Hey, author here. I don't usually comment on my own articles on HN, but this comment was one of the more negative ones I've seen here.
A lot of us here on Hacker News (formerly Startup News) are working on startups. One of the biggest challenges facing startups is finding the determination to work hard during the long initial period where you might see very few fruits from your labors. Personally, I like to read pg's "How Not to Die" frequently (http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html). It was in this light that I wrote the article. I submitted it to HN and apparently it struck a chord with a lot of readers here, and they upvoted it.
Not every article on HN is going to appeal to every reader. Perhaps you're not working on a startup, so this article doesn't really apply to you. Maybe my next one will. Recognize that not all HN readers are in the same situation in life; enjoy the articles that apply directly to your situation, and read the others to give you perspective on the lives of your fellow HNers.
agreed ... your blog post tried to convey a very simple and punchy idea, and you didn't make any pretenses about it being 'mathematically accurate' or whatever, so i'm astounded that people have nitpicked on your curves not being accurate or whatever.
a piece of presentation advice i've heard for creating graphs and diagrams is that if you don't want people to nitpick on details, make a really crappy low-fidelity sketch so that people don't have an expectation of precision. i once got ripped on because i drew a line that looks like 1 / x^2 to talk about inverse correlation, but people nitpicked on whether it was a power law, 1/x, whether the integral converges, etc., which was totally irrelevant to my argument. if i had made a crappy hand-sketch on the board, then people might not have been as critical
And don't include mathematical equations. They are meant to be precise.
A closer analogy might have been with growth of a bacteria colony: It's more or less exponential and you have to keep the right conditions up --- even in the beginning where you do not see anything, yet.
A lot of us here on Hacker News (formerly Startup News) are working on startups. One of the biggest challenges facing startups is finding the determination to work hard during the long initial period where you might see very few fruits from your labors. Personally, I like to read pg's "How Not to Die" frequently (http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html). It was in this light that I wrote the article. I submitted it to HN and apparently it struck a chord with a lot of readers here, and they upvoted it.
Not every article on HN is going to appeal to every reader. Perhaps you're not working on a startup, so this article doesn't really apply to you. Maybe my next one will. Recognize that not all HN readers are in the same situation in life; enjoy the articles that apply directly to your situation, and read the others to give you perspective on the lives of your fellow HNers.