7 ms·

Do Things That Don’t Scale (2013)

209 points by js7745 9y ago

js7745 9y ago
Earlier today I posted my medium article on HN that is this exact article with a bunch of sections taken out. It was starting to rise but was then flagged. I apologize to the HN community for driving traffic for my benefit using other people's work. I honestly was just amazed with how valuable this post to me that I wanted to share it with as many entrepreneurs as possible and used my growing medium account to do that. However the people that flagged me are right that even though that was the correct format to share his essay on medium, it was not the right format for HN, I could have just linked to the original post. I have done that now because I still believe that this article is so good and I want as many people to read it as possible. All the best, Jeremy
- sabalaba 9y ago
  Nearly every one of your Medium posts could be interpreted as a copyright violation. Copy pasting text and calling it a "curation" doesn't give you the right to publish others' works without their permission.
  - wunderlust 9y ago
    With proper citation, there's no violation, right?
    - lmkg 9y ago
      Proper citation means that you're not violating academic integrity. That has very little to do with copyright.
    - jjawssd 9y ago
      If I put a watermark in a movie which properly cites the original does that allow me to redistribute the derivative work? Same applies here.
      - msla 9y ago
        A lot of people seem to think it does: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ > How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. [snip] > On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID. The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
        mncharity 9y ago
        > people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
    - cyphar 9y ago
      Acadmic citation guidelines have little to do with copyright (for example, my university requires me to cite public domain works -- despite there being no copyright on said works). Most citations or reasonable quotations fall under fair use, but reproducing an entire work (and/or modifying it) fall under copyright infringement.
    - smacktoward 9y ago
      No. One of the tenets of the "fair use" standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substantiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substan...) is that the more of a work you reproduce within your own, the less likely it is that your reproduction is actually fair use. This is true whether or not you cite the author of the work you're reproducing. The idea is to give people who just want to quote a line or two leeway to do so, while punishing those who would take someone else's work en masse and publish it under their own name.
      - wolfgke 9y ago
        "Fair use" is a very US-American concept. For example German Urheberrechtsgesetz > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ knows no concept of fair use - you can easily get sued if you use even a little snippet of a copyrighted work (and often are). Only in some very specifically defined cases short quotes are allowed: > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html
        nayuki 9y ago
        "Fair dealing" is the Canadian equivalent of "fair use", following much of the same principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyright_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyr...
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - deleted 9y ago
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  - js7745 9y ago
    You may be right here, going forwards I am going to provide more commentary on my posts. But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this. So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.
    - toss1 9y ago
      That's exactly the same BS argument as "just give me your product for free and you'll get tons of publicity". Only works if the person proposing it is actually world-famous. Otherwise, it's just scamming. (Not even addressing the copyright infringement issues here.) You are freeloading on PG's insight and fame, trying to increase yours at his expense. Even if the expense is relatively trivial, it's no less true. If it were actually OK, you would have already asked PG if it was ok for you to hack up his articles and re-publish them under your name. Come to think of it, why don't you ask him directly, and see if he thinks it's ok, or what conditions he'd put on it? Let us know how that conversation goes.
    - hashkb 9y ago
      It's not about your opinion. Of course you think what you're doing is ok, everyone does. Fortunately we have a general consensus (and laws) that say what you did was wrong. Own it.
    - singhrac 9y ago
      To address your point ("So what's really the harm here"), there's a lot of reasons copyright law exists, including: 1. By using his work without permission, you risk misrepresenting his message. For example, you might accidentally remove a key passage or quote or citation. After all, you say "Below are (in our opinion) the essential excerpts" - I have a feeling he wouldn't agree. 2. He almost certainly prefers to have his work consolidated in a single place (he has a distinctive style), for any number of reasons (branding, analytics, ability to remove and/or edit, etc.) 3. At the end of the day, it's his property. I think it's easy to think "these laws don't really make sense here, because of [foo] reason", but it's nonsensical to do so without asking for pg's permission. You risk looking like you knew that he wouldn't be ok with it. If you really intended to help him, just ask.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  I don't know. Seems like you are following his advice by building something that does not scale.
