

dasil003• 13 years ago

Most people who would feel the need to point that out when it's off-topic from the article probably have some inadequacy issues of their own.

Self-esteem is a tricky thing. Sometimes I think we'd be better as a culture if we didn't value it so much. In any case though, lifting weights and other forms of intense exercise are pretty life-affirming activities that I suggest you try a few times just to see what you're missing.

mattgreenrocks2• 13 years ago

That's a bit much.

There's something satisfying about pushing your limits in all areas of life. I hope you reconsider your viewpoint and give fitness an honest try. It doesn't need to be about vanity, though that is a common trap that people fall into.

jafaku• 13 years ago

Whatever excuse works for you for not lifting...

onedev• 13 years ago

Alright someone in here is going to mention Snapchat, so I'm gonna go ahead and mention it first: Snapchat.

Guarantee a good portion of you were thinking the same thing while reading that.

jmduke• 13 years ago

I'm having trouble imagining a definition of "important" which excludes a new communication paradigm that connects literally millions of people.

(Whether or not that communication paradigm will ever break a profit is, of course, a separate issue.)

jeffdavis• 13 years ago

The actual value produced is the marginal improvement it offers over the next best alternative.

In other words, don't compare snapchat to carrier pigeons, compare it to what those people would be using without snapchat: google chat, whatsapp, text messages, email, or one of 1000 other very slightly different ways to chat.

Sure, even a small number multiplied by millions can still become important. But let's not pretend that they invented the printing press.

Another way to look at it is that the internet and mobile data are what's connecting people. The fact that a bunch of people happen to use the same extremely shallow layer on top doesn't mean a whole lot.

freyrs3• 13 years ago

Think about technology on the scale of 10 years out, and try and convince yourself that Snapchat will be relevant to human civilization. I certainly can't.

Compare this to technologies that will matter, which are things like mass mobile data coverage, cloud computing, open hardware, distributed data analytics frameworks, low cost gene sequencing, 3D printing, etc.

cmsmith• 13 years ago

Popularity does not define importance. Unless we want to add 'Toddlers and Tiaras' and the pet rock to the list of 'important' things.

chrissnell• 13 years ago

Pointcast wasn't even the most egregious example of this type of bullshit company. Look at Blue Mountain Arts, the online greeting card company. These guys let you create a hokey greeting card and e-mail it to a friend. HTML greeting cards over email. Probably 2,000 lines of bad Perl CGI scripts and some decent artwork. They sold this company to Excite@Home for.... $780,000,000.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/224981

Granted, $430MM of it was paid in Excite@Home stock which was worthless in short order but still, the previous owners took $350MM in cash. Their grandchildren will never have to work.

Another awesome E@H acquisition: iMall.com. They provided little storefronts for people to sell Harley Davidson keychains and stuff like that. Selling price: $425MM in E@H stock.

mathattack• 13 years ago

There were a lot of folks who got out on the top with BS ideas that had me scratch my head. At least I used Blue Mountain, though I never figured out how they'd get anyone to pay for their service. This was well before the current "We'll sell the data exhaust from our free service" phase that current companies have. Maybe it was banner ads?

corresation4• 13 years ago

"One of the greatest, truly worthless ideas of its time was Pointcast."

Pointcast was essential network news on the data wire (the notion that it was all advertisements is the sort of asinine over-rationalization to pitch a point that completely devastates the speaker's argument), and it brought to the mainstream the concept of push information. Whether it could be duplicated was irrelevant to the value which was in a very well known, widely deployed name and product. Through the perfect clarity of hindsight we can now proclaim the idea an obvious failure given that the execution faltered, but I hope most see past that inanity.

But then the author holds as the counterpoint the papers of the Google founders. Their notion was, essentially, links count for ranking points, and the more ranking points the more your links count. Is that the brilliant heavy lifting? Because it really isn't, and the fact that Google has excelled doesn't prove some sort of point.

Most of the heavy lifting in the world has gone completely without herald, much of it leading to failure.

chewxy• 13 years ago

It is a lift though. Sure, they are standing on top of giants such as the HITS algorithm or even Vasilly Leontif's algorithm, but it is applied in a very novel way - fundamentally shifting the view of the web as more than just a collection of hypertext documents. They viewed is as an interconnected network of documents. This was the major leap that can be considered a lift.

Heck, even Twitter and Facebook led to a fundamental change of view of the internet, namely comms and social networking.

Compare this to pointcast or snapchat. What is the fundamental shift in point of view that happened due to pointcast of snapchat?

corresation4• 13 years ago

They viewed is as an interconnected network of documents.

That is the very premise of the WWW. There was nothing new in that.

There is a too common "the victors write the history" sort of way of looking at things. And FWIW, the notion of counting, weighting and sorting on links is hardly a novel premise, but the schism that Google really brought was that they had a business case to spend far more computer resources on any given search, and on the content that served those results, the results being a much better product. When they in-housed some custom ad serving, the ascent of Google began.

