12 ms·

How to write stuff no one else can

527 points by EthanDBrooks 3y ago

ReD_CoDE 3y ago
LinkedIn is a dead social network! A platform that doesn't have daily active users, but weekly ones
yamrzou 3y ago
This sentence caught my attention: > You can’t just Google these kinds of things. That’s why they’re so interesting. So what Google did is dilute the information advantage. The more interconnected we are, the harder it becomes to maintain that advantage.
- hawski 3y ago
  That's also something I often encounter with ChatGPT. It often is very wrong about things I ask, because I often wonder and try things off the beaten path. That's our advantage against LLMs.
  - from-nibly 3y ago
    No the advantage is that you have context. That context is HUGE. That's why you can't and won't be able to have chat gpt actually do your job for you. You still need to ask it questions. And to even know what questions you need to ask you need to have context.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      You don't just need a context, you need to finetune a model around that context since working memory isn't enough. That is what human workers do, they spend the first months finetuning their model around the company context before they can start to provide valuable code. Once you can pay to get your own fine tuned version of the big LLMs maybe we can start to do real work with these.
      - from-nibly 3y ago
        Agreed on the first part. However my point is that having the context and the ability to use it is sooooooo far out of reach for a computer it's unfathomable. In much the same way how life is unfathomable at some level. It's this self referencing infinity that is somehow collapsing into results while being uncollapseable. Computers can't do that not without something fundamentally different
  - adtac 3y ago
    Purely probabilistically, trying things off the beaten path is just a matter of higher LLM temperature. Turning up GPT-4's temperature is basically an expensive /dev/urandom pipe today, but I don't see any fundamental reason why LLMs can't catch up. Maybe all it takes is tinkering with how temperature is calculated.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      You've missed the metaphor, I think. Higher temperatures will make it "more creative" for lack of a better term, but there's a lot of specialist knowledge it doesn't have and which you can't give it just by twiddling a dial. It has a massive speed advantage that lets it read the whole internet, but it's dumb enough that it also needs to, and when even that doesn't give it enough examples, it's like asking me to improvise Latin based on what I recognise of the loanwords in English.
    - jwilber 3y ago
      No - temperature is a sampling measurement from a distribution. If you adjust temperature, you still ultimately pull from the same distribution. Parent is saying the advantage is in pulling ideas from outside that encoded distribution.
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  The fact is that we're not that interconnected though. Finding people that have useful, actionable information, and want to share it with you, is extremely difficult.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    That is a search issue not an interconnectivity issue.
  - fxtentacle 3y ago
    Or maybe we have just conditioned people to not share useful information publicly anymore. Amazon selling what used to be open source projects has certainly had a chilling effect on people publishing source code under a permissive licence.
- ssivark 3y ago
  Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc are all retrieval services (with some rudimentary remixing capabilities thrown in, for the latter few). Some human has to actually have interesting insights and write them. Retrieval services help with distribution & discovery. The less we’re connected, the harder it is to find the right audience who value your (niche) insights. Of course attribution and linking is important.
  - wordpad25 3y ago
    AI so much much more than retrieval since it knows how to correctly apply exist concepts to previously unexplored areas. You can ask ChatGPT how one might implement and enforce laws in a world where magic exists. Or time travel. Or whatever. Because it knows laws and it knows common fiction tropes and can reason well enough to surmise how to apply them together.
    - wordpad25 3y ago
      Wanted to give it a try. I didn't even consider many of these and doubt I would've come up with such a good list even if I had a lot of time. Much less than 1 second it took to generate the response. In a world where magic exists, laws and the legislative system would likely undergo significant adaptations to address the unique capabilities and risks presented by magic. Here are several ways in which these systems might be different, based on various assumptions about the nature and scope of magic: 1. *Regulation of Magical Practices*: Just as with professions and practices in our world, there would be regulations governing who can practice magic, how it can be learned, and where it can be used. Licenses or permits might be required for practicing certain types of magic, similar to medical licenses or driving licenses. 2. *Magic-Related Offenses*: New categories of crimes would exist, such as unauthorized enchantments, illegal curses, magical fraud (using illusions or mind control for deceit), and unlicensed necromancy. Laws would specify what constitutes a magical assault versus a non-magical one, with potentially different penalties. 3. *Enforcement and Jurisdiction*: Special law enforcement units trained in counter-magic or magical defense would be necessary to handle crimes involving magic. The jurisdiction might depend on the nature of the magic used; for example, cross-dimensional or time-altering magic could involve a higher authority or international magical council. 