  - tnr23 9y ago
    hahahaha, that one made my day
- DenisM 9y ago
  The internet is choke-full of content that was "recycled" and stripped of attribution. I wouldn't call it the cancer of the web, but perhaps algae overgrowth would be a fitting metaphor. You would need to add something original and of value to have it accepted here. Also, your apology is very tone-deaf. I imagine it pisses people off way more than the copyright issue.
miguelrochefort 9y ago
(2013)
forkLding 9y ago
Any stories of fellow HNers with their startups doing this?
- nextstar 9y ago
  When I worked on an online platform for people to learn hands-on technology with experts in person such as woodworking or glassblowing, we went from door to door in Brooklyn, asking for their trust to give us a try.
- rglover 9y ago
  We do :) As customers sign up we ask if they want stickers and then send out a handwritten letter alongside a set (example: https://www.instagram.com/p/BWA5q95jADc/?taken-by=cleverbeagle https://www.instagram.com/p/BWA5q95jADc/?taken-by=cleverbeag...).
- brianwawok 9y ago
  For our first 100 customers we basically did all the setup work for them. Basically did a screenshare, clicked for them, told them what to do. Would sometimes leave the call, and spend 1-8 hours clicking for the customer. Learned how customers wanted the product to work, and gained initial customers. Lost money on the setup but who cares. Now setups are a 30 minute phone call where we teach customers how to click themselves.
  - Scarbutt 9y ago
    Curious, what software did you use for screen sharing? were customers ok with this? Was your app so complex that you couldn't guide them through the phone or it was a deficiency in the UX/UI of the app?
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      > Curious, what software did you use for screen sharing Started off with Join.me. I then threw out my windows PC and installed Ubuntu, so it stopped working. I did appear.in a few times, but the quality stunk. Mostly moved to my setup team, that mostly still uses join.me. > were customers ok with this Oh they loved it. The competition is "Here is a youtube video and some docs, have at it". We actually took the time to get to know our customer and dive in, help them navigate the setup etc. > Was your app so complex that you couldn't guide them through the phone or it was a deficiency in the UX/UI of the app? Both! Necessary complexity is high, but so is accidental. Working on reducing accidental a little every day. Not willing to kill off too many features in the name of simplicity, but willing to at least make the common path a lot easier to use.
Prizewinner 9y ago
Spent a month in university libraries handing out candy and asking groups of students to try out our sharing platform. We then would take what we learned that day and code changes/fixes before we left or when we got home so we could go out again in the morning.
- seizethecheese 9y ago
  And, how'd it go?
  - pawadu 9y ago
    They are now a small company with a lot of diabetic users.
deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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evincarofautumn 9y ago
I’ve been working on a programming language for a while, and this is one of the key bits of advice I’ve had in the back of my mind during that time. People have come along and contributed occasionally, but for the most part, I’m doing everything: writing the compiler, standard library, documentation, editor integration, blog posts, evangelism of the programming paradigm, and so on. Despite the fact that I don’t scale, I’ll happily sit down with someone who’s trying out the language, help them get up to speed, and fix all the bugs and usability issues they report. It’s that kind of connection to people that not only drives interest in the project, but drives me to stay motivated. I can’t say I fully understand my own success…or even whether it’s success. I’m not selling anything, just making the language I want to use. Maybe a few hundred lines of code have been written in the language by someone other than me. I’ve accumulated >450 stars on GitHub for a product that doesn’t even do anything yet. It’s certainly surreal, but it’s been pleasant. :)
- markholmes 9y ago
  What's the language called?
  - gordon_freeman 9y ago
    This is from his HN profile: I’m writing a stack-based functional programming language called Kitten: https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten
    - evincarofautumn 9y ago
      Thanks—only reason I didn’t mention it was that I didn’t feel the need to advertise. I mainly wanted to give my thoughts on how this article’s advice has been a positive thing for the project—seeking out users and taking measures to help them and make them happy directly.
statictype 9y ago
This is Paul Graham's best piece. Really nails down what it takes to make a business successful.

