Very true! In my own case, I like to think "impossible," because I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that I have the insight to know the difference between actually-impossible and impossible-for-mere-mortals-to-conceive.
So if something seems impossible to me, I try to consider the possibility that the problem is my lack of imagination.
I definitely agree with this article. We shouldn't be pessimistic about someone's grand vision. However, if you really wanted to start a cable company you probably wouldn't be asking hacker news on how to start a cable company. You would already have other resources that you can tap into and get started on it.
I want to change healthcare. I have spent twelve years getting myself well when the entire world says it cannot be done. I have a website. I have a mental model for how to proceed forward. I don't have the programming skills I need. I am deeply in debt from the process of accomplishing "the impossible". The specifics of my personal situation are unconducive to applying to Y-Combinator. I have a really huge credibility problem.
I am generally equally dismissed, though my intent to do something potentially world changing is sincere and backed up by more than a decade of work. But, hey, feel free to join the legion of people who have already dismissed me for not currently having some successful business model in place while claiming you would like to see people like me get more support.
Oy.
Tldr: People seek feedback at different stages. Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness.
Because most people do not believe me, I am up against a brick wall. I cannot get people to talk to me and it is making forward progress very challenging, to put it mildly.
I will work on that. I don't currently have a one sentence pitch. (My background is not in business. I have a lot of room to grow in that regard.)
The goal is to share the mental model that helped me get well when I was sentenced to death. It does not neatly fit with current mental models. Conventional medicine uses a disease model. This is a wellness model. I struggle to communicate it. People think something is deadly, thus we must nuke the body with something equally deadly. They miss that the body is the battlefield and they are turning it into a wasteland which cannot defend itself. Your body can produce its own army. You need to supply it the means to do so. Then support its effort to defend itself.
"Additionally, I make use of bits and pieces of info and advice I hear from people whom I consider "in the know" -- mostly moms who have found what works for a difficult kid that the medical community has written off."
Sounds like a sincere version of the "one quick tip that moms found to..." ads.
One mom was a former RN who formally studied a number of alternative medicine disciplines to keep her sons alive who were anaphylactic to antibiotics. Another is a lawyer who runs a website for alternative treatment info. These are educated, knowledgeable people who figured out what worked to help their children after experts had written them off. The fact that they are mothers meant they got to observe the person they were helping up close, over a long period of time. They became more familiar with the problem space than most doctors, who typically spend about 15 minutes with a patient before writing a prescription for a drug. Medicine was not always like that, but it often is so today.
Who are speaking way above their level of understanding. This is not unique to untrained professionals, either. In academia plenty of tenured professors use their position to spread pseudoscience. Just because they associate their care with their childrens' improvements, does not mean that their care and specific choices for self-treatment were the cause of their childrens' improvements.
They are people who gave me useful information at a time when doctors were saying nothing could be done. Their credentials may not be anything you respect, but they knew what they were talking about.
"Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness."
Yes it is. Ten years ago it might not have been, but these days, when vast troves of information are at virtually everyone's fingertips, there is no excuse for not having done some basic research before asking such huge questions and expecting other people to do all the work for you.
Aren't you homeless? Your first priority should be a getting a job so you can get out of debt and put a roof over your head. Then worry about big ideas like changing healthcare.
To be perfectly candid, the reason people dismiss you is that someone who seems incapable of providing for themselves to take care of their basic needs is certainly incapable of starting a hugely disruptive business.
I left my job in order to finish getting well. I was working at a desk job but the building was in an industrial park, surrounded by factories. Given how expensive and debilitating my condition is via conventional treatments, it makes no sense, financial or otherwise, to pursue an income source which keeps me ill.
Isn't being homeless generally accepted as being more detrimental to health than pretty much any office job?
My only point is that you should start at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and take care of the basics for yourself before trying to change the world.
Seriously. Get off the internet, get off HN, and figure out some way to have a stable income(or apply for disability and welfare), get health insurance, etc.
After you've done that you can transform healthcare. Not before. Ranting online isn't going to change anything for you. Get out there and fix the basics.
I am fixing the basics. I know you mean well, but you do not know what you are talking about when it comes to my situation.
Also, I did not post in this thread to ask for support, but to make a point, and not about me per se. I am sorry you are so distracted by the particulars of my situation, which are really rather incidental to this discussion, which is about HN culture.
> And yet Hacker News folk must be drawn at least somewhat by Paul Graham, who applauds frighteningly ambitious startup ideas.
It wasn't a frighteningly ambitious start-up. It was the same old idea, done hundreds of times across multiple countries, with a minor adjustment in its pricing structure.
While I do find it interesting to read about the work involved to start such a company - I believe most here would be even more interested to read what steps it would take to start a disruptive company in such a market.
