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The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail. So from a pov of looking to reduce my chances of failure, reading about a failure means there are n

The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail. So from a pov of looking to reduce my chances of failure, reading about a failure means there are now Inf - 1 ways I might fail, not too useful. Pragmatically reading about success and seeing if I can repurpose their techniques to my situation is far more useful. Where reading about failure is useful is to help remove the general stigma around failure that prevents people from even trying, but there's only so much of that form of self-help a person needs before they move on.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
Not so many ways to _recover_ from failure and go on, though.
- crowbahr 6y ago
  That's usually seen as success though. I'm fairly confident in saying no success has come without recovery from failure
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    It may not be something you can publish as success, though.
- riebs 6y ago
  The lesson is: failure is an indespensable step towards success, so we need not to gloss over failure as if it's taboo
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Perhaps your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.
TimTheTinker 6y ago
Reminds me of a quote from Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
- staunch 6y ago
  Like most proverbs, it only seems insightful and true if you don't think about what it is claiming at all.
  - REOLOLsToy 6y ago
    Remember that everything Leo Tolstoy did (since his younger unlimited money, all whores and drinks, things,) is basically a headless chicken approach to different theologies and etc. He probably caought the syphilis etc in his golden days, and whatever, his golden years were really at the whorehouses. I mean a homeless schitzophrenic could basically write tolstoy works, if they could, I mean, so, the Tolstoy bullshit is really overblown. He was mainly and basically a cat-house client, and all of those things, drinking, etc, the latter things are just a product of his syphilly and so on. Tolstoy was a whore customer, and, whatever he did later is pretty irrelevant. He has no clear non-syphillic grasp on what he feels about religion, nor anything else. Stop lauding up LOLsToy. He was a whore-customer and little else, comrades.
hinkley 6y ago
There are categories of failure though. Those not only tell you where to look but give you starting points and substitutions. Substitute one set of problems for a better known set, and go from there. When engineering figures out how to solve the less known set, then you can do something “new”. Today you might solve liquefaction by running pillars to bedrock and then design for earthquake damage caused by being anchored to bedrock. Some day you might use the Dutch trick of building houses that can float instead.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
You can derive pattern though. You can learn about recuring weak links. And you can learn about solutions. Those are nice.
bumby 6y ago
>The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail Do you mean infinite ways in life? I’m trying to reconcile your statement as it would apply to a specific domain rather than something as broad as the scope of ones life. Reliability engineering would tend to disagree with the above quote. For a specific engineering application there are a certain number of fault modes that can be ideally mitigated and quantified as a reliability risk. Good engineering practice documents these in the form of fault trees, failure mode effects analysis etc. Sure, unknown failure modes still may pop up, but to the point of the article, if they get discussed and documented they can be mitigated in future iterations. While maybe never reaching zero, over time the remaining unknown risks become smaller and smaller probability events.
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  I was thinking of it more in ways businesses fails given we're on HN and that's a bit more narrow than the "in life" version of the article so that it's more useful. However that's a really great point that in the context of a specific engineering application failure can be enumerated to the point where such study of failure is incredibly powerful. Thanks for pointing that out.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Businesses also have common failure modes. I used startups as an example of learning from failure in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498875.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
You also need to read about failure to account for survivorship bias. Eg, did some entity fail even though they were doing the same things as the successful entities? If you detect that, then it's evidence that the techniques of the successful entities are no guarantee of success. That some other technique or factor or luck was the actual differentiator. That's useful information when you're trying to decide what techniques of successful entities may be worth repurposing to your situation or not.
MathematicalArt 6y ago
Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity" Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure, which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things could fail. The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are infinite in scale.
- MathematicalArt 6y ago
  As an example, there are only 16 categorical manifestations of software exceptions based on the following categories: - Synchronicity, Scope, Origin For Synchronicity we have: - Synchronicity - Asynchronicity For Scope we have: - Process-specific - Cross-process For Origin we have: - Data origin - Temporal origin - External origin - Process origin Then you combine them such as "Synchronous-CrossProcess-Temporal Origin." The total is 16 ways. Even if something were somehow to be missing from this categorization scheme, it would only add a finite amount of possibilities to the permutations. Yet this taxonomy seems quite complete as is. See: “Error Handling in Process Support Systems” by Casati & Cugola.
- eeegnu 6y ago
  If the context isn't a formal proof, you can safely substitute infinite with 'might as well be infinite' most of the time to get the intended meaning.
hermitcrab 6y ago
If you read these 13 stories of failed software products that I collected you'll see that they have quite a lot in common: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-from-13-failed-software-products/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f... Also, hanging out on forums for software entrepreneurs, I see people making the same standard mistakes again and again.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  can you tell me some of them?
  - hermitcrab 6y ago
    Off the top of my head: Not doing market research. Taking too long to release v1. Not spending enough time on marketing. Lifetime licenses. Obsessing over piracy. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2009/07/21/ten-mistakes-microisvs-make/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2009/07/21/ten-mistakes-micro...
qotgalaxy 6y ago
If there exist infinite ways to fail, why would there not also exist infinite ways to succeed?