209 points by js7745 9y ago

Earlier today I posted my medium article on HN that is this exact article with a bunch of sections taken out. It was starting to rise but was then flagged. I apologize to the HN community for driving traffic for my benefit using other people's work. I honestly was just amazed with how valuable this post to me that I wanted to share it with as many entrepreneurs as possible and used my growing medium account to do that. However the people that flagged me are right that even though that was the correct format to share his essay on medium, it was not the right format for HN, I could have just linked to the original post. I have done that now because I still believe that this article is so good and I want as many people to read it as possible. All the best, Jeremy

sabalaba 9y ago
Nearly every one of your Medium posts could be interpreted as a copyright violation. Copy pasting text and calling it a "curation" doesn't give you the right to publish others' works without their permission.
- wunderlust 9y ago
  With proper citation, there's no violation, right?
  - lmkg 9y ago
    Proper citation means that you're not violating academic integrity. That has very little to do with copyright.
  - jjawssd 9y ago
    If I put a watermark in a movie which properly cites the original does that allow me to redistribute the derivative work? Same applies here.
    - msla 9y ago
      A lot of people seem to think it does: http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/ > How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. [snip] > On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID. The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
      - mncharity 9y ago
        > people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
  - cyphar 9y ago
    Acadmic citation guidelines have little to do with copyright (for example, my university requires me to cite public domain works -- despite there being no copyright on said works). Most citations or reasonable quotations fall under fair use, but reproducing an entire work (and/or modifying it) fall under copyright infringement.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    No. One of the tenets of the "fair use" standard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substantiality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#3._Amount_and_substan...) is that the more of a work you reproduce within your own, the less likely it is that your reproduction is actually fair use. This is true whether or not you cite the author of the work you're reproducing. The idea is to give people who just want to quote a line or two leeway to do so, while punishing those who would take someone else's work en masse and publish it under their own name.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      "Fair use" is a very US-American concept. For example German Urheberrechtsgesetz > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ knows no concept of fair use - you can easily get sued if you use even a little snippet of a copyrighted work (and often are). Only in some very specifically defined cases short quotes are allowed: > https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__51.html
      - nayuki 9y ago
        "Fair dealing" is the Canadian equivalent of "fair use", following much of the same principles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyright_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing_in_Canadian_copyr...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- js7745 9y ago
  You may be right here, going forwards I am going to provide more commentary on my posts. But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this. So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.
  - toss1 9y ago
    That's exactly the same BS argument as "just give me your product for free and you'll get tons of publicity". Only works if the person proposing it is actually world-famous. Otherwise, it's just scamming. (Not even addressing the copyright infringement issues here.) You are freeloading on PG's insight and fame, trying to increase yours at his expense. Even if the expense is relatively trivial, it's no less true. If it were actually OK, you would have already asked PG if it was ok for you to hack up his articles and re-publish them under your name. Come to think of it, why don't you ask him directly, and see if he thinks it's ok, or what conditions he'd put on it? Let us know how that conversation goes.
  - hashkb 9y ago
    It's not about your opinion. Of course you think what you're doing is ok, everyone does. Fortunately we have a general consensus (and laws) that say what you did was wrong. Own it.
  - singhrac 9y ago
    To address your point ("So what's really the harm here"), there's a lot of reasons copyright law exists, including: 1. By using his work without permission, you risk misrepresenting his message. For example, you might accidentally remove a key passage or quote or citation. After all, you say "Below are (in our opinion) the essential excerpts" - I have a feeling he wouldn't agree. 2. He almost certainly prefers to have his work consolidated in a single place (he has a distinctive style), for any number of reasons (branding, analytics, ability to remove and/or edit, etc.) 3. At the end of the day, it's his property. I think it's easy to think "these laws don't really make sense here, because of [foo] reason", but it's nonsensical to do so without asking for pg's permission. You risk looking like you knew that he wouldn't be ok with it. If you really intended to help him, just ask.
0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
I don't know. Seems like you are following his advice by building something that does not scale.
- tnr23 9y ago
  hahahaha, that one made my day
DenisM 9y ago
The internet is choke-full of content that was "recycled" and stripped of attribution. I wouldn't call it the cancer of the web, but perhaps algae overgrowth would be a fitting metaphor. You would need to add something original and of value to have it accepted here. Also, your apology is very tone-deaf. I imagine it pisses people off way more than the copyright issue.