A lot of these markets are either ready for disruption or have recently been disrupted. I would love to read an in depth-article about the work involved.
I didn't take part in the previous thread, but I kind of took umbrage with the question. It's really hard to take a question like that seriously when it appears that the OP has put zero effort into researching the subject. How can you not be pessimistic about that? If you're not the kind of person that can do even the most basic research of how cable companies operate, then I don't have one iota of confidence that you would be successful building one. I'm not trying to be mean - just realistic.
I agree with this. It reminds me of the guy who, when his family members would as him fix their computers, he would ask them to drop it off. The idea was that he had them "put some skin in the game." It seems that OP did not do that.
Perhaps if OP worded it differently, he may have gotten different results.
exactly. The ideas this guy cites, like Elon Musk, are completely unrelated. Elon Musk actually researched these markets, figured out what to do and did it. To equate that with asking a completely unresearched question on Hacker News feels like the author was really grasping at straws here...
Looking back to my limited experience, most of the wins in my life was mostly because I was too naive to think "it's probably not all that difficult to do".
If you have a problem with a market, like the cable industry, your first question should be 'Why is it the way it is?' not 'How do I disrupt it?'
Asking HN, for good sources that explain the economics of the cable industry or media distribution, or for a list of the key players in the space would have resulted in a much more positive response.
Asking HN about how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. successfully competed against established cable industry would probably have resulted in current or former employees and/or investors in those companies providing some direct insight.
But asking 'hey, how do I disrupt the cable industry?' is just lazy and resulted in the negative response it deserves.
In my opinion, no. In this day and age, there are far better ways of obtaining preliminary knowledge on a subject besides asking another person to fill you in. There's obviously Google and Wikipedia as starting points, and there are any number of paths those might lead to which would help you form a specific ? - e.g. "what would you have to do to make true a la carte channel options from a cable provider profitable?" That ? shows me that the person asking has done at least preliminary research and, if I have any thoughts, I don't have to start from square one.
Asking the community to spend its time doing preliminary research for you is, to put it bluntly, rude.
I don't see this as a shortcut for preliminary research. I saw it as an attempt to generate discussion about disrupting a sector with high barriers to entry.
That's ridiculous. RTFM isn't an attitude that arrose apropos of nothing. It comes from situations where newbies asking the same basic questions over and over again exhausting a community's patience with simple questions that can be easily looked up in a FAQ or manual. Asking an open ended question about starting a new kind of business isn't anything like that. There's no FAQ about starting an ISP* so it's difficult to know where to look for info. Asking people who know more than you is not an unreasonable form of preliminary research in most situations. My first stop would have been HN too.
*Amazingly, it looks like there is: http://cgi.amazing.com/isp/ but it's hard to tell how useful it really is.
HN in this case is what a salesperson would call an "unqualified lead". A good salesperson tries to make sure that they sell their product to someone who will potentially buy it. Similarly, the person who asks a question should try to ask someone who can potentially answer it. Just as the HN community would reject a posting that is a sales pitch for many products, the HN community will reject a question that is too vague to answer.
For reference, here is the original, way too vague question:
> I want to build a cable company that centers around
> viewer types. Basically, it is my understanding that the
> majority of my cable costs centers around channels
> (like fox) that I just dont watch, if I wanted to build
> a system that let customers limit this, where would I
> get started?
Note that he didn't ask this question on a discussion forum about cable television. He didn't specify if he was looking for advice on the technical aspects, the regulatory aspects, or the business aspects. He didn't hunt around in the user profiles on HN to see if there were people with industry experience that he could approach directly. He didn't describe whether he was looking for high level answers like a list of websites that might have more information, or whether he was looking for very specific info. He did nothing to qualify HN as a good source for the answer to his question.
If I was trying to gloss a reason for the OP posting on HN, I would think he asked here was because of HN's particular focus on startups and 'disrupting' traditional industries. Seems to fit for creating a cable company. That being said, the question is still a poor fit because, like others said, it lacks a lot of initial effort.
No, it doesn't, because it's asking other people to do your research for you. Asking questions without first trying to learn as much as your can yourself is a minor faux pas on the internet (witness all the 'let me google that for you' replies to elementary questions). Of course, this doesn't mean that asking questions is bad (not at all), but it means that there is generally a social contract at work. It's something along the lines of "I'll answer your question because I assume my effort won't be wasted."
I disagree. I don't think he was asking everyone on HN to do his research for him. Rather, I think he made a reasonable guess that some people on HN work in the industry he'd like to disrupt, that they may feel the same way, and that they may have good suggestions.
That's what I'm thinking. For all I know (or care) the OP may have just posed the question as a hypothetical. I'll never start a cable company but I'm interested in the answer.