4. *Evidence and Investigation*: The collection of evidence might include magical means, such as truth spells, scrying (viewing distant or future events), or reviewing memories directly. However, there would also need to be laws protecting individuals against invasive magical investigations. 5. *Rights and Protections*: There would be laws to protect non-magical beings from discrimination or harm by magical individuals or entities. Similarly, sentient magical creatures or beings might have their own rights, leading to more complex legal considerations regarding interspecies interactions. 6. *Ethical Use of Magic*: Legislation would likely address the ethical implications of spellcasting, summoning, and other magical practices, including the use of magic on unwilling subjects or creating sentient beings. Regulations might prevent or restrict the use of magic that can alter someone's will, memories, or identity. 7. *Magical Contracts and Agreements*: The legal system would need to address the binding nature of magical contracts, which could have irrevocable consequences. Laws might specify how such contracts can be fairly negotiated and what remedies exist for breaking a magical contract. 8. *Intellectual Property*: In a world where spells, potions, and magical items are created, there would be intellectual property laws protecting the creators of magical inventions. This could include patents on spell formulas, copyright on magical texts, or trademarks on magical item designs. 9. *International Relations and Security*: On a larger scale, there might be international laws governing the use of magic, especially in conflicts or espionage. Treaties could limit the use of particularly destructive spells or ban the creation of magical weapons of mass destruction. 10. *Education and Public Safety*: Laws would govern the education and training of individuals with magical abilities, possibly requiring mandatory schooling to ensure that magic is used safely and responsibly. Public safety regulations would address the storage of magical materials and the construction of magically protected buildings. In this magical world, the legal and legislative system would need to be flexible and innovative, capable of addressing the ever-evolving nature of magic and its impact on society. It would be a blend of traditional legal principles and new rules designed to manage the unique challenges posed by the existence of magic.
- chubot 3y ago
  If you want to maintain an information advantage, you should definitely not rely solely on the web. Simply reading a book is often 10x better. Comment from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369583 One thing I've found comically underestimated is books. It's not whether the information is physical or electronic, but what actual corpus of information is available ... So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one Though I'd also put "talking to the right people" and by extension "working at the right place" pretty high up there in getting novel information. I think for a certain generation, Google probably diluted their ability to access other knowledge bases, and act upon that info. And for the generation currently learning how to learn, LLMs may do the same thing.
akhil-c 3y ago
Interesting discussion. I agree with the author's premise. IMO finding these undiscovered gems will stand out more; a lot of content has the veil of originality but lacking. A lot of content online feels unoriginal or uninspired. Perhaps we'll see the pendulum swing back toward original long form journalism to tell these stories.
mattfrommars 3y ago
I read the article, what mind opening tactic did the author explain to the public? Appears to be blogspam.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tmountain 3y ago
  Going down a layer below Tim Ferriss to his staff… /s
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    I agree this is kind of trivial, but doing anything more than the average person already puts you in the high percentiles. My abstract strategy for making contact with the right people: Try to imagine things from the perspective of the people you're trying to contact. What is their day-to-day, what are they sick and tired of? What will make your cold email stick out in that context? It's click-bait targeted at a specific person. Again, this is probably just one level above what the average person will do. But that already puts you ahead of most people. It gives you some chance of reaching the right person.
    - dinkleberg 3y ago
      The thing is, almost all of the "secrets" of successful people are trivial, it is just that few people are doing them consistently. Anybody could practice basketball as hard as Kobe Bryant did, but almost nobody is actually willing to put in the consistent work over years and years.
- vrc 3y ago
  I think the extent to which writers have to get creative in finding sources for novel pieces is taken for granted. I did not realize how tactical and painstaking the process is to create the content that I casually skim and enjoy. So I strengthened my appreciation of the process
irrational 3y ago
I wonder if Stephen Hanselman is being inundated with email right now and doesn’t know why?
thenerdhead 3y ago
What was the answer? Find a human who can bypass robots.txt/limitations of ChatGPT and find less traveled sources given the internet fails to archive itself and important information can be wiped any minute? Isn't that just called good journalism?
- gamepsys 3y ago
  The author primarily talks about interviewing interesting but un-interviewed people as a new source of interesting information to write about. The author talks about their process of finding new people to interview.
simne 3y ago
