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Ask HN: What's the best aha moment you've had?

• sharemywin 10y ago
  starting a business is all about building a sales funnel.
  • napsterbr 10y ago
    Business newbie here. How relevant is that to B2C? If my saas-like product is simple and relatively cheap, is it worth spending so much effort into sales instead of, say, marketing? Got any interesting resources? I can't get my head around how sales could work efficiently with B2Cs in general.
    • hnhg 10y ago
      Marketing is the top of the funnel. He's not talking about a hard sales function but actually the process from attracting someone to closing the sale (e.g. clicking 'buy').
    • bjelkeman-again 10y ago
      Marketing leads to sales. If your marketing doesn't convert viewers of your marketing effort to buyers then you have nothing. For consumer products, look at how competitors do it. What looks like it is successful? Try it. Put proper metrics and A/B testing on everything you try.
  • sharemywin 10y ago
    adwords is interesting because you can create a landing page and test it. regardless of whether it's cost effective it allows you to test your top benefit, etc. even if your targeting SEO your going after the same keywords. facebook is a way to test things as well.
• hourislate 10y ago
  How much luck and who you know plays in determining the success of a business.
  • bjelkeman-again 10y ago
    I certianly have been lucky. And our team knows a lot of people, it helps enormously. But I have also realised without hard work and a willingness to learn, the luck and know-who, would have been completely wasted.
    • tonetheman 10y ago
      I have been thinking about this exact thing a lot lately. Luck + [hard work|skills|knowledge] You could be lucky and then not know what you are doing and fail. You can know a ton and just not be in the right place. It is that magic elusive combo. I tell my kids you can only control one side of that equation. Learn as much as you can.
    • hourislate 10y ago
      Of course you need a decent product and some hard work to go with it. I'm not sure if I remember correctly but it was either Peter Thiel or Malcolm Gladwell that mentioned (in one of their books)how much luck and knowing the right people can make all the difference in the world. It makes sense because I know firsthand that the smartest folks are not necessarily the most savvy business people and a great product with good customer service may not be enough. Getting your foot in the door or knowing someone who can open a door can be a huge deal.
• hijinks 10y ago
  Figuring out it's never worth it to work more then 40 hours a week at a job where I'm making someone else money.
• sigi45 10y ago
  When i was something between 11 and 14: I was going to an eletronic store with my father to buy a cd player for me (i was looking forward to it) and my sisters where watching tv while they were already over there time budget. I didn't want that (not sure what english word would fit here) and pulled out the cable and the plug broke. My father was annoyed/angry and i was crying because we nearly didn't drive to that electronic store. I realized two things: 1. enviousness/distrust/jealousy is stupid 2. me being angry/crying about a situation i can't change doesn't change that situation I got less emotional/more rational after this event. I also think that this was one key point to become a nihilist.
• tmaly 10y ago
  around 2012 when I finally decided to start a side project to try to contribute something to the world.
• rezashirazian 10y ago
  The satisfaction of proving someone wrong is not worth the effort.
  • godDLL 10y ago
    Unless you're doing it professionally.
    • rezashirazian 10y ago
      Still, perhaps why I was never attracted to Law.
• PJDK 10y ago
  When writing SQL you are describing the result you want, not the way to achieve it. It helped me understand functional programming too.
• sean_patel 10y ago
  Few years ago, I started getting a package almost everyday from my recently deceased Uncle's 82 year old wife. It was anything from small things like old photos and key chains, to larger items like a traditional India "Thali" meal plate made of silver, an Ivory (from a real elephant :( and more. Turns out she was clearing out the late Uncle's garage and stuff all around the house, and returning gifts from my family back to us, and doing the same with others (friends and relatives who had sent my uncle stuff). Mind you, he wasn't a hoarder. It was just things people gave him over the (many) years and he kept them because of the emotional element (friend, family) attached to such things. Old and frail herself, I remember my Aunty spent a good few months -- almost a year -- shedding the baggage. The postage alone must've cost her a few 1000 $s. Not to mention packing, taking stuff to Good Will etc. It reminded me of the quote from Fight Club - "The things that you own end up owning you.". On that day, a young 16 year old me decided to never store or keep anything with me and become a minimalist, even if it was an "emotional" thing. Because I don't want me or my surviving family to have to go through something like this ever! I also don't buy any gifts for anyone, and instead give cash whenever I am obligated to give a present or gift (think weddings, birthdays etc)
  • PeterWhittaker 10y ago
    I understand, I really do, but consider that in the sadness and duty of clearing things out, she held memories in her hands. Some would have been treasured. She would have smiled more than once. That she spent so long doing this also suggests it may have been cathartic for her. That said, I keep very, very little myself, but for different reasons (I simply don't need anywhere near the stuff I have and tend to clean ruthlessly every now and again). I will also suggest that gifts given years ago have far less value now.
• DarkTree 10y ago
  love is about appreciation, not possession.
  • wsinks 10y ago
    This one hits home right now.