I don't think there is any reason to criticize you personally for thinking/responding this way, but I find that that attitude leads to the comments on Hacker News that I think are most unhelpful and discouraging (other than blatant trolling).
thanks you've put that rather nicely. there is no bonafide way to start a cable company. nobody could tell you how to do that, not even their executives. the cable providers operate in a market that heavily favours monopolies (because the entry barriers are so ridiculously high). OP failed to realize this and that's just a very bad precedent for any further discussions.
Right, but to say such a thing violates the unspoken rule of startup/Silicon Valley culture of being nicey-nice and super excited about everything even when you don't care at all.
Thus the sin was not to ask a question with zero effort on the part of the questioner, moving all the onus onto those meant to answer it -- "I'm just asking questions, man!" The sin was to point out that this was indeed what happened. The sin was not being nice when verbally rolling your eyes.
Look upthread; currently, the highest-rated discussion involves detecting the sentiment of comments programmatically! The point is the sentiment, the enthusiasm -- not the content. Do you see?
But I do always find myself needing to point out: Hacker News is the most constructive and positive community on the internet. Yes there are lots of dicks and know-it-alls with "why didn't they just do this?" syndrome, but you won't find another anonymous discussion based community of this quality anywhere.
I think the issue isn't about how feasible the start up idea is in general, but how feasible it is for YOU. The comments may have been directing you to another idea for this reason.
Using your example of Elon Musk, you can see even his start ups have a progression of ambition. That is, space travel and electric car companies are much less feasible than a payment system or news site.
What is the difference between Musk and you today? Simple. Investors trust him with large sums of money since he has led successful companies before.
There is a reason YC companies generally have low capital requirements. That is the lack of track record of the founders (and that business experience does matter).
For your cable idea, the path towards that goal may very well be starting other companies first. Or be an industry insider who has the experience and connections to convince the incumbents to invest in you (like Pandora).
So if someone says they want to jump off a cliff naked, should we all applaud and encourage them? I think it's better to tell them it isn't going to work out well and why.
There was some interesting analysis and procedures in that thread about how to go about it, but the best post for the OP was really about how, as a company, he would be paying to license certain channels, and if users only subscribed to one or two instead of all of them, he wouldn't make enough money to keep in business.
As a user he can whine and complain all he wants about a la carte being rare, but as a business, he has to make enough money to keep running and he didn't understand that. Pointing out big problems in his plan is doing him a favor because he can then change the plan or address them.
I didn't participate in the discussion because the question was so vague. "I want to colonize Mars. How would I get started?" The same way NASA got to the Moon -- they didn't log onto ARPANET and ask around, they got to work.
For most of those questions, the answer is capital.
Elon Musk started from very low hanging fruits for him, whose success enabled him to move on with more ambitious goals. This model is easily replicable, so if you have ambitious goals, first build capital with something easier. Which, I think, most of people here are doing.
I'd say there is a big difference between 'asking for feedback' and 'fishing for ideas'.
"I want to launch a new courier service. How would I get started?"
This seems much more in the 'fishing for ideas' stage and hoping you can crowd source the process of creating your business while paying nothing for the privilege. Most people aren't going to help you.
"I've started planning my new courier service. It will be mostly in the healthcare industry as hospitals are over-paying on delivery costs of fragile medicine. I've worked out some ideas on how I can better fit and transport fragile medicine. However, I don't know how I would get contacts in the medical industry to test drive the technology. Who should I try and talk to and does anybody know of any existing studies into this? Anybody work in the field of transporting fragile goods and know what certifications are required?"
This is much more in the field of 'asking for feedback' and is very unlikely to be brushed aside.
I'm hoping you're actually working on the service you just described? Between the delivery of meds and labs, it is "interesting" how much hospitals pay just to get things from A to B - though the custody chain tracking certainly plays a part.
Unfortunately not! It is something I've seen before and the charge goes straight to customers/insurance with even mundane things in healthcare - like paying $50 for a pair of plastic gloves as an extreme example.
I don't actually have any new novel ways to transport medicine though, I was just making an example. More than likely the high charges are because of the very small number of providers of mobile, certified and absolutely secure cold storage devices. I think my guess on asking about the certifications is probably the right aspect to tackle first if considering this, because the certifications are no doubt extremely challenging to obtain.
EDIT: Also want to add - if anybody finds the idea of cheaper medical transport appealing, please try and make it a reality! Decreasing the cost of medicine by any sort of factor is probably the single best thing that could be done for humanity as a whole at present, and will probably make you more money than some new social network.
The answer to most of these questions, is find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry, and ask them for advice. Most of the SpaceX senior staff have aerospace experience.
> find somebody knowledgeable in the field or industry,
This, or actually get yourself into the field, work for some time.
