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.
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.
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..."
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.
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
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).
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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).
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.
Imagine, as a thought experiment, that HN declared a do-over and took another stab at answering the question. What, specifically, do you want in the new thread that was not present in the old thread, and what do you not want in the new thread that was present in the old thread?
Some potential options:
a) Keep all the facts. Remove conclusory statements which suggest that this is a bad idea.
b) Remove the discouraging facts. Add new facts which tend to not be discouraging, such as "Monthly cable rates are high relative to many B2C products and lifetime values can easily hit the thousands of dollars, allowing you to spend a lot on customer acquisition." Add conclusory statements suggesting that this makes founding a cable company a good idea.
c) Remove discouraging facts about the cable industry, replace with to-do action items which accurately describe the process of how one would set up a cable company (regulatory approvals you'll need, who to hire, how much to raise, etc etc), and very carefully attempt to phrase "Convince investors to stake you with $X0 million" in such a way that it does not sound discouraging.
d) Remove everything about starting a cable company. Treat the question as a springboard about "How to disrupt the cable industry?"
Patrick, this is condescending. I doubt you meant for it to come across that way, but that's how I read it. Most of the posts in the original thread could have conveyed the exact same information in a less dismissive, discouraging, and sometimes even hostile tone--it would have made them more valuable to our community.
You are right: It is condescending, and I downvoted it for that reason which has no doubt been cancelled out by like a hundred upvotes just because it is Patrick.
But, gee, how many other people get called by their first name instead of their handle? "Thomas" comes to mind, but I imagine it is a rather small club. Patrick is fairly introverted and gets super nervous when giving public speeches, even though he has experience doing so. On a much smaller scale, I have been in the kind of position he is in here on HN. I read his remark here as an attempt by someone with a lot of social pull and responsibility here but limited social savvy to affirm the good qualities of a forum he is very personally invested in. Yes, he did it less than smoothly. But his condescension is very likely a defense mechanism, knowing he is a big target and is very likely to be attacked. It is kind of him flinching, knowing it is coming and trying to steel himself for it.
I don't know what the solution is, either for HN or Patrick. But I do know how uncomfortable it is to be called out by my given name in public when most other people are hiding behind some anonymous handle or otherwise lower profile. I know how awful it feels to be delivered what amounts to a personal attack so very personally, by name, from semi-anonymous crowds. I don't think putting Patrick on the hot seat like that helps HN at all. In fact, it likely makes things worse.
One of the problems with HN is that it is a forum aimed at a largely socially awkward crowd. Most people who have the technical expertise to become influential here will be poorly equipped to perform crowd control duties, even though they essentially take that on as a de facto duty, like it or not. When they attempt to live up to that duty, it might help to cut them some slack and try to see the good intentions behind their sometimes mediocre execution.
I wish the leaderboard had 160 names on it. It is the top 150-ish people who have some hope of "fixing" the loss of quality that is so frequently lamented here. I don't know exactly how to do that on such a large scale, but I have a few clues about how to proceed. And trying to meet people like Patrick halfway is part of it.
(I apologize for how rambling this is. As is often the case, I seem to be running a fever.)
But even more interestingly, there's a way to social engineer yourself into the in-crowd. Open their profiles in separate tabs, click on "comments" and "submissions", and bookmark the lot of them. Instead of reading the Hacker News main page, open the tab group and read their comments and submissions. Agree with them for the most part, and take their side in arguments. Not 100%, or you'll come off like a sycophant. You're not looking for karma - submissions are much better for that - you're looking for acceptance by that group. When people call you by your first name, you've won.
I'm not advocating this, but I think it's interesting that it can be done.
:-) Though I have very serious doubts that would really work, at least not without having sufficient technical knowledge and intelligence to genuinely engage them in discourse. In which case you could join the in crowd on actual merit -- and probably would far prefer that method, for a variety of reasons. Some social circles you really can't fake your way into. This is probably one of them.
I hold Patrick in extremely high regard, and I don't want anyone to read my previous comment as a personal attack or an attempt to place anyone in a hot seat.
I am Michele. I was not trying to put you on the hot seat either. It struck me as an opportunity to address some of the underlying issues in the forum, issues which sparked this submission. Please consider it a compliment that I thought your remark a worthy jumping off point.
And, as I have said twice already tonight on hn, I really need to go now.
