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In the world of high angle rope rescue, we have a concept called the "whistle test". The idea is that if someone were to randomly blow a whistle at _any_ point,

• japhyr 11y ago
  Where do you do rescue work? I do mountain rescue in southeast AK. I wouldn't work with a team that didn't use the whistle test.
  • JshWright 11y ago
    Upstate New York
  • eigenvector 11y ago
    In the world of industrial rope-access, it'd be illegal in most jurisdictions to use any rope system that wasn't 100% safe to fall in to at any given time.
• nostrademons 11y ago
  I think that relatively few startups would get started if they all had to be 'default alive' - founding a startup would be limited to folks who were already independently wealthy. The point of the article, I think, is that if you're 'default dead', you should know that you're default dead, and your attention should be focused on getting to a state where you're 'default alive'.
  • JshWright 11y ago
    Absolutely. My point in making the analogy is that 'default alive' is _very_ expensive, and a lot of work. It's probably not worth it in an early stage startup. The stakes just aren't that high.
    • DerKobe 11y ago
      I think it heavily depends on your product. If you have something that can be used by a single person (or small group) without a million others to use it, too, than you're IMHO default alive (Slack, Trello, ...). I think as a rule of thumb if you have to first get traction and then be able to monetize than you're default dead. Instagram's social component was default dead but the feature where you can alter your photos was default alive and that pulled them through.
  • powera 11y ago
    On the other hand, Facebook and Google were both founded as "default alive" - the startup part didn't happen until the founders were certain they had something so good they should drop out of school to do it.
    • suneilp 11y ago
      They also didn't have much in the way of worthy competition. That really helped them out a lot. It's different now. So much saturation in many areas things have moved from the era of bold ideas to the era of carving out niches.
      • ollifi 11y ago
        Didn't google enter search market when it was considered full and pretty boring already?
        • ghufran_syed 11y ago
          From Bessemer's anti-portfolio: Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
      • ghufran_syed 11y ago
        Facebook (launch Feb 2004) was founded after Myspace (launch Aug 2003), which was founded after Friendster (2002). So there was certainly competition. Was it 'worthy competition'? Hard to say without hindsight bias (only the winners 10 years later were 'worthy'), but I doubt Mark Zuckerberg or the Google founders felt there was no worthy competition. It seems fairly clear to me that Facebook (and Google) succeeded because they made better decisions (on average) at a gazillion small decision points, not because they had some great idea that no-one else had thought of.
  • ryandrake 11y ago
    > founding a startup would be limited to folks who were already independently wealthy Isn't that already mostly true (with a few outlier counter-examples)?
    • nostrademons 11y ago
      What do you count as independently wealthy? Middle class (1-3 years savings, good education, professional job prospects) to successful startup founder is not uncommon enough to call an outlier - I personally know at least half a dozen people with that background and story. It's not exactly easy, but people can do it. It is much harder for working-class folks (no savings, no college degree, no unique skills) to make the jump.
      • ryandrake 11y ago
        Pretty much by definition, yea. If you can actually afford to leave your job (in other words are independent of it) for 1-3 years and go off and start something that might not even make money, you're pretty wealthy.
• jrometty 11y ago
  What's the most common reason to fail a whistle test? If a real life "whistle test" situation were to occur and everyone let go without being 100% secure, what would happen? how many people would fall? This idea is really interesting to me, but I'm not sure why.
  • JshWright 11y ago
    The general idea is that whatever mechanism is allowing the ropes to move is something that 'fails closed'. The simplest mechanism is to wrap two prusiks[1] around the rope that is moving. Those prusiks are then securely attached to an anchor or some sort. Left alone, the prusiks will 'grab' the rope and prevent it from moving. Someone has to be actively holding them in position to allow the rope to move (otherwise they'll slide with the rope and pull taught). In other cases, it's a question of how you set up things like descenders[2]. The same basic principle applies though. You need to be actively holding it open in order for the rope to move through it. There are a few exceptions to this (things like figure-8 descenders[3]), but in those cases, they are being used by a single operator to control their own descent. The most common situations where this goes wrong are during transitions. The system used to lower someone over the edge is different from the system used to haul them back up. This exercise is fairly simple, but it requires a great deal of attention to detail, and the steps have to be done in the proper order to ensure there are no 'gaps'. The number of people who would fall would depend completely on the operation. Generally speaking you have a single medic over the edge, who may have the victim clipped in to them if they're on the way back up. In some cases, you may have one or more additional rescuers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prusik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prusik [2] http://www.petzl.com/en/Professional/Descenders/RIG http://www.petzl.com/en/Professional/Descenders/RIG [3] http://www.cmcrescue.com/equipment/rescue-8/ http://www.cmcrescue.com/equipment/rescue-8/
    • jrometty 11y ago
      Thank you! This is reallyl cool. :) The links are amazing. I just spent a bit of time looking through most items and figuring out how they are used. I guess I like this kind of stuff.