And it is extremely hard to find person, who prefer the people who were deep in the trenches. What I see most time, managers buy bright cover, very few bother to look deeper. And it's easy to understand - as said wisdom, "No one fired due to buy IBM solution". When I agree, not many people are like IBM with near cloud-less clear reputation, but it's just simple and need less energy, to not try swim against flow.
nhggfu 3y ago
excellent post.
Donaldobob 3y ago
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Tysondrilling 3y ago
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soneca 3y ago
I was kind of curious in what the author had to say, but his sole motivation being ”getting ahead of competitors” really put me off. Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice. So I stopped reading.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  The daily newsletter business is a crowded space, to say the least. The barrier to entry is as low as it could possibly get and the unit economics are brutal. Getting ahead of competitors isn't some abstract, arbitrary goal. It's the only way to survive in a business like this. If your goal is just to write for the sake of writing and you don't care if anyone reads it, this article probably isn't for you.
  - soneca 3y ago
    I think it’s almost there. I care if people will read me (I am an amateur fiction writer), but not a competition to read me and not others. Or praise my writing more than they praise others.
Aurornis 3y ago
> For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time. > But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’t so much an executive hire as it was kids trying to get something off the ground. Although not the main point of the article, this is much better advice for finding high-potential employees who are under the radar than the article that was on the front page a few days ago: ("How to hire low experience, high potential people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 ) When the last article hit the front page I couldn't believe HN was upvoting an article that advocated for deep-diving into people's personal early life history as a hiring technique. That's like reading the tea leaves for interviewing candidates. Instead, this article reveals the real secret: You have to be prepared to do some legwork and research, as well as look beyond the obvious. You could go hire a lot of smiling ex-FAANG people with perfectly curated LinkedIn profiles and professional headshots by throwing large salaries at them, but you're not going to get the best results that way. It's also one of the least efficient uses of your headcount budget and those people are almost guaranteed to ghost you in 18 months when someone else offers them a fancier title. There is a lot of gold waiting to be discovered among people who aren't curating perfect LinkedIn profiles or collecting famous company names for their resume. It takes some work to find it, but it's out there.
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  This is funny because Facebook was famous for adopting this attitude early on. Hire people with potential instead of credentials. If you have a good perf review system and don’t mind false positives it can work. Maybe it worked better before boot camps.
  - febeling 3y ago
    What changed with boot camps?
leetrout 3y ago
I have a quip I have repeated for years that aligns with this: The people talking about the stuff largely arent the people doing the stuff because theyre too busy doing the stuff. Where, in my case, in our tech circle, that is generally design and development. Of course there are outliers.
- baxtr 3y ago
  Absolutely. At the same time it’s a bloody shame they don’t. Great people who actually do great stuff need to become people who talk about it too. Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure.
  - enriquto 3y ago
    > Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure. Or maybe we shouldn't organize our society so that "exposure" is such an overwhelmingly positive thing.
    - hiatus 3y ago
      Exposure, as I understand it, is becoming known to more people. I can't see how society, which is predicated on interpersonal relationships, could be organized to dissuade increasing your renown.
      - trealira 3y ago
        Perhaps with some sort of score that rewarded accomplishing things more than just talking about them. Then you could look at someone's score and trust that they've accomplished more. Seems meritocratic, but also somewhat dystopian, honestly.
        jmathai 3y ago
        I’ve trended in the opposite direction. I don’t particularly enjoy taking about any successes I may have had and I don’t care to make sure others (including in the company I work at) are aware. It’s not great for career progression. But I actually don’t care about that. So instead of playing that game I play one I actually care about which looks very different than one where exposure matters.
austin-cheney 3y ago
The article misses something super critical: why?. More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership. Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership looks like. An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance. * Strong leaders know when to not follow trends with extreme criticality. This is highly paradoxical since so many software companies are funded by advertising which is a business of growing trends. Real leaders set new trends and take share from existing players setting their brand reputation in the process. Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry Maybe in the companies you’ve worked for, but I haven’t found this to be true at all > An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders who are trying to build a team that works together. Encouraging people to speak their mind is good. Encouraging “maximum confrontation” is just going to create chaos. The goal is to work together to ship, not to argue and defy all the time. I can’t think of anyone who would want to work on a team where everyone had agreeableness dialed down to 0 where leaders encouraged confrontation all the time, except maybe for people who just like to argue a lot. > Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation. Another strong generalization that I can’t agree with. Most people I’ve worked with in software have been so aggressive about bucking trends and trying new things that we’ve had to dial it back a notch. A lot of the debates I’ve had with teams have been about choosing boring, stable technologies over the newest cutting edge technology that’s popular on Twitter. Same goes for business strategies, where I’ve had to deal with everyone from product managers to sales people trying to do things their own creative way when the standard, boring practices are what finally got the job done.
hansonpeter 3y ago
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effnorwood 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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neilv 3y ago
For my back-burner startup, the reason it would work (in theory) was due to a particular thing we were doing that none of the other players in the market would do, even if they thought of it. (Unfortunately, just as I got time to move it to front burner, it was probably killed by LLM consumer popularity.)
tirthvora 3y ago
To double down on one of the points a bit, its well observed and accepted that the CEO or senior authorities get all the attention, even in politics; But there's always the less-known team behind it that did most of the work. They don't get the credits because they couldn't take the RISKS, that the senior folks did. Senior positions come with its associated risk and stakes, and not everyone has the guts to tackle that kind of exposure.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  > Senior positions come with its associated risk and stakes Strong doubt on the risks part. Sure, for founders. But for executives at established companies, the more senior you are the less risk you have. Severances get larger, firing rates get lower, and you probably have more cash in the bank.
  - f1shy 3y ago
    AND if you get fired you go to destroy the next company... They always have work.
- mordae 3y ago
  Nobody asks them and I've seen attempts to prevent assistants of members of Parliament running as candidates. They have the know-how and the moat is pretty narrow so the acting politicians felt the need to widen it somewhat.
- hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  A lot of those risks are for other people, not themselves. They are there for a variety of reasons but accepting risks is probably not the primary one.
ustad 3y ago
“I plug names of lesser-known key employees into Google and Spotify” ? Whats with spotify?
- subarctic 3y ago
  Maybe for podcasts? That's the only thing I can think of.
  - dinkleberg 3y ago
    You wouldn't want to interview someone with bad taste in music.
- hailt 3y ago
  For featuring in a podcast episode, I guess.
- causal 3y ago
  Spotify has a really good search engine, may uncover some relevant audio work.
danbruc 3y ago
Tangent. I understand the appeal of a four hour work week but how can people take that seriously? You will either have to have a pretty unappealing standard of living or you will have to exploit other people. If you only work four hours per week, then you can only consume as much as can be produced in four hours each week. But I guess people mostly hope to make the exploitation strategy work, manage to only produce something for four hours per week but consume stuff that took others forty hours to produce.
- dinkleberg 3y ago
  It has been years since I read it, but iirc the main point was to build businesses that once they are up and running don't require much much work to keep bringing in money. I suspect achieving what he was aiming for is much harder now than it was when he wrote the book, as the barrier to entry to starting businesses goes down and the competition continues to rise. But I think there is still something to be said for the goal of building a "lifestyle" business rather than trying to build a hyper-growth startup. If you are strategizing through the lens of "How can I make enough money to survive and thrive with the minimal amount of time spent?" vs "How can I grow my business to $100m" you'll come up with very different plans.
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Also known as selling something at an inflated price and hoping that no one will undercut you.
    - lex-lightning 3y ago
      What if someone works 30 hours a week performing a service which is not yet automated, but uniquely theirs, like their own standup comedy. Contrast that with the replicable software example.
    - dinkleberg 3y ago
      How so? If I build a simple app that does its job and does it well, I don't need to work on it for 40 hours a week for the rest of my life. After the initial effort, you can put in almost no work, just periodic maintenance, and you can keep bringing in sales. There are lots of opportunities like this. There is nothing morally or ethically questionable about this. It doesn't require you to over-inflate your prices. That is the power of software. The VC hyper-growth world is heavily focused on continuously changing your software, but that isn't a requirement (and in fact, is often not desirable to your customers).
l2silver 3y ago
I love articles like this. Short, concise, and filled with interesting and unique tips instead of the usual cliche dribble. I particularly loved the outlining of Zack's methods.
Vinaas 3y ago
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jennadooty775 3y ago
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527 points by EthanDBrooks 3y ago