• lomnakkus 10y ago
  Amiga 500 at age 14ish. Simple as that :). Done & done.
• brey 10y ago
  There is only one currency: time. You can trade this for everything else - the exchange rate is up to you.
  • toomuchtodo 10y ago
    Welp, existential crisis for the rest of the day now.
  • godDLL 10y ago
    I'd add to that that everything, all the things you can consider are passing. The amount and specific shapes of that passing are where your mind dwells and wonders away unless you pull it back.
  • partisan 10y ago
    This is one of my "aha" moments as well. I was working on a development project for free. I hated it even though I had interest in the project itself. I didn't realize until a long time after that I felt as though my work had no value. I communicated this and suddenly I was making $75/hr. My takeaway was: Everyone's time is worth something.
• ceterum_censeo 10y ago
  In E&M class, seeing Maxwell's equations be manipulated into the wave equations that predict a propagating EM wave.
• qxt 10y ago
  Recently, I realized that instead of putting the pressure to launch a website specifically, I could launch products within the website instead. This got me to start writing, sharing, and getting feedback immediately, and has made me feel much more comfortable that I'm building something people will actually use.
• nojvek 10y ago
  Not the biggest aha. But when I figured out how VLQ encoding works in a source map, I did a hoora!
• tluyben2 10y ago
  Most things people tell you that are important are not (at all) important. Realizing that removed all stress and since then everything has become easier business wise as well.
• bjelkeman-again 10y ago
  At age 14, I realised if I have to be in school, I could just as well listen to what was said. This resulted in learning a bunch of useful stuff.
  • raihansaputra 10y ago
    Thank you for saying this. Currently studying CS and planning to study further because in a way I have to. I should get off HN.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• panarky 10y ago
  When I was 13 years old I figured out that people of other faiths believe in their Gods just as fervently as my devout and conservative family believed in theirs. Since truth isn't determined by where you happen to be born, it seemed unlikely that my family's God was the one true God while all the others were false. That's the "aha" moment that changed the course of my life. Well, that and learning Bayes' theorem.
  • brey 10y ago
    "Do you believe in God?" "I believe in one fewer than you"
• namuol 10y ago
  In an astronomy class, our professor gave us the formula for Escape Velocity. It's typically used to calculate how fast a rocket must go to get out of the gravitational pull of the planet. It's a simple formula that takes into account the mass of both objects, and their distance. As you make the mass of the larger object greater and greater, it becomes clear that eventually the escape velocity can be greater than the speed of light. That's all a black hole is: A gravity well strong enough that even light itself cannot escape. I knew this already to some extent, but the simplicity of the math really stunned me.
  • brey 10y ago
    this one always bugged me a little a rocket takes off. let's say it's going upwards at 1 m/s at some short time after takeoff. why can't it then reduce (not to zero) acceleration such that it stays going upwards at 1 m/s all the way out of the gravity well? don't aim for escape velocity, keep the velocity at exactly 1 m/s until you're out. yes, I know - Tsiolkovsky, reaction mass, delta-v etc etc clearly that's wildly impractical but MUST the rocket achieve its 'escape velocity' in order to escape? why can't we have a casual stroll out of the gravity well? escape velocity applies for an unpowered vehicle, right? throw a rock, it's gotta be going at least at the escape velocity or it won't escape. but throw a rock that's propelling upwards itself all the way out ... if I want to climb stairs, I propel myself gradually on every step, I don't require that I launch myself off step 1 with the speed to get me to the top. what am I missing here?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • fessick 10y ago
      "a rocket takes off. let's say it's going upwards at 1 m/s at some short time after takeoff. why can't it then reduce (not to zero) acceleration such that it stays going upwards at 1 m/s all the way out of the gravity well? don't aim for escape velocity, keep the velocity at exactly 1 m/s until you're out." <-- that will totally work, but isn't escape velocity. Escape velocity is essentially the velocity an object must start out with to move towards an asymptotically infinite distance from the gravity well without additional thrust. That last bit is what makes it escape velocity. The gravity well will slow the object to near zero velocity but the object's distance will eventually overcome the gravity before it reaches zero or negative velocity. Your example of moving at a constant speed of 1 m/s is only achievable with constant thrust to cancel gravity, thereby stopping the object from slowing during its ascent. If the object has achieved its escape velocity, no additional thrust is needed. One is not better than the other, it's just a matter of what is more practical in terms of fuel or travel time.
• phycodurus 10y ago
  It was when I learned that the genetic code actually resides in the set of tRNA-synthatase enzymes that couple the appropriate amino acid to appropriate tRNA.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• markatkinson 10y ago
  Finally getting the combo of recursion and pattern matching in Elixir, and other functional languages I supoose. Almost fell off my chair.
  • majewsky 10y ago
    Reminds me of succeeding for the first time to implement "reverse :: [a] -> [a]" in Haskell using tail recursion. <3
• c64dude 10y ago
  When I was in high school and realized for the first time that the 6502 assembler mnemonic LDA was the same as the number 169, thus bridging assembler source code with its machine code representation.
