My policy is to not click on articles whose title are unclear. If I am intrigued I read the comments first and generally find out a comment (like yours) explaining this article was a waste of time

That's one of the biggest benefits I get out of using HN - pre-selection by taking a quick look at the comments before reading anything.

It has become my habit too. I never click the links directly, always comments section first.

Does anyone else always feel a weird HN specific fomo - "comments or content... I want both!"

I don't. I always go straight for comments, unless I already recognize by the title or domain name that the article is something I'd like to read. Then I skim comments to learn whether the article is worth reading. Even if it isn't, if I want to participate in a thread that's about the article directly (vs. an interesting tangent), I go back and at least skim the article, just to not be that person who comments on TFA without reading it.

Same here. More often than not, there's people in HN who have experience with a topic and can add perspective (and hopefully an impartial view).

More than ever, we need to tone down the clickbait, put it to perspective, and understand if it's something we should give attention to. HN does this in a quick manner

It works especially well with click-baity things where someone has helpfully quoted the key bit in the top comment and you can avoid dealing with popup-riddled sites to find it.

A good rule of thumb to live by indeed.

Running toward your fear isn't hand wavy advice. It is in essence what modern therapy around fear, panic, and anxiety teaches. It's good advice because it works. Running away only makes the problem worse. Be that losing $30M or not being able to walk out of your house.

Fear might be the most important emotion from an evolutionary perspective. Pretending you can simply run towards your fears and things will get better is awful, awful advice. I am not saying you should let your fears consume you or that they can never be conquered, but maybe an alcoholic's fear of being in a bar is a healthy thing (there are plenty of other examples but that was the first I thought of after 5 seconds).

The point about running toward your fear isn't that things will get better, it's that you'll know which of your fears were valid and which were illusory. Oftentimes the thing you're most afraid of is simply not knowing what's going to happen next.

In the context that Ben is writing this post (founding a startup), basically the worst thing that can happen to you is that your company goes bankrupt and you have to look for a job. It feels a lot scarier than that because your ego gets wrapped up in the startup and all sorts of negative events can be existential threats to the startup, but there are basically no physical threats to your person other than yourself. If a tiger comes running at you or someone points a gun at you, by all means, be afraid and run away, but if you're signing a $30M lease, be afraid and then face that fear and rationally analyze the risks.

The hard part of juggling startup risks feels more of the reverse of what Ben's remembering.

It's not that you need to spot a ball is about to drop and catch it. Founders are up at 2am and every e-staff & advice meeting thinking about them & then acting on them. However, running at all of them will give you a heart attack, burn out your team, and derail your mission.

Instead, you have to accept that a ton of balls are dropping, and somehow get good at guiding which & how. Now that's a chapter I'd like to read :)

As someone who started a company and had it fail years ago, I still consider that a defining moment in ruining my life today. The knock-on effects are not so simple unless you have the benefit of tens of millions of dollars of exceedingly wealthy investors' money to play with. Relationships destroyed, people's finances ruined, people that had nothing to do with my company losing their jobs. I was often told my biggest mistake as a founder was that I cared about people rather than money.

This post reeks of the privilege of a VC who sells self-help books.

https://xkcd.com/1827/

To put it kindly, I disagree.

Yeah, "run towards your fear" is similar to "life is a meritocracy". We only hear from the people who it was true for.

I've found a lot of success in that philosophy, but also some incredible damage. I ran towards my dear for a long time, and mostly it worked out. Even when it failed, it was a learning experience - I knew not to trust, but was no longer afraid of what I had previously feared. There's a huge difference between being afraid and being aware of falsehood/scam/danger.

Then I ran into something truly awful, and got drugged (and possibly raped, though I will never know). I've been afraid since then, and it's gonna take me a good long while to shake it off. It has immensely negatively affected my life, and it's made me question my judgement in a lot of situations - because I'm pretty sure the experience is only unique in that the stars aligned, not that the intent, will, and opportunity wasn't there in plenty of previous places, only didn't all line up before.

I don't have anything that I can take from it, except a certainty that Chestertons fence is real, and a lot of things that are looked down upon are looked down upon for good reason.

Chestertons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fen...

That last sentence has some real subtext to it. It took me a long time to appreciate Chesterton's fence.

Sorry you went through that experience.