In a lecture(startupschool), Jessica Livingston(Partner, YC) talked about a guy who made app that allows users to order food from their phone. She said that he was an example of 'a good founder' because he actually joined a restaurant as a waiter just to learn how things worked.
Take away? (Get your self involved in, know widely about, find spots which you should do better) in the field you want to start your company in[Joel Spolsky also said something of this sort in his lecture!]
You asked for advice and received some great information. Just because the overwhelming advice is "This is not a great idea, you will need a lot of money to fight established, entrenched businesses" doesn't mean the advice was unhelpful.
Did you want everyone to sugar coat their opinions with "Yeah! Go get them tiger! We believe in you!", or did you want serious advice that can lead you to making an informed, rational decision?
If you were a CEO of a company, would you want your employees to tell you whatever you wanted to hear ("yes-men"), or would you want people who actually advised you and helped make an appropriate decision (even when it may be counter to your opinion)?
Everybody already knows it would be great if we could get cable speed and reliability without actually laying cable. Building a business around that is easy. The hard part is actually achieving that.
Asking people for the miracle upon which you'd like to build a business, that anyone could build given that miracle, isn't a request for constructive feedback. At its absolute best it is a request for an IP handout.
> However, why does everyone assume that the inquiring mind is an idiot?
Because the inquiring mind did zero research and asked a question so broad and so vague that it was impossible for anyone to answer it without months of work and very specific knowledge.
To quote Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I don't think anyone was wanting to sit and spend hours explaining to the author how to do something incredibly difficult and complex without the author putting anything forward. Why not just take that knowledge and do it myself?
I agree there is a very large snarky dick contingent on HN who pollute potentially productive conversations with "What a stupid idea" type of comments. (Unfortunately I think this is a symptom of the human race, not just HN.)
However, there are some exceptionally bright people who hang out here who I would love to just brainstorm with--throw ideas out and see what happens. This site has an above-average level of these people I think.
I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Even if I have no interest in starting a new courier service or whatever, I find it quite enjoyable to take the lessons and skills that I've learned and apply them in a new problem space. I especially love hearing feedback on those ideas from people who've worked in those spaces.
The most promising ideas are the ones that might sound dumb to someone entrenched in tradition.
> I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out.
Great idea! Something similar has actually happened, not with the HN community, but just a handpicked group of highly intelligent people put into a room together with the mission of coming up with innovative new ideas. It is described in this article.
I agree. To take the courier example, you may not be interested in actually starting a courier but in going through the thought process of how a courier operates you might find a problem that they have which you or others could solve.
In my dealing from couriers I get the impression a lot are using outdated software and inefficient processes, might be some disruption in that space.
Many of my friends have a very interesting trait: pose any sort of problem in front of them, and they'll practically drop everything to work out a solution.
Trebuchets using only materials in the office. Conquering South Africa. Lesbian strip clubs. Realistic world domination. What the world would look like if D&D rules actually applied. AI for storytelling. Etc.
Regardless of how ridiculous the premise, they'll work on it until they have at least a plausible solution. Ignoring impossibilities and slim chances and jumping straight into brainstorming and crazy ideas is a lot of fun. I'd rather have more of those conversations.
And of course this thread fills up with more of the same negativism trying to justify itself.
PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it.
I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case.
It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site.
In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else.
But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site.
If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped.
Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.
Speaking of ambitious ideas and 'middlebrow dismissal', I'd like to see the algorithmic dismissal detector that PG wrote about. I'm sure the denizens of HN know a thing or two about computational linguistics. Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of middlebrow dismissals) possible?
> Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of
> middlebrow dismissals) possible?
I'll give you a middlebrow dismissal: No. Definitely not at the current state of the art. In fact, not many people agree on whether a given comment qualifies as a "middlebrow" dismissal; personally, I consider many of the examples that pg has labeled as such pertinent points.
If in doubt, I prefer a good middlebrow dismissal to the shallow cheering of the overly excitable.
What is 'the current state of the art'? Note that I am a total dilettante in the area of machine learning/NLP.
And why couldn't the top k HN users (patio11 et al) be given the option to classify comments {dismissive; troll; shallow-cheering; ...;} and this human classification could be the training set of a supervised learning system that could use NLP algorithms to derive useful metrics. Simplistic example: dismissive word ('sucks'; 'never work', 'impossible') density correlating to something that has been flagged as dismissive. Or is this an impossibility? Again, I do not have the hands on knowledge to be able to call this one.
The immediate flaw in that approach is that "patio11 et al" are top contributers because they post a lot and have valuable opinions - NOT because they are always right. They're not (I'm confident they would agree here). Therefore their opinions would be inappropriate as an AI training set.
Not an NLP guy by any means, but aren't we at the point where we can at least guess sentiment algorithmically? Couldn't you combine that with the commenter's history, the length of the post and the presence of charged words such as "nonsense" and "silly?"
