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With computers you tell them "here's exactly what's wrong with you." With humans you can actually rely on them to fill in the gaps and just state things a lot more diplomatically (not to mention, it's not about making people "wrong" anyway!). Something phrased very gently and ambiguously can get results, and is probably the only way to deal with people effectively in most circumstances. I appreciate the reminder!

No. Objecting to platitudes isn't trolling.

The statements most commonly described as "platitudes" are short proverbs and aphorisms which are intended to motivate or encourage another person, but which are in reality overly-simplistic or cliche; for example, "You will succeed if you try hard enough"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platitude

> You asked a question that was impossible to answer

Wrong again -- funny, because he answered it above, describing what he actually did for years before YC.

It's disappointing how much knee-jerk reactionism there is when people perceive something as raining on their fantasy parade. Critical investigation will help people succeed. As a result of my not accepting the original platitude, the poster supplied much more informative answers.

Actually that's how this whole debate got started -- I asked: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52613

> because nobody is doing deals in Boston

So in your opinion would YC be better off doing both batches in Silicon Valley? My impression is people would be better served living there and flying to Boston for Demo Day 2 than vice-versa.

> but he has a lot of good stuff to say about marketing, salesmanship, morale-building, and lots more

http://valleywag.com/tech/silicon-valley-tool/guy-kawasaki-2...

http://www.nowpublic.com/don_t_be_a_dude_yamaha_a_gripping_s...

http://techdumpster.com/2007/08/03/toolbox-profile-1-guy-kaw...

> Guy's a great motivator.

In a "scared straight" kind of way, sure.

My impression is that the best way to meet investors is to live in Silicon Valley. That sounds like it's leaving out a lot of steps...

You need industry contacts first. Suggestions?

> Take over the world. (Microsoft)

"Left as an exercise for the reader."

You haven't explained how your start-up succeeded without YC.

> seen Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start

I hope you're kidding about that.

> There's a difference between "Getting into YC would help my business" and "I need to get into YC to start my business".

Astounding! Who else have you told this to?

"You can do it too!" works better when they aren't telling you to pursue a different strategy than they did with no specifics.

    *cough* Virtualmin -- YC Winter 2007 *cough*

http://ycombinator.com/w2008.html

http://lwn.net/Articles/66666/

Are all those sixes a coincidence?

And the finale, "666" + "69" = CrAzY delicious!

http://lwn.net/Articles/66669/

It doesn't update in real time.

To go back to your Starcraft example, that is why Starcraft is a game, and the screenshots on the box are not.

> what value is there in making that distinction?

To most people it's a novel way of thinking about it.

That's too bad. I personally found the second half quite interesting.

> even more precious to hear him refer to the telephone as the first virtual reality technology. What the hell is that supposed to mean?!

Being able to have a conversation with someone miles away. That is revolutionary. They are "virtually" there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

"Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.

The inventor attributes his success in marketing technology products to being able to predict the arrival date of competitively priced components and match it to rollout of his designs, for example, the hand-held book reader built into a digital camera.[1]

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.

He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of the past two centuries.[3]"

-- Arthur C. Clarke

If you're looking at academic papers, no wonder you don't believe it.

http://groups.google.com/group/Hutter-Prize/browse_thread/th...

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html

> Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.

Oh no.

Guess which one is more useful.

I hope my competitors are all very reasonable people.

"Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men." -- George Bernard Shaw

    * Binary search trees
    * AVL trees
    * Red-black trees

Yoda: "That is why you fail."

See http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38

Cf. heavier-than-air flying machines, walking on the Moon, the Internet, sub-4-minute-mile, summiting Everest, Deep Blue, the integrated circuit, Cold Fusion [1]

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

Chinpokomon.

NLP? Great, maybe it can make me get over my Luposlipophobia.

Hopefully things have improved since then.

Something about a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.