
You’ve Either Shipped or You Haven’t - tswicegood
http://scraplab.net/2010/07/17/youve-either-shipped-or-you-havent/
======
mechanical_fish
This is a big reason why it's important to promote tinkering at many levels of
society, whether it's by holding those Maker Faires, or producing TV shows
about modding your motorcycle, or giving seed money to lots of first-time
startup founders, or whatever.

If you do any amount of engineering or building, you will learn a _lot_ about
how the process works. On the flip side, if you have never tried to engineer
anything you'll be prone to magical thinking. Too many people's mental model
of engineering seems to be drawn from Green Lantern comics: If a gadget cannot
do a certain thing, it must be because its builders don't have enough will to
succeed. They need to _want_ it more!

The extreme example of this problem is in science. Just about nobody in
society has actually done any experimental science. Being a fan of science,
reading lots of books about science, visiting science museums, or conducting
demonstrations of basic procedures doesn't count. It doesn't teach you what
it's actually like to explore a problem where the "right answer" is not known
in advance, and every data point costs money or time, and there are more knobs
than you can afford to turn, and it's hard to resist cherry-picking the data,
and your first _N_ hours of work have to be thrown away after you find the
boneheaded systematic error.

~~~
lionhearted
> The extreme example of this problem is in science. Just about nobody in
> society has actually done any experimental science.

This. A thousand times this. It takes like three weeks of screwing around to
get something remotely valuable, and oftentimes a summary takes just a
paragraph that people look at and say, "Well, yeah, duh, that's obvious isn't
it?"

~~~
mechanical_fish
One can't say this enough: After your work is done, you are going to look at
it, at the product of _years_ of herculean effort, and you are going to say
"Damn! This is _completely obvious_. How did this take me so much time?"

Only then will you truly grok Feynman's joke about mathematicians:
"Mathematicians can only prove trivial theorems, because any theorem, once
proved, is trivial."

(When I first read that at age fifteen or so, it was humor. Now it is _dark_
humor. Still funny, of course, but with richer overtones.)

Only then will you understand how James Clerk Maxwell's life work can
simultaneously be one of the top ten intellectual feats in the history of
mankind and something that most undergraduate physics majors learn in a
semester or two.

~~~
banuelios
Do they? I'm not a physicist but I wonder why a friend of mine (PhD in physics
@caltech) decided to take a sabbatical and "dedicate a full year" to study
Maxwell equations. I'll ask him more about it...

~~~
mechanical_fish
Oh, I don't mean to say that undergrads _finish_ understanding Maxwell's
equations. I took about six semesters' worth of material that basically boiled
down to the equations, and I came nowhere near reaching the limit.

But it is true that we routinely use the equations to solve problems that were
very difficult intellectual struggles for Maxwell. A big problem is that
Maxwell was encumbered by his mathematics and notation - everything he did was
later refactored to be more straightforward. The dev, grad, curl stuff we use
today came later. We have Oliver Heaviside - a man whose name is now more
famous from _Cats_ lyrics - to thank for them.

------
sharksandwich
Brings to mind a great Teddy Roosevelt quote

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man
stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again
and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who
does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great
devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the
end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at
least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those
cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

~~~
atiw
Like :)

~~~
atiw
Why the down vote? I don't understand. I just liked that quote.

~~~
huangm
Because you can express that sentiment with an upvote, a comment should
probably have more substance than just the fact that you "liked" the parent
comment.

~~~
jaxn
Absolutely true. But -4 on both those comments seemed a little extreme too.

~~~
minus1
I can understand the first comment getting buried. That's really the only way
to discourage the behavior. On the other hand, we could be more welcoming to
new posters who clearly have good intentions.

I was surprised to find there is no mention of this in the HN comment
guidelines. Maybe it could be added?

Apologies for continuing with the meta.

~~~
atiw
But if I up vote, that doesn't let the person know I up voted it. Aren't we
supposed to let people know that I care? I am not sure anonymous up voting
helps so much. It only says your link is popular, but you never get to see who
liked it, and then you can not find out who they are. Because you never see
their profile directly.

Are we supposed to only find new HNers by reading through all comments? Isn't
that kinda counter productive? We being startup founders and all, we have so
less free time anyways.

Also,is there some way I can see who up voted my links?? Maybe I don't know of
it, and that features exists, kinda like some other features on HN, which are
intuitive, but not mentioned specifically, and you end up finding them by just
noticing them or by some other post.

As a matter of fact, I found up voting this way. And yes, I can be considered
new, because I really used to be crazy busy (Being a first time entrepreneur
(founder and a single programmer) did that to me). Besides I didn't really
feel like I had anything to say, so didn't used to comment much.

