

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

======
phugoid
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.

~~~
Cushman
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.

------
skrebbel
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.

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

~~~
jpadvo
"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...

------
bfe
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.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
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
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.)

~~~
amcintyre
"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."

That's definitely the case for me. I find that I don't have the internal
motivation to sit down and read a lot about a given subject until I've been
faced with some real- world problem that turns out to be really hard without
more knowledge of that subject.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I like to speed read/scan books like Knuth's just so I have some mental map of
what's in them, even if I don't grok it right away. That way when I do hit a
problem I'm working on, I'm more likely to remember I saw it already solved in
a book somewhere.

In fact, I just assume from the start that every single problem I face in
programming, no matter how large or small, has already been found and solved
by someone else, and written about in a book or posted about on the internet.
It's not like I'm trying to create real AI or prove P=NP or anything, just
building apps.

------
inkaudio
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.

------
carbon8
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.

------
code_duck
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.

------
brackin
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.

------
axefrog
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.

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

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

~~~
antidaily
also: StayFocused for Chrome
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji)

------
chemmail
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.

------
Toady
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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