• sharkweek 11y ago
  In a much less serious vein, I had a boss who used to joke about throwing our laptops on the ground at work, saying "if you're not up and running on another machine in 10 minutes, you're doing it wrong"
  • pmiller2 11y ago
    I can do that at work, because all my code is on an EC2 instance, and I use emacs on the remote box as my editor. I've accidentally logged out of my X session and been back up and running in less than a minute before.
    • teraflop 11y ago
      Then just replace "throw laptop on ground" with "delete EC2 instance".
      • pmiller2 11y ago
        That would take longer than 10 minutes but definitely under an hour.
        • Estragon 11y ago
          How often is this put to the test? How do you automatically record configuration changes like the occasional "apt-get" to bring in something you're missing?
          • pmiller2 11y ago
            We use chef to record all our config. Our chef configuration is pretty stable these days, but it gets tested every time we build a new dev box, which happens at least as often as we hire new engineers. I could completely rebuild my dev box at any minute and the only thing I'd lose would be unpushed changes I was working on at that minute.
      • gesman 11y ago
• clamprecht 11y ago
  Here's an interesting thought in response: (Keep in mind I know jack about rope rescue, so I'm making assumption as to what it is) Imagine you had 100 people do a "rope rescue race". Half of them used all the safety mechanisms (they would pass the "whistle test"). The other half didn't use any safety/redundancy (they would fail the "whistle test"), but instead relied on their skill. In the end, it's likely that a few of the high-risk ones would die. But it's also likely that many of the high-risk ones would survive, and also that they would be the winners of the race. The safer, lower risk ones would eventually get there, but far behind the high risk ones. Startups are the high-risk ones.
  • paulsutter 11y ago
    You raise a good point. It's not a matter of caution and being double careful. The point of the essay is the drive towards self sufficiency, and being realistic about how investor expectations change in successive rounds. Perhaps: don't think there's a rope backing you up if it isn't there.
    • justinator 11y ago
      > Perhaps: don't think there's a rope backing you up if it isn't there. If you use the metaphor of rock climbing, you'd actually rehearse your route with ropes/safety system, before you would ever try the route without. When the stakes are so high that it's you're life you're gambling with, is it really worth it for most to go so blind out there? It's either that, or you go without a rope, when the difficulty is far below your limit (in other words, you have amassed a lot of experience)
  • ryanwaggoner 11y ago
    This is a good analogy in one sense, but I think the probabilities in your example are reversed from the startup case: for high-risk startups, only a few survive, but they're the winners. And of course, that's what makes them better on average for investors (who spread risk across their portfolio) than for founders, who have all their eggs in one basket. As pg says here, as a founder, you want to survive.
  • 11y ago
• mhartl 11y ago
  PSA: Rather than using underscores, _like this_, at HN you can get emphasized text using asterisks, like this. (I see _emphasis_ almost every day on HN, so IMHO it should support both. But until it does, asterisks are definitely the way to go.)
  • pbreit 11y ago
    Everywhere else I write I use * except here because I want *, not italics.
    • Mtinie 11y ago
      \Escaping should work (but doesn't)\ Edit: That test failed, nothing to see here...
  • hollerith 11y ago
    >so IMHO it should support both some of us think it should support neither (because _emphasis_ is only slightly less legible than emphasis whereas erroneous use of asterisks is very much less legible than uses of asterisks would be if asterisks were not interpreted -- and because erroneous use of asterisks is fairly common). But _if_ the present situation continues in which asterisks (or asterisks and underscores) are interpreted, at least the interface should provide a link next to the "ago", "parent", and "flag" links that show the raw, uninterpreted comment the way the user entered it.