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The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
- DaniFong 18y agoI submitted this to see the thread of whomever already did. Apparently I'm the first. Another weird coincidence is that I'd never seen this before, and it's really good. Possibly one of the best essays I've read. Or at least one of the most informative. "Startup founders are naturally optimistic. They wouldn't do it otherwise. But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that's also very dangerous. You have to build a shield around it, or it will fry you."
- dkokelley 18y agoWow. Congratulations. This is the second old PG essay that hasn't made it up here yet that I've seen in about 2 weeks. I guess this is like a HN sport now. :P
- eb 18y agoIt looks like it was submitted a long time ago, before this site was even announced. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13
- DaniFong 18y agoI guess the prefix www. isn't stemmed for the collision detection algorithm, then...
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- noahlt 18y ago> So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. I'll make them all read this, and then instead of nagging them in detail, I'll just be able to say: number four! I am curious as to how well this worked out.
- lsb 18y agoStrictly speaking, it's Lempel-Ziv coding. LZ compresses text by replacing the second occurrence of a phrase with a pointer to the first, as above, whereas Huffman represents more frequently used characters with shorter bit strings, like Morse code.
- bstadil 18y agoBut make sure your "tell it right" and occasionally refer to a number "they haven't heard before"
- eru 18y ago17.