He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
What are your takeaways?
Thoughts on Tate's Hustlers' University?
EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.
I thought it was an interesting behind the scenes look at how seriously they take their “art” but nothing world changing. Which part of the article did that for you?
> It feels like the tech industry is having a moment where a lot of us are looking critically at the work we're doing and the effects it has on the society we live in.
I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry. It was where all the founders hung out 15 years ago. It's now just a place where IT workers talk.
> Sometimes that's not fun but it is important. Sorry if that checks the vibes too much for you.
No I just do what everyone else does which is talk about tech elsewhere. I spent a lot of time over the last 15 years here so I'm sad that the place has changed, but at the end of the day I have several alternatives.
Moreover there's plenty of problems in the world out there. A few wars in progress, a genocide or two. My relatives spent the last few weeks in hiding because a government failed. MrBeast's engagement practices are probably the very lowest of my worries. If only HN comments could change the world...
I try and remember to not HN at the weekend, obviously forget sometimes. I tend to find sticking to Ask HN is better at the weekend.
Instead, a trinary should be used, so among true and false, you can have undefined. Or, more importantly for value judgements, "it doesnt matter".
And of course, like things in javasvript, everything should probably just live as undefined, and there should be plenty of guardrails before choosing the other states.
I try pretty hard to only work on companies that have at least a neutral impact on society. Many of them have had an actively positive one.
> I think you grossly overestimate HN's prominence in the tech industry.
It's a good thing I wasn't talking solely about hackernews then.
And that the nitpicking is merely a failure to express that understanding of the world, especially since it seems like pro-status quo commenters don't care to learn more?
I think I'm one of the sour grapes commenters often, and I've very often tried to have patience to explain in depth where my opinions come from. My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial (as I actually did a long time ago), and then being met by responses like "he's obviously doing something right to get all those views and he's promoting altruism", responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was.
If think if we really are supposed to improve the quality of discussions, asking more questions should be common when we fundamentally disagree so much. On fundamental disagreements, either the other party is stupid/naive/uninformed or they have fundamentally different principles that we might not understand, and without which a response is just flaming.
Later edit: I actually think the document by Mr Beast is exceptionally well written, and most startups could apply the main lessons from it. I still think his output is extremely antisocial.
When you see those really great things here it does restore some faith in the place but they are getting further apart all the time. A real shame.
Not being funny, how often is this the answer:
I didn't have one prior, I'm being told what to think by "smart people" online and I make my identity alignment with them. I'm empty and can't think of anything on my own, so when I read something, I add it to a memory bank to bring up later in life in conversation with others to come across as "knowing a little bit about everything"
This is no different than what's done in ANY entertainment media contract negotiation that takes place with "on-air talent".
Your goal is to convince the audience, not your opponents.
Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.
Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).
Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.
Or, people are just more likely to see something closer to the top, that inspires them to comment.
Therefore, the top comment in a top page thread is itself a natural comment magnet.
I don't know of an antidote to this, except that I try not to do it myself. And wary of the possibility of a pot-kettle situation here.
Meh, just write it well and share, then ignore the feedback. You should really only listen to feedback from smart people that you trust anyway. But I understand your position.
I’ve recently noticed it everywhere. Not just on HN.
Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea, but if the world worked out just a bit differently, could have led to them winning the market and taking the financial world in a new direction. It's not obvious to me that the fraud timeline is the only one or even the most likely one, we'll never know.
"History is written by the victors" is what comes to mind here. Or in another way, it's survivorship bias. I haven't read the Mr Beast document yet but I can imagine what's in it because my previous company had similar material (although likely far less controversial), and I'd bet many commenters here have similar culture documents, handbooks, mission statements, and so on, which when read out of context or through the lens of a future scandal could appear far more incriminating than otherwise.
We need to get better at distilling what it is in material like this that is a contributor to the success/failure/scandal, and what... just is... doesn't have an impact, or could have been another way. We need to be better at actually learning from these things in a nuanced way.
If you post something interesting people will read it! Sour grapes comments are kinda boring, and complaints about sour grape comments are also kinda boring.
If you don’t want certain kinds of conversations in a community, one of the best things to do is to “crowd that out” by just offering positive alternatives, with interesting posts.
I have a lot of social complaints about finance, but still love reading about it. Cuz it’s interesting in the abstract!