I don't find the comment derisive, in that it does not express contempt or ridicule. Rather, I find it somewhat patronising--it dismisses Peter's blog post as not specific enough by focusing on the question of content rather than tone.
The blog post was an exhortation to open our minds, to be more constructive with our peers and more creative as a community; I found it unfortunate that Patrick seemed to dismiss Peter's input by making that sort of detour in his comment. I probably would have ignored it except that the entire point of the blog post was to try being a bit less rigid with each other.
I didn't mean for my comment to become a "scrutinise Patrick" thread--it was just a comment.
Not sure who in the heck downvoted this, but I proposed a simple solution for the community that would help us explore these types of topics on each post.
Called - "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started".
Edit 1: For whatever reason, this comment seems to be a battleground. Been upvoted & downvoted so many times. Guess this comment symbolizes the struggle for those of us interested in preserving the quality of the community we have come to love, and with those that just love to downvote willy nilly.
I was under the impression you aren't able to downvote on this site. In the same way this site is Reddit except the fact you can't react negatively to anything (downvote), we now need to do the same for comments.
You either upvote or you do nothing. You either comment positively or you don't comment. Excellent job patio.
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.
I love this idea. Not as something to realistically help you get started, but purely educational. There's so much knowledge tied up exclusively among people "in the industry", that would be great to get out into the public.
I would love to know all the things involved in starting an airline. How are planes actually bought? How are mechanics actually procured? What kind of safety regulations are followed? etc.
I once read the book "Starting & Running a Restaurant for Dummies" just to find out how it's done. It's fascinating!
But turning it into a Wiki, for anything, would be so much better. You can have summary sections, that link to fuller articles, you can cross-reference how to hire a chef (both for the restaurant, and for the airline catering), and so on.
As it happens I've been thinking similar questions about the film industry. I was surprised at how hard it was to find good information online, so I started a site that largely consists of interviews with filmmakers.
I only launched it a couple weeks ago so only have a few interviews up, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how many have agreed to be interviewed (still have those in the queue).
A common thing I've heard about that industry is that it's the exact opposite of the collaborative, inquisitive nature of tech startups. For example, I've heard several people say the difference between SXSW Interactive and SXSW Film is night and day.
It may be impossible, but my little site is a small attempt to change the industry attitude from one of "what's in it for me?" to "how can we work together to create great products that people love?"
A lot of this information might already be available, just not in the obvious places. An example:
"how to start an airline" came up a couple of times in this discussion. If you ask an existing airline "How should I begin?", they might see you as a future competitor or as a waste of time - either way, they won't gain anything by helping you.
But plane manufactures do gain something from helping you. Even if only every millionth guy looking for advice actually buys a plane, it's still worth it for them. In face, you can check out Boings guide on how to start an airline:
I'd wager that it's the same in other industries. If you want to start a cable company, talk to the people that'd profit off of it - people selling routers, contractors that build the infrastructure, helpline operators, etc.
Starting a wiki is a great idea, and there's already some information you could copy/link to (depending on the license). You'd have some information right off the start.
I agree with you, and I want to call out a particular phrase you wrote as profoundly good advice:
"If you want to start a [$ALMOST_ANYTHING] company, talk to the people that'd profit off of it"
There's certainly more you need to know about starting and running any type of business, but finding the people who would potentially profit from a successful company is going on my shortlist of "Let's evaluate this idea" questions
I worked in the aviation industry for 6 years, so here's a 20 second "Airlines for Dummies" guide :)
1). To acquire aircraft you either buy directly from the manufacturer (Boeing, Airbus, Embraer etc.) or (much more commonly and especially if you only plan on operating a small fleet) you lease them from someone like Macquarie or, in some cases, from another airline who has spare capacity (known as wet and dry leasing).
Alternatively, if you are an existing airline, you can temporarily contract another airline's aircraft under what is known as ACMI. They give you their aircraft and crew and you pay the fuel, landing fees and other taxes. ACMI contracts can be as short as a day or last for years.
2). For mechanics (assuming you mean people), you either hire them directly via specialised aviation staff agencies or you outsource maintenance (e.g. to someone like www.priority.aero)
3). Safety regulations are devised by international bodies such as ICAO and IATA as well as national entities known as Civil Aviation Authorities. Aircraft manufacturers also play a role. It's typically each country's CAA that primarily enforces the regulations on all nationally registered aircraft. In Europe, there is also Eurocontrol which is a pan European governmental body that's responsible for co-ordinating Europe's airspace.
