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- Hacker News
- The bar for what is worth bringing out of the cave gets higher every day. Unless you have a huge network of fans or a small network of foolhardy VCs, screaming into the market, with two million other voices, may as well be the void.
It's getting hard to even get a shrug.
by baron3dl - > It's getting hard to even get a shrug.
I've slowly gotten more comfortable with the void, you put something out, allegedly 50 clicks received and not a single comment or conversion. 700 views of a video, no comments and 3 likes.
You don't get told if it's good or bad you'll just get indifferent silence.
So now I don't wait until it's perfect because I know likely nobody will say anything.
I do wonder if people are more fatigued with all the AI content being put out.
by cube00 - The answer is to aim for a much smaller audience. Solve a problem for one other person/company.
- > let reality teach me what it required
This resonates with me. I think it takes balls to leave the comfort zone and test our assumptions against the real world, to get actual feedback, good or bad. I think now it’s easier than ever to just stay in our caves surrounded by nothing else but our customised feeds that reinforce our beliefs and the sycophantic AI agents that yes-and all our ideas.
by iammjm - it needs so muchby brainzap
- > Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train endlessly in private like a coward. Ship that product
Funny, I didn't read this as career advice, but social advice. Like, get off the apps, get off the couch, go sit at a bar alone, ask someone to hang out.
by multisport - I also don't see a strong link between training at a competitive activity, and releasing a product. Obviously, training against real opponents is crucial.
But the world is full of half-baked products, especially software. If you show up to your first tournament and lose pathetically in the first round, no one is going to prevent you from attending the second tournament. But people will permanently write off your product if it is half-baked. Or even if your product is good but the release process is half-baked.
by pphysch - We should strive for somewhat higher than sitting at the bar alone.by samudrijan
- Tangent inspired by the first half of the article: wasting time on the Internet, in front of screens being akin to Plato's Cave is a useful framing device I wish I could internalize. Two or three decades ago getting acquainted with the nascent web felt like escaping the cave to a brand new world, just to now feel discovered we have been trapped into a worse one, and now wishing to escape back to the real world. You know, the one that actually matters.by sph
- Have you hit the end of the internet? I mostly have. This thread though is pretty decent.by samudrijan
- I'm reminded of Ze Frank's "Brain Crack:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
The idea is that unexecuted ideas can actually become addictive. You keep telling yourself, "boy, that thing is going to be amazing whenever I get around to making it!"
And the more you tell yourself this, the more you become petrified that it won't be great, making you even less likely to actually work on it.
- Whoa, Ze Frank! Forgot all about him.by senordevnyc
- > A lover needs someone free to reject him
As G. K. Chesterton said,
> Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1718/pg1718-images.html...
by svieira - Marriage is good if you want kids. Otherwise, there's really no point to it and most people would be happier and better off single. It's also why a lot of married people divorce after their kids are grown.by SoftTalker
- Posts like this remind me of a story:
A young Thomas Carlyle was attending church with his mother. Upon returning home, after a lengthy sermon by the minister, Thomas turned to his mother and exclaimed, “If I were the minister, I would simply say: good people, you know what to do, now go and do it!”
His mother replied, “Aye Thomas, but would you tell them how?”
by tacitusarc - I don’t get itby a1o
- There is a real tension. On the one hand, you need to grind to develop the horse power needed. Without the horse power, it's just not possible. On the other hand, your ideas need to meet reality for things to get steered and stay grounded. I started a business in 2022 and constantly got the advice to first sell, then build. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You can't sell something that's not good enough, but you don't know if there is demand without selling. This is an awkward balance, at least at the beginning. I tried full throttle to sell but the product just wasn't there. Was it a waste of time? Partially, sales can get time consuming. But some of it I'm glad I did because it provided some real field insight that provides that bit of steering that's needed to guide all the building.by edg5000
- > It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
AI can help tremendously with the initial leg-up problem of shipping a working prototype -- paradoxically, if you're willing to put in the work. That is, the right kind of work: talking to people, getting suggestions, writing all your own marketing copy by hand, creating a design that has human touch, throwing it away and starting fresh (with less genAI help) when you've learned what the real demand is for, etc.
by TimTheTinker - > you don't know if there is demand without selling. This is an awkward balance
The answer is you start with the sale. Once you’ve sold it, you build it. Ideally, you sell it to customers first. Less ideally, to investors.
- The only thing worse than 100% inhabiting your own cave is trying to fit into someone else's. I had a conversation this weekend with someone in an emerging startup that I initially wanted to join but increasingly didn't as I realized I had gone from starring cast to somewhere between entourage and sub 1% equity NPC. And at that point, startups are horrible bets when you have any sort of sure thing IMO.
But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.
Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.
by LogicFailsMe - A small correction though. Because of AI I'd argue that execution is cheap while the best ideas are valuable.by Ostatnigrosh
- Missed out a crucial word: there's nothing - wrong - with spending most of your time in the cave.
I agree 100%.
- Reminds me of a couple things: Nils van der Poel (Olympic speed skater record holder) and his How to Skate a 10k [0]:
> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.
and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:
> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.
and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:
> 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.
The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/
[1] https://x.com/JosephNWalker/status/1452772819792642054
[2] https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm
by jcalx - YUP.
>> you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
"One test is worth a thousand opinions"
Indeed, if the opinions are about yourself or your capabilities, not testing them soon is truly indulging in fantasy. (and nevermind how much you learn from the tests or competition itself)
by toss1 - It reminds me of an old series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1] where he talked about how there's "doing your best" which is often more like just doing what's expected of you, and then there's really trying, like actually thinking hard about the best way to achieve something and carrying that out, and then even above that there are levels of effort that usually only come into play in extraordinary situations where you become willing to take desperate risks to achieve a goal.by Nition
- > A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.
Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?
Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?
It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.
I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.
by ang_cire - I'm a grindset man.
I never advertise my grind details.
by RobRivera - What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?by jimbokun
- The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion.
The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test from the doctor, etc.
The point is that the mat doesn't care what you think of yourself. I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test - or was it with something less honest?
Whatever your goals are, if you really, truly care about them, and you understand what your true objective is, you'll value the mat. The mat is not about what other people think, it is about undeniably simple and real feedback on your objective.
by eutropia - My side projects all take forever and meander indefinitely. Completing them means they're over. I do them to do them. I pretty much never make anything useful.by tootie