Ternary sentiment detection rates are currently around 30-40% for Spanish. English rates might be better, but not by a lot. That means you give a piece of text to your classifier and it will tell you correctly if has positive, negative or neutral connotation at most 40% of the time.
In short, we are still worse than a fair coin toss at sentiment detection.
Language is not tricky at all, no sir. Can you see why? :-)
Pardon my nitpicking, but wouldn't the metaphorical "coin toss" in a case where there are three possibilities be 33%, so 40% is very (very) slightly better?
For cases with only two outcomes, you can never be worse than a coin toss. If you're achieving 40% accuracy in that case, all you have to do is invert the output of your algorithm and suddenly you're achieving 60% accuracy.
Not a terribly important point I'm making, I know.
In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not... But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company?
That's at least half of the value of most posts on this site. Not the content of the posts itself, but rather in the quality of the discussion that follows. And while some posts do a better job than others of sparking that quality discussion, the interesting things is that we have 100% complete control over the quality.
I'm reminded of politicians when you ask them a question you don't want to answer.
"Mr. Obama, under your presidency, what chance do I have of joining the 1% by starting a cable company?"
"Good question. Let's talk about the initiatives I've sponsored to help people create and build businesses in this great land..."
We can do the same thing. "Good question! Let's talk about how one could get into this business and especially how one might make this business irrelevant by disrupting it..."
Are all actionable, informative and realistic. They aren't negative comments. Sure, there were some "This is dumb and you are stupid" posts in the thread, but most of the replies were sincerely realistic.
It really wasn't middlebrow dismissal...it was "this is going to be hard, and here is why". In all honesty, that is exactly the sort of feedback I would want as someone doing basic research in an area. I would want to know why it is going to be hard, why certain interests/business ideas are entrenched, etc.
A valuable skill in life is asking the right questions and knowing how to ask it. I think if the original post asked "theoretically how would one disrupt the cable industry" the discussion would of been much different
I think the response on HN was almost reasonable. It could be summarised as 1/3 useful, plus a 2/3 measure of "the fact you're asking us this implies you have no idea how hard this will be."
Yes, it might be discouraging. However, someone with the guts, resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah to start their own cable company is not going to let a few negative comments on the Internet get in their way.
Have you actually read the thread he was complaining about? Most (but not all) was very reasonable with specific challenges to be overcome (which if he really wants to do this he should want to know about) and in many cases some suggestions and/or alternative approaches to achieving his apparent aim (different subscription pricing model).
The first thing one should do if you want to disrupt a market is learn as much as you can about the current state of that market.
This doesn't mean reading it's Wikipedia entry.
Ideally, it means spending several years working for the current market leader in that space.
Barring that, reading as much as you can about the history, economics, mechanics, and current players in that space.
If possible, become a customer of one or two of the market leaders. If that is not feasible, again get to know people who are customers (again they may become your first target customers).
Befriend several people who do work in that space (they could become your first hires).
The deeper your understanding and experience in a market, the more likely you will succeed in disrupting it.
I missed that question and would be happy to help with the technical aspects of starting a cable company (though I'd like to see content delivery decoupled from the infrastructure). I have 25 years of experience in the industry if he gets that far.
The hard part of the process (and I believe the limiting factor in a new company's success), is arranging the contracts with the content syndicators. Find my e-mail in my profile if you're serious.
Actually even this tidbit (contracts) helps. Identifying the challenges/obstacles is very valuable as it opens it to creative solutions to those problems that may not occur to insiders.
IIRC, ESPN is the most expensive and some of the channels are actually free. If there is information on the history of Telebeam (and how they started), it might be instructional with regards to picking a niche and starting small.
150 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadSo if something seems impossible to me, I try to consider the possibility that the problem is my lack of imagination.
I want to change healthcare. I have spent twelve years getting myself well when the entire world says it cannot be done. I have a website. I have a mental model for how to proceed forward. I don't have the programming skills I need. I am deeply in debt from the process of accomplishing "the impossible". The specifics of my personal situation are unconducive to applying to Y-Combinator. I have a really huge credibility problem.
I am generally equally dismissed, though my intent to do something potentially world changing is sincere and backed up by more than a decade of work. But, hey, feel free to join the legion of people who have already dismissed me for not currently having some successful business model in place while claiming you would like to see people like me get more support.
Oy.
Tldr: People seek feedback at different stages. Having nothing currently in hand (or seeming to) is not proof of lack of seriousness.
Here is the original site:
http://www.healthgazelle.com/oldsite/archive.shtml
Here is the site I am trying to migrate everything to and trying to figure out how to better present what I know:
http://www.healthgazelle.com/
Because most people do not believe me, I am up against a brick wall. I cannot get people to talk to me and it is making forward progress very challenging, to put it mildly.