If you wanted to start a new airline (assuming it was to offer charter flights and not scheduled routes), some of the things you'd need to do would be:
1). Decide what type and how many aircraft you need
2). Decide what cabin layout you need (all economoy?, how many rows, how many galleys etc.). This depends largely on who you envisage your customers will be (e.g. are you planning to sell charter capacity to tour operators or do you want to offer a VIP configured fleet to fly wealthy people around).
3). Decide what engines you need (different generations have different range capabilities and maintenance costs)
4). Get your aircraft. If you go the leasing company route, try to get a "power by the hour deal" where you only pay for the hours you fly (the holy grail) or a short 1 or 3 year lease. The market is depressed at the moment so gone are the days where leasing companies demand 5 or 10 year terms.
5). Get insurance. You will need a specialist aviation policy from someone like Lloyds. Although it depends on what aircraft you are insuring and where you plan to fly, a typical policy will offer damage and liability cover in the region of $200 million.
6). Get your crew together (flight, operations and ground staff). Due to minimum rest regulations, you are going to need at least two sets of flight crew for each aircraft if you want to maximise utilisation. For a 180 seater, a typical crew complement consists of: a captain, a first officer, a mechanic and 4 cabin staff. To save on staff costs (at least in theory) you can outsource operations (these are the people that co-ordinate everything -e.g. catering the aircraft, filing flight plans, crew rostering, over flight permits etc.)
7). Get your operating license from the CAA. You can't fly without it.
8). Set up a fuel deal using a fuel broker (or directly with Shell or BP).
???
profit*
--
* Actually there is no profit in running an airline. Seriously, don't do it (trust me).
That there's no profit is something I've seen repeatedly, including written by Warren Buffet. So my question is where does the capital they burn through each year come from ? What kind of magic business is this where companies are eternally taking losses yet still around ?
Unfortunately, explaining this will take more than a sentence and it's 00:30 where I am and I need to sleep. But in a nutshell, the whole industry relies on a heady mix of stupid investors, money launderers and state backing. The only people that make money are the brokers (as in most industries...).
There is plenty of profit in certain kinds of airlines -- cargo, certain kinds of business service (flight services to oil and gas, war zones, ...). I think there's money to be made in medical flights and maybe even pet flights (although I think the pet airline went under).
Passenger service in the US, sure, no profit there.
Then you have to choose if you're going to sell through a GDS (expensive and heavy, but mandatory if you want to codeshare, which can be a good way to bootstrap), or directly to customers over the internet (cheaper but more limited)
Yes! I hate how the really valuable knowledge is just tied up inside the walls of big industry. People making money are too busy to teach others how to do their jobs.
I'm always in search of these types of answers, and rarely get them on the internet. I've looked up those questions about starting an airline in the past.
Maybe we can't start an airline, I understand the barriers to entry, but if we got a look at the mechanics of the whole thing maybe someone could disrupt just a small segment of it. That person sells some software to the airlines and makes lots of money. That person then works as CTO for an airline. That person moves up to CEO. That person later leaves and creates an upstart airline that disrupts the industry as we know it. This is the way these things happen all the time, there's no reason for pessimism.
Oh no, they are not merely too busy. In most cases, the industry actively wants to exclude others and keep their info to themselves. When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, running my mouth on the internet about the industry could have gotten me fired. I say more these days, now that it is relatively safe. I still don't name the company, just the general industry.
Yeah, I have always wondered about manufacturing. If I wanted to go out and manufacture a product of some sort, even something simple, where would I find the information on doing that.
There is a bit of a difference too between manufacturing base parts and assembly. There are a lot of shows on car manufacturing but they mostly are focusing on assembling mostly parts that have already been formed. I watched one on making little blow up balloons and was kind of amazed how much goes into it and even then they didn't really go too much into where the base components come from.
These days I guess with outsourcing a lot of businesses don't even know how their products are made.
I'm a developer that would be interested in helping this come to fruition. Maybe starting a github repo with the site's code would be a good start for others to pitch in.
As for the domain, howdoistart.com returns:
"This domain is for sale. Please contact Curtis Stock at curtis.stock@yahoo.com for more information."