LinkedIn is a dead social network! A platform that doesn't have daily active users, but weekly ones

This sentence caught my attention: > You can’t just Google these kinds of things. That’s why they’re so interesting. So what Google did is dilute the information advantage. The more interconnected we are, the harder it becomes to maintain that advantage.

hawski 3y ago
That's also something I often encounter with ChatGPT. It often is very wrong about things I ask, because I often wonder and try things off the beaten path. That's our advantage against LLMs.
- from-nibly 3y ago
  No the advantage is that you have context. That context is HUGE. That's why you can't and won't be able to have chat gpt actually do your job for you. You still need to ask it questions. And to even know what questions you need to ask you need to have context.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    You don't just need a context, you need to finetune a model around that context since working memory isn't enough. That is what human workers do, they spend the first months finetuning their model around the company context before they can start to provide valuable code. Once you can pay to get your own fine tuned version of the big LLMs maybe we can start to do real work with these.
    - from-nibly 3y ago
      Agreed on the first part. However my point is that having the context and the ability to use it is sooooooo far out of reach for a computer it's unfathomable. In much the same way how life is unfathomable at some level. It's this self referencing infinity that is somehow collapsing into results while being uncollapseable. Computers can't do that not without something fundamentally different
- adtac 3y ago
  Purely probabilistically, trying things off the beaten path is just a matter of higher LLM temperature. Turning up GPT-4's temperature is basically an expensive /dev/urandom pipe today, but I don't see any fundamental reason why LLMs can't catch up. Maybe all it takes is tinkering with how temperature is calculated.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    You've missed the metaphor, I think. Higher temperatures will make it "more creative" for lack of a better term, but there's a lot of specialist knowledge it doesn't have and which you can't give it just by twiddling a dial. It has a massive speed advantage that lets it read the whole internet, but it's dumb enough that it also needs to, and when even that doesn't give it enough examples, it's like asking me to improvise Latin based on what I recognise of the loanwords in English.
  - jwilber 3y ago
    No - temperature is a sampling measurement from a distribution. If you adjust temperature, you still ultimately pull from the same distribution. Parent is saying the advantage is in pulling ideas from outside that encoded distribution.
cjohnson318 3y ago
The fact is that we're not that interconnected though. Finding people that have useful, actionable information, and want to share it with you, is extremely difficult.
- Jensson 3y ago
  That is a search issue not an interconnectivity issue.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  Or maybe we have just conditioned people to not share useful information publicly anymore. Amazon selling what used to be open source projects has certainly had a chilling effect on people publishing source code under a permissive licence.
ssivark 3y ago
Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, etc are all retrieval services (with some rudimentary remixing capabilities thrown in, for the latter few). Some human has to actually have interesting insights and write them. Retrieval services help with distribution & discovery. The less we’re connected, the harder it is to find the right audience who value your (niche) insights. Of course attribution and linking is important.
- wordpad25 3y ago
  AI so much much more than retrieval since it knows how to correctly apply exist concepts to previously unexplored areas. You can ask ChatGPT how one might implement and enforce laws in a world where magic exists. Or time travel. Or whatever. Because it knows laws and it knows common fiction tropes and can reason well enough to surmise how to apply them together.
  - wordpad25 3y ago
    Wanted to give it a try. I didn't even consider many of these and doubt I would've come up with such a good list even if I had a lot of time. Much less than 1 second it took to generate the response. In a world where magic exists, laws and the legislative system would likely undergo significant adaptations to address the unique capabilities and risks presented by magic. Here are several ways in which these systems might be different, based on various assumptions about the nature and scope of magic: 1. *Regulation of Magical Practices*: Just as with professions and practices in our world, there would be regulations governing who can practice magic, how it can be learned, and where it can be used. Licenses or permits might be required for practicing certain types of magic, similar to medical licenses or driving licenses. 2. *Magic-Related Offenses*: New categories of crimes would exist, such as unauthorized enchantments, illegal curses, magical fraud (using illusions or mind control for deceit), and unlicensed necromancy. Laws would specify what constitutes a magical assault versus a non-magical one, with potentially different penalties. 3. *Enforcement and Jurisdiction*: Special law enforcement units trained in counter-magic or magical defense would be necessary to handle crimes involving magic. The jurisdiction might depend on the nature of the magic used; for example, cross-dimensional or time-altering magic could involve a higher authority or international magical council. 4. *Evidence and Investigation*: The collection of evidence might include magical means, such as truth spells, scrying (viewing distant or future events), or reviewing memories directly. However, there would also need to be laws protecting individuals against invasive magical investigations. 5. *Rights and Protections*: There would be laws to protect non-magical beings from discrimination or harm by magical individuals or entities. Similarly, sentient magical creatures or beings might have their own rights, leading to more complex legal considerations regarding interspecies interactions. 6. *Ethical Use of Magic*: Legislation would likely address the ethical implications of spellcasting, summoning, and other magical practices, including the use of magic on unwilling subjects or creating sentient beings. Regulations might prevent or restrict the use of magic that can alter someone's will, memories, or identity. 7. *Magical Contracts and Agreements*: The legal system would need to address the binding nature of magical contracts, which could have irrevocable consequences. Laws might specify how such contracts can be fairly negotiated and what remedies exist for breaking a magical contract. 8. *Intellectual Property*: In a world where spells, potions, and magical items are created, there would be intellectual property laws protecting the creators of magical inventions. This could include patents on spell formulas, copyright on magical texts, or trademarks on magical item designs. 9. *International Relations and Security*: On a larger scale, there might be international laws governing the use of magic, especially in conflicts or espionage. Treaties could limit the use of particularly destructive spells or ban the creation of magical weapons of mass destruction. 10. *Education and Public Safety*: Laws would govern the education and training of individuals with magical abilities, possibly requiring mandatory schooling to ensure that magic is used safely and responsibly. Public safety regulations would address the storage of magical materials and the construction of magically protected buildings. In this magical world, the legal and legislative system would need to be flexible and innovative, capable of addressing the ever-evolving nature of magic and its impact on society. It would be a blend of traditional legal principles and new rules designed to manage the unique challenges posed by the existence of magic.
chubot 3y ago
If you want to maintain an information advantage, you should definitely not rely solely on the web. Simply reading a book is often 10x better. Comment from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369583 One thing I've found comically underestimated is books. It's not whether the information is physical or electronic, but what actual corpus of information is available ... So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one Though I'd also put "talking to the right people" and by extension "working at the right place" pretty high up there in getting novel information. I think for a certain generation, Google probably diluted their ability to access other knowledge bases, and act upon that info. And for the generation currently learning how to learn, LLMs may do the same thing.