A one sentence pitch would be great as it isn't clear to me from either version of your website.
The goal is to share the mental model that helped me get well when I was sentenced to death. It does not neatly fit with current mental models. Conventional medicine uses a disease model. This is a wellness model. I struggle to communicate it. People think something is deadly, thus we must nuke the body with something equally deadly. They miss that the body is the battlefield and they are turning it into a wasteland which cannot defend itself. Your body can produce its own army. You need to supply it the means to do so. Then support its effort to defend itself.
Sounds like a sincere version of the "one quick tip that moms found to..." ads.
Who are speaking way above their level of understanding. This is not unique to untrained professionals, either. In academia plenty of tenured professors use their position to spread pseudoscience. Just because they associate their care with their childrens' improvements, does not mean that their care and specific choices for self-treatment were the cause of their childrens' improvements.
Yes it is. Ten years ago it might not have been, but these days, when vast troves of information are at virtually everyone's fingertips, there is no excuse for not having done some basic research before asking such huge questions and expecting other people to do all the work for you.
To be perfectly candid, the reason people dismiss you is that someone who seems incapable of providing for themselves to take care of their basic needs is certainly incapable of starting a hugely disruptive business.
Sorry if this is harsh. Just trying to help.
My first priority should be, and is, my health.
My only point is that you should start at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and take care of the basics for yourself before trying to change the world. Seriously. Get off the internet, get off HN, and figure out some way to have a stable income(or apply for disability and welfare), get health insurance, etc. After you've done that you can transform healthcare. Not before. Ranting online isn't going to change anything for you. Get out there and fix the basics.
Also, I did not post in this thread to ask for support, but to make a point, and not about me per se. I am sorry you are so distracted by the particulars of my situation, which are really rather incidental to this discussion, which is about HN culture.
Anyway, I have things to do. Logging out now.
Later.
Well, you did talk a lot about your personal situation in your original comment, so you shouldn't act surprised that the discussion took that turn
It wasn't a frighteningly ambitious start-up. It was the same old idea, done hundreds of times across multiple countries, with a minor adjustment in its pricing structure.
Though I'm sure you could argue many of those are rather unambitious ideas also.
Perhaps if OP worded it differently, he may have gotten different results.
Looking back to my limited experience, most of the wins in my life was mostly because I was too naive to think "it's probably not all that difficult to do".
Asking HN, for good sources that explain the economics of the cable industry or media distribution, or for a list of the key players in the space would have resulted in a much more positive response.
Asking HN about how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. successfully competed against established cable industry would probably have resulted in current or former employees and/or investors in those companies providing some direct insight.
But asking 'hey, how do I disrupt the cable industry?' is just lazy and resulted in the negative response it deserves.
Q. "How do I start a rocket company?"
A. "Start by asking a different question, such as 'What are the economics of interplanetary exploration?'"
Thinking about it, Kennedy did this pretty well in the '60s.
"Ask HN" doesn't qualify as most basic research?
Asking the community to spend its time doing preliminary research for you is, to put it bluntly, rude.
*Amazingly, it looks like there is: http://cgi.amazing.com/isp/ but it's hard to tell how useful it really is.
For reference, here is the original, way too vague question:
Note that he didn't ask this question on a discussion forum about cable television. He didn't specify if he was looking for advice on the technical aspects, the regulatory aspects, or the business aspects. He didn't hunt around in the user profiles on HN to see if there were people with industry experience that he could approach directly. He didn't describe whether he was looking for high level answers like a list of websites that might have more information, or whether he was looking for very specific info. He did nothing to qualify HN as a good source for the answer to his question.I think it does in some cases, but not in a case of this magnitude. It's a matter of specificity.
I don't think there is any reason to criticize you personally for thinking/responding this way, but I find that that attitude leads to the comments on Hacker News that I think are most unhelpful and discouraging (other than blatant trolling).
Thus the sin was not to ask a question with zero effort on the part of the questioner, moving all the onus onto those meant to answer it -- "I'm just asking questions, man!" The sin was to point out that this was indeed what happened. The sin was not being nice when verbally rolling your eyes.
Look upthread; currently, the highest-rated discussion involves detecting the sentiment of comments programmatically! The point is the sentiment, the enthusiasm -- not the content. Do you see?
But I do always find myself needing to point out: Hacker News is the most constructive and positive community on the internet. Yes there are lots of dicks and know-it-alls with "why didn't they just do this?" syndrome, but you won't find another anonymous discussion based community of this quality anywhere.
Using your example of Elon Musk, you can see even his start ups have a progression of ambition. That is, space travel and electric car companies are much less feasible than a payment system or news site.