Every product along the way -- whether it is long gone or a thriving success -- has an influence on technologies that follow. Pointcast is absolute the ancestor of RSS and other so-called push technologies, which themselves could be considered the ancestor to things like Twitter. To write it off, rewriting history based upon some sort of survivorship bias, just clouds the topic.

bborud7• 13 years ago

No, PageRank was not heavy lifting.

I like to use Google search as an example since I was involved in building a competing search engine roughly at the same time as Google, so I happen to know a thing or two about the difficulty of that task.

Everyone and their dog thinks Google won solely because of PageRank, but anyone who has ever worked on web scale search engine can tell you that long before you can start worrying about ranking, you have to solve a bunch of problems that are really hard. Like copying a sufficiently large portion of the web onto your servers and processing that copy. Or even removing all the duplicates you will get (which is certainly much harder than I had imagined when I was tasked with this problem).

Google did all of these things as well as, or better than the competition. And on top of that they put together a cocktail of ranking methods that they were able to apply to information amounts for which there was effectively no practically oriented literature to turn to for advice. (Sure you could find lots of neat algorithms for this and that, but very few people had any experience with these at web scale).

Oh, and Google were not alone in having PageRank, or algorithms similar to PageRank. All web search engines I have any inside knowledge of (2-3) had this within six months of Google popularizing the idea.

Ask any one of the dozen or so web search engine companies that did web search if any of this was "easy".

What Google did in the late 90s was indeed heavy lifting. What pointcast did was relatively trivial and easy to copy in a few months.

edit: fixed typo

corresation4• 13 years ago

Yet no other search engine suffered from these problems. Excite, AltaVista, dogpile...everyone else managed to successfully spider, index, and filter the web. I'm not seeing how infrastructure or data management was any particular value of Google's, and have seen absolutely nothing declaring otherwise. Indexing/deduplicating/managing data didn't seem to be a problem for anyone.

And FWIW, Google's real strength -- I guess I'm not everyone and their dog? -- was that they made a business case for the individual searcher. In the collapse of the .COM bubble an individual searching was seen as a close to worthless commodity, which is why every once-vigorous search engine had largely abandoned engineering advances. Google at the time first saw being the premiere search engine as a way of selling search appliances to business, and then with their text ads reinvigorating web ads after, again, the .COM collapse.

Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google won, therefore Google must have done everything right. Anyone who lost must have done everything wrong. This is cargo cult thinking that does nobody any good. How you so casually write off the engineering challenges of Pointcast (an incredibly popular, multimedia-rich product, including pooled and queued subscription for millions of people, when bandwidth and computing power were very limited. A whole industry of Pointcast caching appliances appeared).

It's also interesting how you create the caricature of executives decrying the Google interface, as if it were the vindicated underdog after all of those years. Yet in those early years, the simplistic interface of Google was overwhelmingly the number 1 lauded feature of the site. Even before it was featured for good and quick search results, it was heralded for its simplicity.

todayiamme• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what to take away from this piece as it appears to be yet another blog post decrying the "easy way out" that seems prevalent (according to the author) within Silicon Valley. I would like to make a digression and point out that in almost every article of this kind that I've read on HN, the author takes pains in comparing a present "fad" to a seemingly hard yet commonly graspable internet success story. Something that most people in the audience could look at and admire while saying inwardly, "if only I did this I could surely build this." Again this might be true, but the point is that such blog posts or articles always contain such seemingly hard, but familiar examples instead of something like say Lightsail Energy or DWave. In the end in an awe inspiring tone and yet in a very graspable way the author concludes the article by stating that you, yes you, can do such great thing X and all you have to do is solve "hard" problems...

What most authors don't realize and that they often fail to grasp is that the fads are necessary. The failures are necessary. Sure it burns to be on the losing side of history, but it is important for that side to exist nonetheless. It is important to try out things nonetheless. Take the great internet fad example, Pets.com. Hindsight tells us that it's a terrible idea but we forget that people weren't excited by the fact that someone was selling pet food. They were excited that they were selling pet food through the internet and because we didn't have any reliable models of the time their reasoning told them that through scale such a thing might make a lot of money due to its reach. They were groping in the dark, but they were trying to hit upon the - at least from my perspective - vein of modern internet retail. They got it tragically and hilariously wrong, wiping out a large amount of investment, but we are all better off from this failure as an example. It helped us to hone our models. All of those failures from the unknown two people in some garage / living room to the big expensive messes like WebVan taught someone something and in general as a society we inched closer to a more refined understanding of things resulting in a better understanding of things. We now know for instance that X, Y, and Z are constraints in e-commerce and to be successful you need A, B, and C. Those things weren't readily deducible in the past, they are now apparent as a result of all of these "fads."

