
Do you even lift? - bborud
http://blog.borud.no/2013/11/do-you-even-lift.html
======
chrissnell
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](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
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?

------
todayiamme
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.

~~~
bborud
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
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

~~~
thewarrior
Great Quote !

------
onedev
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
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.)

~~~
freyrs3
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.

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

------
olefoo
> \-- 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.

~~~
bborud
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.

------
analog31
"Beware of having lucky people trying to rationalize their luck into
repeatable process postfact."

Quote of the week. Thanks!

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

------
scjody
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.

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

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

~~~
shanselman
Totally. RSS was the beginning of RSS, in my mind, and I said so in 2003:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/RememberPointcastSmellsLikeRSS...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/RememberPointcastSmellsLikeRSSSpirit.aspx)

------
gpcz
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.

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

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

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

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

~~~
thewarrior
Could you elaborate ?

------
darkxanthos
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.

------
corresation
"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.

~~~
bborud
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

~~~
corresation
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.

~~~
bborud
> 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.

Well, I'd say otherwise. It _was_ hard and there were big differences in how
efficient the various platforms were. And sadly, not all of them could keep up
with the development pace and the growth of the web.

(I used to work for two of Google's competitors in the late 90s and early
2000s, I had some knowledge of the internals of a third competitor and I
eventually ended up working at Google for a few years).

> Alas, herein we see the magic of the survivorship bias: Google > won,
> therefore Google must have done everything right.

That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that
what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did wasn't. I
didn't touch on why Google succeeded at all. In fact, Google's success is
entirely irrelevant.

~~~
corresation
>That was not what I said. Please do not pretend that I said that. I said that
what Google did represented heavy lifting and what Pointcast did
wasn't[....]In fact, Google's success is entirely irrelevant.

At this point I have absolutely no idea what it is you are trying to say,
then, as you apparently want to have your argument work in any way way that
you think has some sort of lesson.

Google is successful today because they made business bets after the .COM
crash that no one else was making. They brought a new approach that earned
them attention and customers, and the rest is history. They did good
engineering, but so did countless companies that failed or continue in
obscurity. I suppose that is the "heavy lifting"?

Pointcast obviously was doing good engineering (they had an engineering scale
that was pretty much unprecedented at the time), but their business case
completely fell apart and the organization was dissolved. There were literally
zero issues with the engineering of Pointcast, nor were they replaced by
competitors (despite that apparently being your angle?). It simply wasn't a
viable business at the time, and they couldn't find a way to make money.

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

~~~
bborud
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
No excuses.

------
pearjuice
Most people who lift are overcompensating one thing or another.

~~~
dasil003
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.