What is the difference between Musk and you today? Simple. Investors trust him with large sums of money since he has led successful companies before.
There is a reason YC companies generally have low capital requirements. That is the lack of track record of the founders (and that business experience does matter).
For your cable idea, the path towards that goal may very well be starting other companies first. Or be an industry insider who has the experience and connections to convince the incumbents to invest in you (like Pandora).
There was some interesting analysis and procedures in that thread about how to go about it, but the best post for the OP was really about how, as a company, he would be paying to license certain channels, and if users only subscribed to one or two instead of all of them, he wouldn't make enough money to keep in business.
As a user he can whine and complain all he wants about a la carte being rare, but as a business, he has to make enough money to keep running and he didn't understand that. Pointing out big problems in his plan is doing him a favor because he can then change the plan or address them.
Elon Musk started from very low hanging fruits for him, whose success enabled him to move on with more ambitious goals. This model is easily replicable, so if you have ambitious goals, first build capital with something easier. Which, I think, most of people here are doing.
People are getting their feet wet for experience.
"I want to launch a new courier service. How would I get started?"
This seems much more in the 'fishing for ideas' stage and hoping you can crowd source the process of creating your business while paying nothing for the privilege. Most people aren't going to help you.
"I've started planning my new courier service. It will be mostly in the healthcare industry as hospitals are over-paying on delivery costs of fragile medicine. I've worked out some ideas on how I can better fit and transport fragile medicine. However, I don't know how I would get contacts in the medical industry to test drive the technology. Who should I try and talk to and does anybody know of any existing studies into this? Anybody work in the field of transporting fragile goods and know what certifications are required?"
This is much more in the field of 'asking for feedback' and is very unlikely to be brushed aside.
I don't actually have any new novel ways to transport medicine though, I was just making an example. More than likely the high charges are because of the very small number of providers of mobile, certified and absolutely secure cold storage devices. I think my guess on asking about the certifications is probably the right aspect to tackle first if considering this, because the certifications are no doubt extremely challenging to obtain.
EDIT: Also want to add - if anybody finds the idea of cheaper medical transport appealing, please try and make it a reality! Decreasing the cost of medicine by any sort of factor is probably the single best thing that could be done for humanity as a whole at present, and will probably make you more money than some new social network.
A really good story related to all of this is the way Richard Branson started Virgin Atlantic: http://ravithesun.wordpress.com/2006/12/25/birth-of-virgin-a... (couldn't find a better source, but I heard him tell the same story at an event)
This, or actually get yourself into the field, work for some time.
In a lecture(startupschool), Jessica Livingston(Partner, YC) talked about a guy who made app that allows users to order food from their phone. She said that he was an example of 'a good founder' because he actually joined a restaurant as a waiter just to learn how things worked.
Take away? (Get your self involved in, know widely about, find spots which you should do better) in the field you want to start your company in[Joel Spolsky also said something of this sort in his lecture!]
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893857
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894121
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893841
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378
You asked for advice and received some great information. Just because the overwhelming advice is "This is not a great idea, you will need a lot of money to fight established, entrenched businesses" doesn't mean the advice was unhelpful.
Did you want everyone to sugar coat their opinions with "Yeah! Go get them tiger! We believe in you!", or did you want serious advice that can lead you to making an informed, rational decision?
If you were a CEO of a company, would you want your employees to tell you whatever you wanted to hear ("yes-men"), or would you want people who actually advised you and helped make an appropriate decision (even when it may be counter to your opinion)?
Asking people for the miracle upon which you'd like to build a business, that anyone could build given that miracle, isn't a request for constructive feedback. At its absolute best it is a request for an IP handout.
Because the inquiring mind did zero research and asked a question so broad and so vague that it was impossible for anyone to answer it without months of work and very specific knowledge.
To quote Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." I don't think anyone was wanting to sit and spend hours explaining to the author how to do something incredibly difficult and complex without the author putting anything forward. Why not just take that knowledge and do it myself?
I agree there is a very large snarky dick contingent on HN who pollute potentially productive conversations with "What a stupid idea" type of comments. (Unfortunately I think this is a symptom of the human race, not just HN.)
However, there are some exceptionally bright people who hang out here who I would love to just brainstorm with--throw ideas out and see what happens. This site has an above-average level of these people I think.
I would love to see or find a group of people who are just interested in getting together and banging heads together and see what comes out. Even if I have no interest in starting a new courier service or whatever, I find it quite enjoyable to take the lessons and skills that I've learned and apply them in a new problem space. I especially love hearing feedback on those ideas from people who've worked in those spaces.
The most promising ideas are the ones that might sound dumb to someone entrenched in tradition.
Great idea! Something similar has actually happened, not with the HN community, but just a handpicked group of highly intelligent people put into a room together with the mission of coming up with innovative new ideas. It is described in this article.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...