akhil-c 3y ago

Interesting discussion. I agree with the author's premise. IMO finding these undiscovered gems will stand out more; a lot of content has the veil of originality but lacking. A lot of content online feels unoriginal or uninspired. Perhaps we'll see the pendulum swing back toward original long form journalism to tell these stories.

mattfrommars 3y ago

I read the article, what mind opening tactic did the author explain to the public? Appears to be blogspam.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tmountain 3y ago
Going down a layer below Tim Ferriss to his staff… /s
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I agree this is kind of trivial, but doing anything more than the average person already puts you in the high percentiles. My abstract strategy for making contact with the right people: Try to imagine things from the perspective of the people you're trying to contact. What is their day-to-day, what are they sick and tired of? What will make your cold email stick out in that context? It's click-bait targeted at a specific person. Again, this is probably just one level above what the average person will do. But that already puts you ahead of most people. It gives you some chance of reaching the right person.
  - dinkleberg 3y ago
    The thing is, almost all of the "secrets" of successful people are trivial, it is just that few people are doing them consistently. Anybody could practice basketball as hard as Kobe Bryant did, but almost nobody is actually willing to put in the consistent work over years and years.
vrc 3y ago
I think the extent to which writers have to get creative in finding sources for novel pieces is taken for granted. I did not realize how tactical and painstaking the process is to create the content that I casually skim and enjoy. So I strengthened my appreciation of the process

irrational 3y ago

I wonder if Stephen Hanselman is being inundated with email right now and doesn’t know why?

thenerdhead 3y ago

What was the answer? Find a human who can bypass robots.txt/limitations of ChatGPT and find less traveled sources given the internet fails to archive itself and important information can be wiped any minute? Isn't that just called good journalism?

gamepsys 3y ago
The author primarily talks about interviewing interesting but un-interviewed people as a new source of interesting information to write about. The author talks about their process of finding new people to interview.

simne 3y ago

And it is extremely hard to find person, who prefer the people who were deep in the trenches. What I see most time, managers buy bright cover, very few bother to look deeper. And it's easy to understand - as said wisdom, "No one fired due to buy IBM solution". When I agree, not many people are like IBM with near cloud-less clear reputation, but it's just simple and need less energy, to not try swim against flow.

nhggfu 3y ago

excellent post.

