elohimus

My favorite bit of advice ever (poorly paraphrasing Nassim Nicholas Taleb): If you want to be rich or famous - meaning you want to succeed in a field with the potential for exponential growth but a low probability of a large payoff - your best strategy is to maximize your exposure to opportunities with scale potential.

That means: secure a basic level of subsistence that allows you to keep trying, then focus on repeated attempts at activities that can scale exponentially. Think of writing a book, building a SaaS product, or recording a song: things you can sell repeatedly at little or no additional cost, rather than selling your time or labor.

This is equally good advice for an aspiring Punjabi musician in the slums of Lahore and a hopeful software founder at Stanford.

I really like this piece - but it points to a wider truth. All advice is contextual.

- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.

- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?

- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...

Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.

This is the core of it. So much of business, engineering and product design is about navigating a network graph of people to discover requirements, coordinate expertise and make things happen in the real world.

I know many engineers would prefer to just focus on engineering, but creating something meaningful for people means working with and through people. Even the most hands-off, self-service SaaS products depend on this.

Take an extreme case like Minecraft, where a single person behind a computer created a billion-dollar company. I'd argue that even here a significant part of that success came from Notch's very active involvement in the community.

Thank you :-)

I'm a bit overwhelmed by Google's selection of AI environments (Antigravity, AI Studio, Gemini Platform etc.). If I just want the equivalent of OpenAI Codex, which one do I use?

Smart Home devices feel somewhat antithetical to Apple's Philosophy. Aren't they all about a smoothly integrating, tightly controlled ecosystem? Offering something that connects a potentially large amount of third party devices, protocols and homecooked solutions feels odd for apple.

There's more of the stuff that's well known and understood. Any software with an ecosystem of integrations and connectors added a lot of connectors lately. CRMs, CMS and similar extended their functionality.

What we've seen very little of is fundamentally new ideas, usage paradigms, user experiences or similar.

This gets to the very heart of the tension between what's good for social media companies and what's good for society. Western society would be much better off with less Russian bot traffic. Less misinformation, less promotion of destabilizing far-right or far-left viewpoints, less fundamental opposition. Meanwhile, social media thrives on divisiveness, controversy, and engagement bait.

The involuntary shutdown of the Yandex data centers would be a good moment to reflect on how much of the conversation is real and protected by free speech, and how much is driven by malign foreign actors. I imagine it would be technically easy enough to create filters that specifically block traffic from Russian data centers. Whether we'll want to or not will be a litmus test of where we stand on communication policy going forward.

A lot of law is combing through large bodies of rule sets and reference cases to find inputs or parallels relevant for a case. Are you sure you'd rather have Lionel Hutz, Esq. with his limited comprehension do that at half a page per minute?

I feel it's worth distinguishing between the Hacker News Audience that is highly tech-educated and security-conscious and the general public that just wants to use the web and seems more than happy to give all their data to Meta, Google & Co.

If you ask my 70-year-old mom to decide whether she'd like to allow the WebGL API, she'll go bonkers. If anything, the constant cookie banners have just trained her to consent to stuff out of muscle memory. You could probably design a "Are you ok to sign over the deed to your house" question in the rough shape of a cookie banner and get 90%+ agreement.