> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
That does not mean the stories are not important. They are. Vitally important. HN is just not the place for those discussions. This is not being dismissive of the stories, it should be seen as instead encouraging everyone to find a better site to engage even deeper with things that matter. At the end of the day, HN matters to your job, but stories like the ones getting flagged matter to the lives of millions.
Show some respect for how important they are by not striving to mix them in here.
All this tells us is that advertisers were interested enough to try it. It does not tell us whether or not the ads met their expectations. If they did, this trend will continue, and the next adblocker war can begun. If they did not, that revenue is going to drop.
> Every customer request is a revenue opportunity with an expiration date.
Oh, gosh no. The best thing a product manager can say when hearing a new request is "No". If you take every request and do it, you get the Homer Simpson car. You can a mangled mess of one-off stuff that one guy wanted. It is like bad fan fiction applied to your product.
Good PMs listen to the requests, figure out what the underlying problem is, and find the best solution. That is nowhere near the same thing as letting the sales trope of "Just make this one feature and I'll close this sale" set your strategic direction.
Of course, we absolutely agree that you shouldn't build everything. I'm curious, for the best PMs you've worked with, what tactics did they use to get to that underlying problem?
> We all start with an idea, 0 customers, 0 followers
wat. No, this is not true at all. Most successful startups work through many ideas until they already have potential customers to work with as they build. And if the idea doesn't come together and prove that is can generate revenue, people don't build it. They move on.
This idea that someone has a vision that nobody else has bought into and turn it into a startup unicorn is a rare exception to how things go. It makes a good story, but isn't how thing play out in reality 99% of the time. Don't fall into the trap of thinking the other 1% is a reasonable expectation of how your idea will go.
yes. I totally agree with this. Every successful startups has multiple failure iteration in the past.
Success at first attempt is rare. My original question was around when you decide to pursue one of your idea fulltime. It could be 1, 2, 3rd attempt but at some point, we only have 2 option. Quit or next iteration
I read it less as a strategic pivot and more as a moment of: "Oh, shit, we gotta make money, don't we?"
AI is too expensive to just run forever and figure that some future investment round will get the monetization right. We're a few years deep into burning cash to make AI happen, and while the models are improving, the overall societal desire for AI is not. Coders like it, business leaders like it... and that is about it.
They see the end of their road ahead if they keep playing around instead of showing value. So this is cutting corners and monetizing the traffic, just like all past web trends.
> A server-rendered page from a modern framework is fast.
Seems like a massive generalization. The server-side rendering might be fast, but that is just the HTTP layer. What about the lower layers? From where does it pull its data? How well-written is that query? What about the OS, even the VM or physical hardware. Any non-trivial app is going to have far more concerns about those lower layers than the HTTP process when digging into performance problems.
I get the argument that people don't write with it anymore, so teaching kids to write it is not the best use of the limited school hours. What I don't get is not teaching kids to read it. Even if you never write a single letter in it, when you cannot read words written in your own language, that sure feels like illiteracy.
> We used to ask "can we build this?" Now we assume yes.
The answer was always yes. The question was the speed and cost. AI has changed the speed, but increased the cost. Not just in the actual price of the tokens you burn, but in the increased cost of securing the code, increased review time, and increased cost of downtime because AI can build an app, but it cannot build the infrastructure to scale that app.
Will it get there eventually? Possibly. Is the added cost worth it for people trying to build something new? Yeah, maybe. But all the talk I hear of people leaping forward in their delivery contrasts heavily with the real-world experience I'm seeing of massive backlogs and breakage.
> The answer was always yes. The question was the speed and cost.
That's the right assessment, as a result of cost the final decision would be we cannot. The cost to at least prototype and experiment is dramatically lower which lets you try things you'd never have thought was possible.
> it cannot build the infrastructure to scale that app
Why do you say this? I haven't seen proof of this, inversely teams with already scaled infrastructure are able to launch greenfield at scale faster with AI.
The entire point of linktree is to make people quickly bounce to somewhere else - to direct people to your other sites, where they can see your other content, maybe buy something you provide. If you start adding reasons for people to stay on linktree instead of leaving and going to your other sites, you are making it fail.
The author feels that applicants should go beyond just applying - they should be doing free work, proactively, and send it along with their application.
I understand how that would make an applicant stand out. But I wonder if the author understands that there is no way that makes sense in today's hiring market. We'd be burning all of our waking hours doing extra work for applications in order to maybe get a slightly higher chance of getting an initial phone screen. The effort:reward ratio just isn't there.
Now if you want to make sure I'm a real person, and ask me to do something that takes 30 seconds, sure. I'll do that. Maybe even a couple extra minutes. But proposing that applicants do product reviews and build prototypes is absurd and tone-deaf.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That does not mean the stories are not important. They are. Vitally important. HN is just not the place for those discussions. This is not being dismissive of the stories, it should be seen as instead encouraging everyone to find a better site to engage even deeper with things that matter. At the end of the day, HN matters to your job, but stories like the ones getting flagged matter to the lives of millions.
Show some respect for how important they are by not striving to mix them in here.
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