Donaldobob 3y ago

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Tysondrilling 3y ago

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soneca 3y ago

I was kind of curious in what the author had to say, but his sole motivation being ”getting ahead of competitors” really put me off. Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice. So I stopped reading.

Aurornis 3y ago
The daily newsletter business is a crowded space, to say the least. The barrier to entry is as low as it could possibly get and the unit economics are brutal. Getting ahead of competitors isn't some abstract, arbitrary goal. It's the only way to survive in a business like this. If your goal is just to write for the sake of writing and you don't care if anyone reads it, this article probably isn't for you.
- soneca 3y ago
  I think it’s almost there. I care if people will read me (I am an amateur fiction writer), but not a competition to read me and not others. Or praise my writing more than they praise others.

Aurornis 3y ago

> For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time. > But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’t so much an executive hire as it was kids trying to get something off the ground. Although not the main point of the article, this is much better advice for finding high-potential employees who are under the radar than the article that was on the front page a few days ago: ("How to hire low experience, high potential people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 ) When the last article hit the front page I couldn't believe HN was upvoting an article that advocated for deep-diving into people's personal early life history as a hiring technique. That's like reading the tea leaves for interviewing candidates. Instead, this article reveals the real secret: You have to be prepared to do some legwork and research, as well as look beyond the obvious. You could go hire a lot of smiling ex-FAANG people with perfectly curated LinkedIn profiles and professional headshots by throwing large salaries at them, but you're not going to get the best results that way. It's also one of the least efficient uses of your headcount budget and those people are almost guaranteed to ghost you in 18 months when someone else offers them a fancier title. There is a lot of gold waiting to be discovered among people who aren't curating perfect LinkedIn profiles or collecting famous company names for their resume. It takes some work to find it, but it's out there.

edmundsauto 3y ago
This is funny because Facebook was famous for adopting this attitude early on. Hire people with potential instead of credentials. If you have a good perf review system and don’t mind false positives it can work. Maybe it worked better before boot camps.
- febeling 3y ago
  What changed with boot camps?

leetrout 3y ago

I have a quip I have repeated for years that aligns with this: The people talking about the stuff largely arent the people doing the stuff because theyre too busy doing the stuff. Where, in my case, in our tech circle, that is generally design and development. Of course there are outliers.

baxtr 3y ago
Absolutely. At the same time it’s a bloody shame they don’t. Great people who actually do great stuff need to become people who talk about it too. Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure.
- enriquto 3y ago
  > Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure. Or maybe we shouldn't organize our society so that "exposure" is such an overwhelmingly positive thing.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    Exposure, as I understand it, is becoming known to more people. I can't see how society, which is predicated on interpersonal relationships, could be organized to dissuade increasing your renown.
    - trealira 3y ago
      Perhaps with some sort of score that rewarded accomplishing things more than just talking about them. Then you could look at someone's score and trust that they've accomplished more. Seems meritocratic, but also somewhat dystopian, honestly.
      - jmathai 3y ago
        I’ve trended in the opposite direction. I don’t particularly enjoy taking about any successes I may have had and I don’t care to make sure others (including in the company I work at) are aware. It’s not great for career progression. But I actually don’t care about that. So instead of playing that game I play one I actually care about which looks very different than one where exposure matters.

austin-cheney 3y ago

The article misses something super critical: why?. More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership. Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons. * Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership looks like. An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance. * Strong leaders know when to not follow trends with extreme criticality. This is highly paradoxical since so many software companies are funded by advertising which is a business of growing trends. Real leaders set new trends and take share from existing players setting their brand reputation in the process. Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.