AshamedCaptain 6y ago

Not so many ways to _recover_ from failure and go on, though.

crowbahr 6y ago
That's usually seen as success though. I'm fairly confident in saying no success has come without recovery from failure
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  It may not be something you can publish as success, though.
riebs 6y ago
The lesson is: failure is an indespensable step towards success, so we need not to gloss over failure as if it's taboo
- hinkley 6y ago
  Perhaps your purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

TimTheTinker 6y ago

Reminds me of a quote from Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

staunch 6y ago
Like most proverbs, it only seems insightful and true if you don't think about what it is claiming at all.
- REOLOLsToy 6y ago
  Remember that everything Leo Tolstoy did (since his younger unlimited money, all whores and drinks, things,) is basically a headless chicken approach to different theologies and etc. He probably caought the syphilis etc in his golden days, and whatever, his golden years were really at the whorehouses. I mean a homeless schitzophrenic could basically write tolstoy works, if they could, I mean, so, the Tolstoy bullshit is really overblown. He was mainly and basically a cat-house client, and all of those things, drinking, etc, the latter things are just a product of his syphilly and so on. Tolstoy was a whore customer, and, whatever he did later is pretty irrelevant. He has no clear non-syphillic grasp on what he feels about religion, nor anything else. Stop lauding up LOLsToy. He was a whore-customer and little else, comrades.

hinkley 6y ago

There are categories of failure though. Those not only tell you where to look but give you starting points and substitutions. Substitute one set of problems for a better known set, and go from there. When engineering figures out how to solve the less known set, then you can do something “new”. Today you might solve liquefaction by running pillars to bedrock and then design for earthquake damage caused by being anchored to bedrock. Some day you might use the Dutch trick of building houses that can float instead.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

You can derive pattern though. You can learn about recuring weak links. And you can learn about solutions. Those are nice.

bumby 6y ago

>The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail Do you mean infinite ways in life? I’m trying to reconcile your statement as it would apply to a specific domain rather than something as broad as the scope of ones life. Reliability engineering would tend to disagree with the above quote. For a specific engineering application there are a certain number of fault modes that can be ideally mitigated and quantified as a reliability risk. Good engineering practice documents these in the form of fault trees, failure mode effects analysis etc. Sure, unknown failure modes still may pop up, but to the point of the article, if they get discussed and documented they can be mitigated in future iterations. While maybe never reaching zero, over time the remaining unknown risks become smaller and smaller probability events.

blacktriangle 6y ago
I was thinking of it more in ways businesses fails given we're on HN and that's a bit more narrow than the "in life" version of the article so that it's more useful. However that's a really great point that in the context of a specific engineering application failure can be enumerated to the point where such study of failure is incredibly powerful. Thanks for pointing that out.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  Businesses also have common failure modes. I used startups as an example of learning from failure in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498875.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

You also need to read about failure to account for survivorship bias. Eg, did some entity fail even though they were doing the same things as the successful entities? If you detect that, then it's evidence that the techniques of the successful entities are no guarantee of success. That some other technique or factor or luck was the actual differentiator. That's useful information when you're trying to decide what techniques of successful entities may be worth repurposing to your situation or not.

MathematicalArt 6y ago

Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity" Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure, which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things could fail. The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are infinite in scale.

MathematicalArt 6y ago
As an example, there are only 16 categorical manifestations of software exceptions based on the following categories: - Synchronicity, Scope, Origin For Synchronicity we have: - Synchronicity - Asynchronicity For Scope we have: - Process-specific - Cross-process For Origin we have: - Data origin - Temporal origin - External origin - Process origin Then you combine them such as "Synchronous-CrossProcess-Temporal Origin." The total is 16 ways. Even if something were somehow to be missing from this categorization scheme, it would only add a finite amount of possibilities to the permutations. Yet this taxonomy seems quite complete as is. See: “Error Handling in Process Support Systems” by Casati & Cugola.
eeegnu 6y ago
If the context isn't a formal proof, you can safely substitute infinite with 'might as well be infinite' most of the time to get the intended meaning.

hermitcrab 6y ago

If you read these 13 stories of failed software products that I collected you'll see that they have quite a lot in common: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-from-13-failed-software-products/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f... Also, hanging out on forums for software entrepreneurs, I see people making the same standard mistakes again and again.

marshmallow_12 6y ago
can you tell me some of them?
- hermitcrab 6y ago
  Off the top of my head: Not doing market research. Taking too long to release v1. Not spending enough time on marketing. Lifetime licenses. Obsessing over piracy. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2009/07/21/ten-mistakes-microisvs-make/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2009/07/21/ten-mistakes-micro...

qotgalaxy 6y ago

If there exist infinite ways to fail, why would there not also exist infinite ways to succeed?