You either missed the point of the GP comment, or you think that it's entirely pointless to discuss important issues unless it's with people of prominence. Depressing if it's the latter, but given how you started your post, I'm leaning toward that interpretation. That's some kind of fucked up elitism right there.
Be the change you want to see! Post your thoughts on the Mr Beast doc as a reply to your first comment and see how it goes.
Display comments in random order. Then it becomes possible to add a top level comment and have it not disappear forever into the bottom of the page, forever unseen.
Alternatively, comment as quickly as possible. Ideally, be the first person to comment. Just comment your general thoughts and then fill in everything you wanted to say over a series of edits while simultaneously improving the comment's logic, grammar and spelling. This one goes all the way back to stackoverflow. It's a habit I have never been able to shake to this day because of how active I used to be on that site. Probably contributed to my account getting rate limited here.
The fact that you made it to his company is enough incentive for you to go through the onboarding document.
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.
In as far as this is a document that says 'do your best, give 110% 25/8, sacrifice everything for the company', most of what I'm seeing here is the same general approval that latter-day HN gives all impractical advice that a very young person might come up with. ('Just do gooderer, all the time!')
I don't think the change is that people now are now closed-minded, I think it's more that something like Mr Beast's PDF of peppy twenty-something bromides simply wouldn't have made the front page at all in 2014. This would be over on Digg with the other pop-Internet stories.
More broadly, given that the comment section appears around 60-70% positive for Mr Beast, I'm unsure what it is you're actually after. Would you prefer it be 100% positive? Wouldn't that be a huge loss for the intellectual diversity that this site has to offer? Aren't there other, better places for hive takes (e.g. Reddit)?
Respectfully, I think the takes you're taking issue with are precisely the remnants of the old, diverse HN, and the takes you're tacitly encouraging are the monoculture that's taken over the rest of the Internet.
To the grandparent: if you put in the effort to make yourself more clear, you might get the quality responses you wish for.
Shades of "What You Can't Say"[0].
They’re not saying it changed their worldview. Their point is that if a person is just immediately nitpicking it and dismissing it, then there’s probably something in it that can change their worldview. That person’s project management and storytelling skills probably suck (because most people’s project management and storytelling skills suck).
This is the first line of my paragraph.
This is the second line of my paragraph.
They are separated because HN and Reddit formatting is different.
Less "Hacker" More "Greed via Computer" So the idea that they aren't bothered by Mr Beast's lack of integrity is because they too find deceit acceptable so long as they profit. Because, someone else before him did, so why shouldn't he? It's toxic greed all the way down in this view.
the bizarre social Darwinism nonsense that permeates the internet has done a nice job of taking this antisocial mindset - passersby at a glance recognize it quite rightly as the ideology of the asshole - and rebranded it as 'smart' and a mere recognition of the 'real world' (much to the confusion of people succeeding and enjoying the company of others doing so without robbing one another)
I agree with you on this but I don't think it's a failure. I think people just get tired after a while. They get tired, and then they start displaying their disapproval in ways that require less work.
It's just easier than typing out all those words and being ignored.
> My greatest frustration is trying to describe for instance why someone like Mr Beast is antisocial and then being met by responses that obviously never bother to understand what my point was
It's really tiresome.
At some point you start to realize that you have fundamentally different values than the people you're trying to discuss things with, that these values are irreconcilable and that further argument will just make people hate you instead of convincing them.
This isn't really about "sour grapes", we have moral objections to what others are doing, and there's no point in trying to have those arguments with people who do those things for a paycheck.
There's a bit of missed irony here that you decrying the 'sour grapes' crowd with 'sour grapes' of your own, and yourself have been upvoted to the top. I do agree this culture of indulged victimhood is really dragging internet discourse down, but you surely can see your own complicity in it?
I did go watch a couple Mr. Beast videos. I can see why people knee-jerk about them here. They are just not my cup of tea, and they're not in a way that really rubs me the wrong way. That's OK! I can be convinced that's just a "me" thing! It doesn't matter; I'm not building too much of "don't like Mr. Beast" into my identity.
I take your point, but also get why people might have viscerally negative opinions about this particular subject? I get the frustration with superficial negativity crowding out discussions though.
I would argue the opposite. Often the comments that OP is describing are people who have very little knowledge of the topic at hand, only strongly held emotional feelings based on some narrative that appeals to their bias.