miguelrochefort 9y ago

(2013)

forkLding 9y ago

Any stories of fellow HNers with their startups doing this?

nextstar 9y ago
When I worked on an online platform for people to learn hands-on technology with experts in person such as woodworking or glassblowing, we went from door to door in Brooklyn, asking for their trust to give us a try.
rglover 9y ago
We do :) As customers sign up we ask if they want stickers and then send out a handwritten letter alongside a set (example: https://www.instagram.com/p/BWA5q95jADc/?taken-by=cleverbeagle https://www.instagram.com/p/BWA5q95jADc/?taken-by=cleverbeag...).
brianwawok 9y ago
For our first 100 customers we basically did all the setup work for them. Basically did a screenshare, clicked for them, told them what to do. Would sometimes leave the call, and spend 1-8 hours clicking for the customer. Learned how customers wanted the product to work, and gained initial customers. Lost money on the setup but who cares. Now setups are a 30 minute phone call where we teach customers how to click themselves.
- Scarbutt 9y ago
  Curious, what software did you use for screen sharing? were customers ok with this? Was your app so complex that you couldn't guide them through the phone or it was a deficiency in the UX/UI of the app?
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    > Curious, what software did you use for screen sharing Started off with Join.me. I then threw out my windows PC and installed Ubuntu, so it stopped working. I did appear.in a few times, but the quality stunk. Mostly moved to my setup team, that mostly still uses join.me. > were customers ok with this Oh they loved it. The competition is "Here is a youtube video and some docs, have at it". We actually took the time to get to know our customer and dive in, help them navigate the setup etc. > Was your app so complex that you couldn't guide them through the phone or it was a deficiency in the UX/UI of the app? Both! Necessary complexity is high, but so is accidental. Working on reducing accidental a little every day. Not willing to kill off too many features in the name of simplicity, but willing to at least make the common path a lot easier to use.

Prizewinner 9y ago

Spent a month in university libraries handing out candy and asking groups of students to try out our sharing platform. We then would take what we learned that day and code changes/fixes before we left or when we got home so we could go out again in the morning.

seizethecheese 9y ago
And, how'd it go?
- pawadu 9y ago
  They are now a small company with a lot of diabetic users.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

evincarofautumn 9y ago

I’ve been working on a programming language for a while, and this is one of the key bits of advice I’ve had in the back of my mind during that time. People have come along and contributed occasionally, but for the most part, I’m doing everything: writing the compiler, standard library, documentation, editor integration, blog posts, evangelism of the programming paradigm, and so on. Despite the fact that I don’t scale, I’ll happily sit down with someone who’s trying out the language, help them get up to speed, and fix all the bugs and usability issues they report. It’s that kind of connection to people that not only drives interest in the project, but drives me to stay motivated. I can’t say I fully understand my own success…or even whether it’s success. I’m not selling anything, just making the language I want to use. Maybe a few hundred lines of code have been written in the language by someone other than me. I’ve accumulated >450 stars on GitHub for a product that doesn’t even do anything yet. It’s certainly surreal, but it’s been pleasant. :)

markholmes 9y ago
What's the language called?
- gordon_freeman 9y ago
  This is from his HN profile: I’m writing a stack-based functional programming language called Kitten: https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten https://github.com/evincarofautumn/kitten
  - evincarofautumn 9y ago
    Thanks—only reason I didn’t mention it was that I didn’t feel the need to advertise. I mainly wanted to give my thoughts on how this article’s advice has been a positive thing for the project—seeking out users and taking measures to help them and make them happy directly.

statictype 9y ago

This is Paul Graham's best piece. Really nails down what it takes to make a business successful.