• mathiasrw 10y ago
  One day at age 4 I, for some reason, was cranky. I went with my dad to a kiosk close to our home where this big smily overweight owner always gave a little something as a snack when I came. This time I got nothing and I asked my dad why after we came out. He said "I dont know, but you seamed really cranky." and I realised that my attitude affects the attitude of others.
• andrey_utkin 10y ago
  Being ~5 years old, after tearing down a roly-poly toy to see how it works.
• ulmeyda 10y ago
  One of my childhood memories was finding a piece of yellow plastic broken off of some toy that had lots of colorful little symbols and ornaments printed on it. It lay buried in grass for a few years at that point and it went almost white, bleached by the sun. I stood a while, pondered and remembered the toy as I had remembered it further in the past. Fast forward to my late 20s. I started, not too systematically, learning quantum mechanics because I always felt that, although regarded as an intimidating topic, it is probably a thing that is, given a bit of time, not too complicated to understand and involves just as much forgetting established ideas as it involves understanding new ones. And THAT I have on lock down, you hand me ideas no matter how complicated and I will forget the shit out of them so hard it's gonna make your head spin, tremendous. So when learning about entropy and information conservation it struck me: Every time a photon tickled my child self and told me about the way atoms of my toy were arranged, black ones here, yellow ones there, my god even some god damned green ones, that information was not handed to me for free. It was taken from my toy and not only when I saw it but for as long as it lay there enjoying the sun, it sent its information out to everyone passing by, even back into the sky, while putting on its new dress which was designed with a die and tailored by nuclear fusion. Some of it will have waved pluto good bye before the real journey began. Year in, year out. And, finally, it showed. Patterns grew less strong. Distinctions between different regions of the plastic died off. And the information from all the times I saw my toy was, as exclusively as anything, mine. Noone else ever laid hands on these particular bits. They are with me, still, because they tipped a few neurons of mine into a state stable enough to last a few decades. They are slowly leaking, for instance into your brain right now, but I am sure I will not run out until I turn senile. TL;DR quantum mechanics made me realise that all my toys were doomed but that I managed to secure some of their essence
• carsongross 10y ago
  Understanding Godel, and that God set it up this way. I laughed hysterically.
  • ulmeyda 10y ago
    I was never quite able to decide if I should laugh or cry.
    • carsongross 10y ago
      Both, clearly. But mostly laugh.
  • swah 10y ago
    Something along these lines? http://cosmicfingerprints.com/incompleteness/ http://cosmicfingerprints.com/incompleteness/
    • carsongross 10y ago
      yep
  • greatest-ape 10y ago
    On the same note, reading Wittgenstein and realizing there is not a single system of logic underpinning reality, but a hodgepodge of different systems that may or may not have to do with each other.
    • carsongross 10y ago
      Note that Wittgenstein thought that you could not use language to get between language and the world, and never accepted Godel's results. It's possible he never understood them, perhaps due to the cognitive dissonance. I enjoy Wittgenstein, but I think Godel is a far more important figure.
• iamcasen 10y ago
  When I lived in Sweden, I noticed a lot of the 2nd generation immigrants from the middle east behaved very similarly to black and latino people I knew from back home in the US. Very different styles, petty crime, boisterous behavior that stood out in a crowd, etc. I wondered why it was so similar, even though all the cultures involved were completely different. The other thing that puzzled me was that Sweden has a nearly infinitely superior social safety net to the US. So why, despite free education, job training, and plenty of resources to get a foothold, did these people lash out like many minorities in the US? My aha moment was that it just had to do with being a minority culture. That's all it is. When a group's culture norms and values are not accepted/tolerated by the majority, the minority group has a hard time being a part of society. Even in a peaceful, tolerant place like Sweden. It helped me open my own eyes as a white man, and now I can see this sort of thing playing out all around me. It's also universal, no matter when you go to in the world. There is one major and rather sad exception though: when a white person or group is the minority in a place, it is not likely they will experience the same effects. Whiteness, and white culture seems to be universally desired (at least from my limited experience).
• relics443 10y ago
  I always get my best "aha"s when I've found the source of an OOM in Java.
• rayalez 10y ago
  Money is a medium for trading value. Everything in business comes down to creating value, and then exchanging it for money. If you set up a system that generates more value than it costs, you have a business. The difference between how much it makes vs how much it costs is your profit.
• vatotemking 10y ago
  That money != wealth. Even if you give everyone 1 million dollars, NOT everyone will become rich (wealthy) because eventually this money would flow from your hands to the hands of someone that creates value. And you'd end up with the same poor/rich social strata, but now with high inflation. Wealth is value creation. Money is just a medium.
• akytt 10y ago
  Must be system dynamics for me. When I first learned of the math and the idea of modelling the world like that, it explained _a lot_.
• sunstone 10y ago
  At about age 20 I realized that the epicureans were right. Sorting the important from the less important became much easier.