Aurornis 3y ago
> Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry Maybe in the companies you’ve worked for, but I haven’t found this to be true at all > An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders who are trying to build a team that works together. Encouraging people to speak their mind is good. Encouraging “maximum confrontation” is just going to create chaos. The goal is to work together to ship, not to argue and defy all the time. I can’t think of anyone who would want to work on a team where everyone had agreeableness dialed down to 0 where leaders encouraged confrontation all the time, except maybe for people who just like to argue a lot. > Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation. Another strong generalization that I can’t agree with. Most people I’ve worked with in software have been so aggressive about bucking trends and trying new things that we’ve had to dial it back a notch. A lot of the debates I’ve had with teams have been about choosing boring, stable technologies over the newest cutting edge technology that’s popular on Twitter. Same goes for business strategies, where I’ve had to deal with everyone from product managers to sales people trying to do things their own creative way when the standard, boring practices are what finally got the job done.

hansonpeter 3y ago

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effnorwood 3y ago

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neilv 3y ago

For my back-burner startup, the reason it would work (in theory) was due to a particular thing we were doing that none of the other players in the market would do, even if they thought of it. (Unfortunately, just as I got time to move it to front burner, it was probably killed by LLM consumer popularity.)

tirthvora 3y ago

To double down on one of the points a bit, its well observed and accepted that the CEO or senior authorities get all the attention, even in politics; But there's always the less-known team behind it that did most of the work. They don't get the credits because they couldn't take the RISKS, that the senior folks did. Senior positions come with its associated risk and stakes, and not everyone has the guts to tackle that kind of exposure.

travisjungroth 3y ago
> Senior positions come with its associated risk and stakes Strong doubt on the risks part. Sure, for founders. But for executives at established companies, the more senior you are the less risk you have. Severances get larger, firing rates get lower, and you probably have more cash in the bank.
- f1shy 3y ago
  AND if you get fired you go to destroy the next company... They always have work.
mordae 3y ago
Nobody asks them and I've seen attempts to prevent assistants of members of Parliament running as candidates. They have the know-how and the moat is pretty narrow so the acting politicians felt the need to widen it somewhat.
hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
A lot of those risks are for other people, not themselves. They are there for a variety of reasons but accepting risks is probably not the primary one.

ustad 3y ago

“I plug names of lesser-known key employees into Google and Spotify” ? Whats with spotify?

subarctic 3y ago
Maybe for podcasts? That's the only thing I can think of.
- dinkleberg 3y ago
  You wouldn't want to interview someone with bad taste in music.
hailt 3y ago
For featuring in a podcast episode, I guess.
causal 3y ago
Spotify has a really good search engine, may uncover some relevant audio work.

danbruc 3y ago

Tangent. I understand the appeal of a four hour work week but how can people take that seriously? You will either have to have a pretty unappealing standard of living or you will have to exploit other people. If you only work four hours per week, then you can only consume as much as can be produced in four hours each week. But I guess people mostly hope to make the exploitation strategy work, manage to only produce something for four hours per week but consume stuff that took others forty hours to produce.

dinkleberg 3y ago
It has been years since I read it, but iirc the main point was to build businesses that once they are up and running don't require much much work to keep bringing in money. I suspect achieving what he was aiming for is much harder now than it was when he wrote the book, as the barrier to entry to starting businesses goes down and the competition continues to rise. But I think there is still something to be said for the goal of building a "lifestyle" business rather than trying to build a hyper-growth startup. If you are strategizing through the lens of "How can I make enough money to survive and thrive with the minimal amount of time spent?" vs "How can I grow my business to $100m" you'll come up with very different plans.
- danbruc 3y ago
  Also known as selling something at an inflated price and hoping that no one will undercut you.
  - lex-lightning 3y ago
    What if someone works 30 hours a week performing a service which is not yet automated, but uniquely theirs, like their own standup comedy. Contrast that with the replicable software example.
  - dinkleberg 3y ago
    How so? If I build a simple app that does its job and does it well, I don't need to work on it for 40 hours a week for the rest of my life. After the initial effort, you can put in almost no work, just periodic maintenance, and you can keep bringing in sales. There are lots of opportunities like this. There is nothing morally or ethically questionable about this. It doesn't require you to over-inflate your prices. That is the power of software. The VC hyper-growth world is heavily focused on continuously changing your software, but that isn't a requirement (and in fact, is often not desirable to your customers).

l2silver 3y ago

I love articles like this. Short, concise, and filled with interesting and unique tips instead of the usual cliche dribble. I particularly loved the outlining of Zack's methods.

Vinaas 3y ago

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jennadooty775 3y ago

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