(No prior active forum-ish experience, HN is the first, and sadly the only one
I can be regular at even now. I am sure other good forum-ish communities exist
like HN....some day....)

~~~
dieterrams
> But if I up vote, that doesn't let the person know I up voted it. Aren't we
> supposed to let people know that I care?

I can appreciate where you're coming from, but it's a tad egocentric: 99% of
the time, knowing the username of someone who upvoted you just won't matter
that much, and would just be a distraction. Suppose a comment with 60 upvotes
also got 60 replies saying nothing but "I like" or some variation. That page
is now flooded with what is effectively spam, making it harder for people who
are trying to contribute to and/or read the discussion.

If you want to stand out, just telling someone that you liked what they wrote
isn't going to do that. You've got to write something worthy of notice.

------
atiw
Right on point. Yesterday, we went to Romano's Macaroni Grill. My dinner was
delayed by an hour, and the manager apologized. And I was not angry. I
understood. I got it. How tough it could be to make things run perfectly.

I think we learn a lot of humility and patience, doing our startups.

(We did get a free dinner, but somewhere deep inside I wanted to do something
nice to him. And although I usually never have dessert, I ordered a Tiramisu,
and paid 34% tip on it, to show them indirectly that we understood.

Before when I was a student, I would have just taken the dinner free as if I
was entitled to it. )

------
andrewljohnson
I like the sentiment that people who have built something are sympathetic to
other builders.

Other than that, there is no substance to this article. It's first place on HN
because it give you a warm and fuzzy feeling. It's pandering, pure and simple.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Even if we neglect what I thought was the obvious subtext of this article,
what we see here is not mere pandering. It's _coaching_.

It took me far too long to understand how important coaching is. To the
dispassionate observer, a coach sounds like someone repeating the very, very
obvious over and over again. Why, really, do people like the Williams sisters
need a coach? Don't they understand as much about tennis and tennis training
and winning tennis as anyone on earth?

And then you find yourself in the middle of the competition, and you're tired,
and you're stressed, and you're at risk of losing your game, and you find that
it's really good to hear the voice of a coach or a teammate, carefully drawing
your attention to the specific very, very obvious thing that you need to
remember right now.

------
Tichy
Sorry, but the reason that Apple tends to get so much flak is their arrogance,
not the ignorance of the common people. In fact that article portrays a
certain kind of arrogance, too (even though it does not come from Apple).

------
guelo
The critic's work is valuable. As a maker it might rankle but as a consumer
ready to dish out hard earned cash it is extremely useful. Unfortunately your
blood, sweat and tears does not entitle you to success.

~~~
tomjen3
Thats true to a certain extend, but as a consumer (god I hate that term) I
wouldn't be here without the makers - without the critics I would have to
spend a bit more time finding the right products.

------
sdsantos
It remembers me of another article, about producers and consumers: "The Single
Most Important Career Question You Can Ask Yourself"
[http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2008/05/18/the-single-most-
impo...](http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2008/05/18/the-single-most-important-
career-question-you-can-ask-yourself/)

 _If you’ve been reading startup blogs for years and never started anything,
it’s time to accept that your tendency is to be a consumer. It’s not to say
you can’t break out of that classification by starting something, but if you
haven’t done it thus far you’re not likely to do it soon without some external
motivation (maybe this post?)._

 _If you have 50 software product ideas and your hard drive is littered with
folders containing 30 lines of code from each, you tend towards being a
consumer (or at least a producer who has trouble finishing things)._

 _And if you figure out that you are a producer, stop daydreaming about the
day you’ll make things happen. Start making it happen in the next 30 days, or
forever hold your peace._

Once again, is the ability to ship something the major distinction.

~~~
v21
And this reminds me of a talk, by Sophie Houlden, called "computer games are
awesome, but you suck because you haven’t made one yet, you lazy bastard."

<http://www.sophiehoulden.com/blog/?p=84#more-84>

------
johngalt
The list of things an individual hasn't done is always quite a list. This
doesn't preclude them of having a valid opinion, as this article implies.

You've never been a soldier so you can't comment about war? You've never been
in jail so you can't comment about incarceration?

------
keeptrying
This was a swift kick in the pants that I need to ship! Thanks :)

------
code_duck
I do know what it's like.

I became a lot less harsh in my attitude towards companies I deal with after I
started working on a software dev. team.

However, I'm still seething with hatred for management. Maybe if I'm an exec
someday, I'll learn to empathize.

------
pvg
Is this a motivational message for the Diaspora folks? There are probably
equally meaningful binary decomposition criteria for most everyone else, like
"you've either put on clean socks this morning, or you haven't"

------
switch
great point. It's worth mentioning this applies to pretty much every field and
especially to things that have had a lot of effort put into them.

Cooking, acting, coding, shipping, public speaking, being a doctor, pretty
much everything.

Perhaps the better statement would be -

You've either produced something of quality and stood behind it or you
haven't.

------
J3L2404
There are 10 types of people, those who've shipped and those who haven't.

------
code_duck
I haven't.