In my dealing from couriers I get the impression a lot are using outdated software and inefficient processes, might be some disruption in that space.
Trebuchets using only materials in the office. Conquering South Africa. Lesbian strip clubs. Realistic world domination. What the world would look like if D&D rules actually applied. AI for storytelling. Etc.
Regardless of how ridiculous the premise, they'll work on it until they have at least a plausible solution. Ignoring impossibilities and slim chances and jumping straight into brainstorming and crazy ideas is a lot of fun. I'd rather have more of those conversations.
PG nailed it with the term "middlebrow dismissal". Which is a politer term than what I think when I come across it.
I never think to myself "Wow, what a realistic, practical, well-informed comment that generic negative feedback was. My respect for that commenter has certainly increased!" Particularly when it's the 500th example of the same thing in the same thread. Why do people do that? You can't possibly imagine you're adding any value in that case.
It's a growing problem here, and for me at least it's completely contrary to why I visit this site.
In the end, I don't care if the dude is capable of starting his own cable company or not. For one thing, I'm smart enough to know it's not my place to judge that. It's completely irrelevant what I think about that. I can wallow in my own mediocrity without feeling compelled to assign it to someone else.
But the value of the post to me, and to the site in general, is to consider the question. How would you go about starting a cable company? The question of whether any particular individual is capable doing such is COMPLETELY lacking in interest for me. I don't care about that answer, and I especially don't care about some random internet commenter's opinon on that topic. But the question itself is of interest to me, and I hope to others on this site.
If it's not, then maybe there's less value in this community than I'd hoped.
Sorry, a little riled up here. The continuing attempt at justifying the attitude is a bad, bad sign.
If in doubt, I prefer a good middlebrow dismissal to the shallow cheering of the overly excitable.
And why couldn't the top k HN users (patio11 et al) be given the option to classify comments {dismissive; troll; shallow-cheering; ...;} and this human classification could be the training set of a supervised learning system that could use NLP algorithms to derive useful metrics. Simplistic example: dismissive word ('sucks'; 'never work', 'impossible') density correlating to something that has been flagged as dismissive. Or is this an impossibility? Again, I do not have the hands on knowledge to be able to call this one.
http://gkosev.blogspot.com/2012/08/fixing-hacker-news-mathem...
it would probably have more weight when i release the test code and datasets though...
It's always going to be a matter of opinion what constitutes middlebrow-dismissalness, so if we accept that then the question is really:
"Is it possible to automatically determine if this post would be judged in this way by this person (or group of people)?"
It seems like that's a question that has at least a possibility of a "yes" answer.
In short, we are still worse than a fair coin toss at sentiment detection.
Language is not tricky at all, no sir. Can you see why? :-)
For cases with only two outcomes, you can never be worse than a coin toss. If you're achieving 40% accuracy in that case, all you have to do is invert the output of your algorithm and suddenly you're achieving 60% accuracy.
Not a terribly important point I'm making, I know.
That's at least half of the value of most posts on this site. Not the content of the posts itself, but rather in the quality of the discussion that follows. And while some posts do a better job than others of sparking that quality discussion, the interesting things is that we have 100% complete control over the quality.
I'm reminded of politicians when you ask them a question you don't want to answer.
"Mr. Obama, under your presidency, what chance do I have of joining the 1% by starting a cable company?"
"Good question. Let's talk about the initiatives I've sponsored to help people create and build businesses in this great land..."
We can do the same thing. "Good question! Let's talk about how one could get into this business and especially how one might make this business irrelevant by disrupting it..."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378
Are all actionable, informative and realistic. They aren't negative comments. Sure, there were some "This is dumb and you are stupid" posts in the thread, but most of the replies were sincerely realistic.
It really wasn't middlebrow dismissal...it was "this is going to be hard, and here is why". In all honesty, that is exactly the sort of feedback I would want as someone doing basic research in an area. I would want to know why it is going to be hard, why certain interests/business ideas are entrenched, etc.
Yes, it might be discouraging. However, someone with the guts, resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah to start their own cable company is not going to let a few negative comments on the Internet get in their way.
This doesn't mean reading it's Wikipedia entry.
Ideally, it means spending several years working for the current market leader in that space.
Barring that, reading as much as you can about the history, economics, mechanics, and current players in that space.
If possible, become a customer of one or two of the market leaders. If that is not feasible, again get to know people who are customers (again they may become your first target customers).
Befriend several people who do work in that space (they could become your first hires).
The deeper your understanding and experience in a market, the more likely you will succeed in disrupting it.
The hard part of the process (and I believe the limiting factor in a new company's success), is arranging the contracts with the content syndicators. Find my e-mail in my profile if you're serious.