Is there any underlying thesis over here? I don't know, but what I do know is that maybe it is a bit unwise to be so quick to judge someone's efforts and work just because their motivations, direction, and/or the end result doesn't jive with your internal model. Just saying.

bborud7• 13 years ago

What made me write the blog posting was the observation that many brilliant people I know waste their talent on what I tend to think of as "the lottery of Internet fads". They don't even try to solve hard problems or find opportunities that are under-explored.

I did not say that failures were unimportant or bad. Nor did I say that you should never do projects that are shallow.

But I do think that failing at something that is hard or original is preferable to failing at something everyone else is doing.

matwood• 13 years ago

Every time someone attempts to judge what other people work I think of this quote:

It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits -- like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere, or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits -- involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding -- inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, or a Roosevelt can feel himself to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, or a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. --Malcom Muggeridge

mattgreenrocks2• 13 years ago

SV rewards people who fall for the cheap parlor tricks of extrinsic motivation. "You'll be a multi-millionaire! Just work your ass off! Here's a crappy title to tide you over." Why do you think they pursue young engineers aggressively? They prey on a lack of self-awareness. Actually, they need it in order to make it sustainable.

The real solution is to rewrite the cultural narrative that praises these sorts of runaway successes as being essential. We're being held hostage by individualism. When we deify success, we say "it's ok to neglect your SO/family/health!"

WoodenChair• 13 years ago

Thank you for writing this. I wish I had read it several years ago. I had to learn what you wrote through experience. It would have been much better for me to have just had a mentor tell it to me.

pocketstar• 13 years ago

I am disappointed that this didn't have anything to do with actually lifting weights.

dpweb• 13 years ago

Great call by the author on Pointcast. I clearly remember all the hype about Pointcast at the time and it was truly annoying.

gpcz• 13 years ago

I took a class on tech entrepreneurship by a guy who started as a chemical engineer then got an MBA and specialized in finance. He would always compare business to chemical engineering -- most specifically the concept of equilibriums and breaking equilibriums.

In my mind, a company is either breaking an equilibrium or is a fluctuation as an equilibrium is forming (a wave vs. a ripple). Startups in the classical sense are supposed to be "equilibrium breakers" (at least that's an assumption of venture capital), but there's value in being a ripple, too.

It just gets problematic when you're a ripple and you pass yourself off as a wave.

analog31• 13 years ago

"Beware of having lucky people trying to rationalize their luck into repeatable process postfact."

Quote of the week. Thanks!

stefan_kendall• 13 years ago

I was genuinely upset that the post was not about lifting.

bborud7• 13 years ago

I hereby promise that once I've had my kidney transplant and I am once again capable of lifting things that are heavier than my cat I'll blog about lifting :-)

krapp• 13 years ago

No excuses.

Detrus• 13 years ago

Yea the metaphor didn't seem quite right. Do you even lift refers to commonly attainable results of consistent effort, like 50-100K salaries in software. If you can't squat 300 lbs after working out for years you're doing it wrong.

Building world changing products like Google is more like winning olympic gold. You need luck in genetics, competitors and training in addition to the work.

mattdeboard• 13 years ago

I was hoping this would be a post about javascript and variable hoisting

scjody• 13 years ago

Early Google was exactly what we'd call a minimum viable product from a lean startup today. Two smart, committed people put together a site that just did one thing well, running off minimal hardware.

The difference was that the idea (quality, uncluttered search results) was a good one. The anti-Pointcast stance is well taken.

olefoo• 13 years ago

-- which was portals. One stop shops to capture and hold audiences. Horribly ugly things filled with desperate salesmanships and terribly packaged content.

Which seems to be the attractor that Google is tending towards now.

Not to detract from the cool things that Google does do, but their main web properties are looking tattered and the metooism of Google+ is not lost on the audience.

bborud7• 13 years ago

I would argue that portals were a very different beast from the "social" sites of today, however I agree that the one-stop-shop is back with a vengeance.

Curiously, Yahoo was perhaps a bit ahead of its time with a product called Yahoo 360 which did many of the same things that Facebook does today. But it was too much too soon and I think users were just overwhelmed.

As for Google+, I think Facebook still does a better job at being Facebook. Google+ has a handful of small annoyances that push me away and it doesn't seem like Google are fixing them. I would like to use Google+ more, but for the most part I use Google+ for hangouts.

ratsimihah2• 13 years ago

I'm solving general AI, anyone wants to dive in with me?

thewarrior3• 13 years ago

I would be interested , though admittedly I'm not very knowledgeable.

ratsimihah2• 13 years ago

Neither I am. But my approach does not require fancy AI knowledge, but only a good grasp of computer software, hardware, OS, and virtualization.

darkxanthos• 13 years ago

Pointing out Google just shows us exceptions exist. That no one way beats all. If you don't believe that already then this is a great article for you.

Do you even lift?

Related Stories