Benja
Joined 19 years ago
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24
Submissions
28
Member since
Mar 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 19 years ago
Comment · 19 years ago
That makes so much sense. I thought you might be pulling the e-mails out of the applications manually, and having coded and used a system for processing submissions (to an online fiction magazine), I was wondering how the hell you could stand to do that for 500+ applications. Glad to hear you're keeping yourself sane ;-)
Comment · 19 years ago
Hi Ryan,
The thing that struck me as really useful was the way you could use the slides to get an overview of and jump around inside a presentation. For me, that looks like a killer feature that could make me want to watch presentation videos through your viewer.
Except that the thumbnails of the slides are just too small to actually read. To make them useful for me for scanning the presentation without watching it all, I believe they would have to be big enough that the text is legible.
Comment · 19 years ago
Comment · 19 years ago
Yep, but then he explained it even further and made clear that the quote didn't quite make clear what he said :-)
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=21967
I've had the same reaction as boris when reading the original quote. But what he was talking about was the case where someone turns them down because of the valuation. And I can see Paul's point there, actually.
Comment · 19 years ago
They're really running on a tight schedule...
On the other hand, my understanding is that they've been hard at work since their original announcement, figuring out how their program is going to work legally and organizationally. Being willing to set themselves a tight schedule when necessary and being able to meet it might not be such a bad thing for a startup investor. :-)
Comment · 19 years ago
DabbleDB is a startup using Smalltalk.
Comment · 19 years ago
Thanks, Paul! Between your reply and pg's, I understand your point a lot better now, I think.
Comment · 19 years ago
I suppose I took PB's post more broadly than it was intended, then. If he was only talking about solving hard problems that don't benefit the user proportionally, I see that there's no contradiction [and have a clear answer to the question of when to follow which advice ;-)].
Thanks for the clarification.
Comment · 19 years ago
paul says that the way to build successful products is to avoid hard problems:
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/secret-to-making-things-easy-avoid-hard.html http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16409 http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17040
That made a lot of sense to me. But on the other hand, pg's "How to Make Wealth" makes a good argument for precisely the opposite view:
"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one."
http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Of course, no piece of general advice is right in all cases. But what should you look for, in a given situation, to know whether it's better to seek out the hard problems or better to avoid them?
Comment · 19 years ago
"The survey did not ask where the respondents obtained the content, ignoring the reality that many were possibly downloading television shows from Bittorrent or similar services."
To me, it sound like a good idea not to ask that, if you want honest responses.
Comment · 19 years ago
Thanks for the answers! :-)
I don't know a good way to reduce the impact in scenario (1) through legal means, but if you are worried about this, why not choose scenario (3)?