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.
The problem with this is that for questions like "how could I build a cable company?", answers don't help".
If you want to build a cable company, a payments system, a new government, or colonize mars there is no high level answer. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sub-questions that need to be answered. Eventually so many that you need to hire people to ask and answer them, and you won't even know what the question was.
The truth is that if you really want to go to space, no one will help you. Not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't. We can speculate, and dig up research or law or economics---but at the end of the day, all you're doing is inviting us to help design your bikeshed. If you can break down the problem, figure out which questions to ask, what information you don't have, and who does, that person might be able to help you. By the time you've gotten that far, you're already on the verge of sinking your life into this---and if you want to build a cable company, that's what it's going to take.
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.
>"I’m really disappointed in the universally pessimistic and generally unhelpful answers this question received. Some people pitched some interesting ideas and helpful analysis, but most of the replies reinforced the notion that Hacker News readers are predominantly male know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks."
This would have been both more convincing and shorter without the anti-male bit. I realize that western media is pretty insensitive to this variety of sexism, but a quick test is to try substituting "black", "female", or "Jewish" where you've written "male". If it sounds offensive, then it probably is.
I promised myself that I wasn't going to reply directly to any of the comments, but it's important to rebut this succinctly: so far as I can tell, 100% of the top 1oo contributors to Hacker News (by karma) are male.
I am documenting my methodology and will publish my findings in the near future.
Please remember that nobody has the right to not be offended. Meanwhile, if you can prove that HN has been taken over by Jewish black women with a collective chip on their shoulder, then I will stand corrected.
I don't dispute that it's a mostly male site. The problem is that unless you're claiming that being male is a negative thing, there's no reason to include it along with your criticisms of "know-it-alls" or "bunch of snarky dicks".
If, for example, you said that Hollywood producers were "predominantly Jewish know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky dicks," then a lot of Jewish people would take offense and rightfully so... dispite the fact that the vast majority of producers are in fact Jewish.
Similarly, the claim that elementary schoolteachers were "predominantly female know-it-alls and on the average, a bunch of snarky bitches," you would have offended a lot of women, and the fact that most elementary school teachers are female would be no defense.
There's no need to bash men to make your argument. Bash the snarkiness or the know-it-all attitudes. That's my humble request to make the discussion a bit friendlier, and incidentally more focused on what actually matters.
It has to do with power. The comment about jewish film producers (high status) is not only not offensive, Mel Brooks has made jokes about it for 30 years.
Calling all female schoolteachers (low pay) 'bitches' is extra offensive on 2 levels.
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.
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 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.
An interesting rant. I've observed that problem solvers also follow something like the inverse power law, which is to say it takes a certain kind of person to attack large problems and as the problems get larger the set of people willing to consider them seriously decreases logarithmically until it asymptotically approaches zero.
In an analagous fashion the "quality" (using karma as a metric of quality) of comments on HN are also quite high and drop off steeply approaching zero. This is reflected both in the comments, and in the karma distribution [1]. The trick is to keep the noise floor high enough for quality reading and low enough that you don't miss out on new people making great comments.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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!]
This reminded me of Richard Branson (the Virgin guy) and a post by James Altucher. I think James' point is that to do something huge, like start a new airline, you always have to find the next step. Pretty basic really, break a big task into smaller pieces. But worth a read nonetheless, it really goes into OP's question.
"Q: How do you know when you’re thinking too big or aiming too high (if that’s even possible)?"
"A: In the mid-90s I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with
(...)
My real problem was: I didn’t have confidence. And I didn’t know what the next step was. In retrospect, I should’ve written down my idea, written down ten ideas for possible shows to launch with, and started pitching TV companies to get someone to partner with me on it. That would’ve been simple and not taken too much time before there was some payoff."
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 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).
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.
"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.
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.
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 didn't read any of the comments in the original thread, but I can imagine why many of them were negative. Here is the 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?'
This, to me, reeks of laziness. The OP would have done better to say 'this is what I've done, research, and/or these are the ideas I have. Am I right, wrong, or close?'
So problem #1 is that, from the looks of it, the OP didn't do any research before asking the question.
Problem #2 is that the question is a lazy one.
I can guarantee you that Elon didn't ask these type of questions, but instead presented lists of assertions and hypothesis which he was prepared to test and/or validate.