The trouble with these reactive emotions is that they’re twice removed from reality. You see a tiger in the distance, your body pumps itself with adrenaline and you get ready for fight or flight. But the brain and the body don’t work on absolutes - only patterns. You see or hear something, you’re pumped full of adrenaline, and now you have to fight or flee. There’s no way to rationally examine the thing that triggered you and un-secrete or quickly flush the adrenaline.

That’s what we need in a modern non-jungle world - understand your impulses, but be enough in control or yourself to rationally examine your environmental triggers, counteract your adrenaline and logically decide your future actions.

Save the evolutionary adaptions for your camping trip.

Maybe the metaphor is a bad one, but he doesn't mean physically approach the fear, he means confronting the actual problem mentally instead of sticking your head in the sand and just hoping it works out.

I've never met an alcoholic that was scared of a bar

a bar is an enabling environment for an alcoholic in recovery. if an alcoholic doesn't want to relapse, it would make sense that they would fear bars.

Maybe but running towards "losing 30m" as a fear is a hell of a lot different than not-running-away from "I lost 30m" as a fact.

Re: the $30M, hindsight is 20/20

Be that as it may, given the choice, I would run away from losing $30M dollars regardless.

How many people actually crawl towards their fear? Let alone walk or run. It's crazy bananas tough.

Be sure to Lean In when you run towards your fear!

> Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense.

I'm always baffled that people who flop in the most spectacular way manage to convince others to buy books with advice from them.

I distinctly remember an article about a year or so ago touting a new managing partner(?) at a VC who ran his one and only startup into the ground. The logic was "He can help you not to do what he did"

I mean, isn't a whole big shtick of the Silicon Valley mindset that it tolerates, even celebrates, failure? And insists on learning from it. If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it. Fall down seven times, stand up eight, etc..

That's a great principle, but they key to realize its value is actually learning from it, and one of the most important lessons here is that in startups, spectacular successes are driven by luck. If that one lesson doesn't sink in, then all other "learning from failure" is akin to training your machine learning model on random noise.

> If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it.

Isn't that confusing what someone who fails should do ( do it again/do something else/try another path) with what those who see it should do ( not listen to whoever failed about how to succeed at doing what the failed person did )?

I think if you have ever actually run a business, his article hits home and has a pretty clear point.

It hits home even if you haven't. I'd say that I've felt the same tingle when writing code as well. At times when someone asks for a new feature or I'm working on a particular solution to the problem, I'd definitely get the same feeling that this particular abstractions isn't going to cut it, or that this part of the codebase is going to become unwieldy soon.

I'd argue a great engineer is someone who can anticipate exactly how a software product is going to evolve, where it will not scale properly in those cases and see if the code they are writing today is potentially going to be a problem then or not (and play a fine line game of not over-engineering vs. preparing for future circumstances).

Yeah, I don't get it.

Should have have addressed something with his head of sales, or should he have handled his expanding workforce differently?

Or something else entirely? Maybe the point is that ignoring evidence that the market is turning can be a disaster?

Yes, he should have addressed something with head of sales. He should have recognized the coming downturn and stopped expanding his staff. He should have done other things. His gut was telling him this.

But he didn't. He delegated the space problem so he didn't have to think about it anymore. And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story).

It's not about ignoring evidence that the market is turning. It's not that specific. It's that your spidey-sense, for lack of a better word - your gut, your sense of fear - is telling you that something is a problem. You can then either engage that problem, or avoid that problem. And if you avoid it, you will screw up.

But it's incredibly difficult to face our gut fear. So we don't do it.

> And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story).

That's the problem with companies that raise gobs of money -- zero discipline in spending.

It was a different era then. Things are a lot tighter now.

Loudcloud was a terrific concept in its day. It could have become what AWS has become. But it was growing because money was just getting poured into dotcom startups. When the money dried up, they were stuck with all this hardware and staff they had needed. It's a credit to Horowitz that he saved even the sliver he did.

I’m pretty sure the point was for him to tell us all that he is an “elite” CEO at the end of the article.

The article can be summarized in a single sentence: if you your spidey sense tells you something is wrong, figure out what it is and fix it.

It's a good point albeit expressed obscurely. It took me two reads to get it, which seems about average judging from some of the other comments here.

seems to me a16z has been taking quite a bit of reputational damage recently..