I've setup a Wikispace wiki for this to begin. If people contribute and think this is a good idea, then maybe its own domain and custom design will be in order.
I love this idea and I think we should run with it. Go to:
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 didn't see the thread either, but I like this post. I think the best way to go about starting something large and ridiculous is to tell all your friends and family you're going to do it, to the point where it would become embarrassing if you didn't even try to make it a success. Friends and family are the best at calling you out on not living your dreams.
"Hey Gaius, weren't you going to build a Cylon detector? You talked about it for months"
"Yeah, but it was too hard and I didn't know how to start"
"You suck"
A more practical benefit of telling all the people you meet is that one of them might know or be associated with someone who is connected with the industry.
Criticizing what someone has made with middlebrow dismissiveness is one thing but pointing out that taking on a legally and commercially entrenched industry will be hard and here are some of the specific challenges is entirely valid.
I think the original question is worth picking apart if the answers are being criticized.
>Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?
> 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?
The original question is worse (by a long way) than most of the answers. Most of the answers pointed out the major challenges or suggested better ways to achieve the vaguely stated aims although there were some useless dismissals.
The question indicates (possibly wrongly) a massive lack of understanding of the business "Basically, my understanding...[something basically right but oversimplified]". It is badly punctuated "fox" rather than "Fox", 'dont' rather than "don't". The question also fails to really be clear about what he wants to do. Does he really want to run a cable company maintaining wires in the ground and boxes in homes? Or is this mostly about securing more favorable and flexible content deals? Or is there an implicit assumption that he needs to own the cables to get the deals? What scale does he want to start on? A small town/city or national?
I didn't see the original question while it was active but if I did I would have pointed out how hard such a business is to break into especially if top grade content is required due to the maze of exclusivity contracts and the value of them which means massive amounts of money are needed to make the sellers choose non-exclusive options. Even companies like Microsoft and Sony with massive deployed platforms (Xbox and PS3 in particular) need prolonged negotiations to get any content and aren't anywhere near being able to offer full cable replacements and even with their own content Sony can offer only what is not exclusively licensed elsewhere.
However that doesn't mean that the video space can't be attacked as Netflix is showing but it will in my view need to be an indirect attack that builds audience until it can compete head to head for the major deals and content as a viable distribution platform and pricing model. Note that when the competition really starts costs may rise not fall as the platforms will compete for the most important content potentially driving up content prices for all the distribution platforms.
Sure, the internet can be a cynical place, remote communication seems to wake the worth in a lot of people. At the same time it is full of wonders. Maybe I can invite you to join a discussion about how it could impact in political decision making?
Click along: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891571
LOVE this! I'm new to programming and it's the toughest thing to answer. How or where do I get started? I have some great ideas but not much in the way of skills to get it done. I know we all have different levels of "figure it out" skills but it's always helpful if you find someone who can at least show you how to open the door.
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.
This is exactly the mentality we need to see more of. Dismissing good ideas is not just unproductive but actually destructive to the overall progression of thought - which is why we're here in the first place.
I just submitted a propsal for a new thread format on HN that would potentially solve this. Any upvote love would be appreciated - http://news.ycombinator.com/newest
It's called "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started".
There is nothing "rude" about asking HN to chime in on your exploratory-stage ideas, especially when they are uncommonly ambitious and not your average badgeville startup ideas.
Face it, Foursquare is not going to fetch you a mercenary if you ever needed one.
Why can group-mulling of ideas, be a terrific endeavor?
1) It can stress-test your idea and expose the glaringly gaping holes you might have overlooked, in the very fashioning of the prospect itself.
2)Some ideas may not lend to "socialization" because of their inherent nature. Helps to have them flagged -- if not decimated -- before you even begin.
Eg: A startup seeking to disrupt the litigation law market isn't very readily socialize-able as one targeting the fitness trainer market.
3) The group-mulling process need not be just one-way beneficial. The "mullers" stand to benefit from having their horizons broadened too.
They might for once realize, that there are entire industries -- non-glamorous but nonetheless high gravity, real-impact ones -- waiting to be disrupted beyond the Mayorvilles and Filtergrams of the valley.
This kind of mulling happens on Quora all the time.
HN should encourage it.
Again you are just being asked to mull.
Not leak insights from the equity-research desk at Goldman Sachs.
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.