The problem is, HN is a crowd of people who grew up believing they would all become the next Steve Jobs...a decade or two later, the chips have fallen, and most of us have not become that (yet many have had to watch their former peers become wildly successful). So what we have now is a community of bitter, frustrated, and resentful people hurling those feelings onto whatever the topic of the day is.
Instead of accepting your jealousy and failure to achieve [insert desired outcome], it's much easier to believe that...whomever or whatever becomes successful...is doing so not out of merit, but out of deceit. By placing yourself on a higher moral pedestal, you avoid the pain of direct comparison. Ex: Sure, [insert person or company] is successful, but it's because they prey on [insert moral failing of both the product and the people who desire it]!
As someone who has assiduously avoided watching his videos (because of this opinion), I was impressed by the document because it is incredibly practical. The advice about communication, managing critical components and bottlenecks - very very good.
Of course he is singlemindedly focused on building a massive YouTube channel. In the employee handbook it does not say: we treat you well and do the most ethical thing
It says: come here and work hard, we will make a big YouTube channel. (Not: a YouTube channel that is good for society!! Just big!!)
I feel like the Peter Thiel world has eaten the Moxie Marlinspike world, and this is such a huge, monstrous loss for intellectual curiosity, individual liberty, and human flourishing.
I don't think it's just the fact that his videos are expensive click bait where he throws money around... it's the fact that he has some very shady, borderline illegal(maybe actually illegal?) practices. the livestream marketing the chocolate to children to win entries into giveaways that he then scrubs from the internet are probably not legal is one example. there are a few videos on how scummy he is. I think the visceral reaction to him as some kind of genius is warranted.
that said the pdf has some nuggets of wisdom even if it's from a tainted source.
Proceeds to not describe the opposite, and instead projects the viewpoint of the generation that grew up believing that becoming social media icons was the equivalent to being Steve Jobs.
We just recognize the grifter attitudes and process from extensive exposure.
Yes, it is exhausting to read through those comments, more exhausting to argue against them. Not sure if it is worth it anymore, this is probably not a tide that can be stopped. But HN is still one of the few sites that is not wholly dominated by last men, and you can find thoughtful comments that broaden your perspective occasionally. Enjoy it while it lasts!
I don't think it's disputable that what Enron was doing, by the end, was fraud. 'The Smartest Guys in the Room' got a little too caught up in attacking mark-to-market, which itself isn't intrinsically fraudulent, but boy can it be misused for fraud, and the Enron guys absolutely and inarguably used M2M (among many other things) for fraud. Wilfully and knowingly.
Life is indeed shades of grey, but don't get so unmoored in your relativism that you end up giving cover to people doing genuinely bad things.
There are many more discussing all that has come out recently about that channel.
tldr it's not that deep bro, business people are shady and draw ire mostly thanks to decades of business people being shady and drawing ire.
It alleges that many of the “contests” are staged and artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws around such games. I think to many that might feel like fraud.
Think toxic game forums. They used to be nice and a good place, but now? It's a hot mess and everyone who wants proper discourse already self selected out.
Not a rhetorical question; confused.
Can you really not think of any powerful/wealthy/influential/successful/... person that you just have a simple fundamental value disagreement with, and would definitely not want to be in their shoes even given the opportunity?
I read the blog post and I found it interesting. It's something I will file under "interesting" and over time with many other things informs how I think about the topic of building successful businesses and teams. It's something I've been thinking and doing (more on the teams side, less on the business) for a while. It's not something that you just read a blog about and then go do what that blog post says. This is true of technical topics as well. If life was as easy as just do what this other (successful) guy/company does or thinks (in whatever discipline or on whatever topic) then we'd all be immensely successful at everything. It's true that success and failures should feed into building our intuition of what works and what doesn't but intuition is built over a lot of experiences.
In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.
At least personally I appreciate both kinds of thoughtful comments, and it's what's keeping me coming back here. Equating valid criticism with "negativity" on the other hand honestly seems pretty toxic/cultish to me.
I'm not a fan of Mr. Beast but it's quite a phenomena and human nature being something universal I'm sure there are some interesting nuggets from how that business is run.
I also don't get or watch reality shows from more traditional media.
However, I would argue that on this particular forum, in 2024, there's a lot of people pretending they are making "highly rational" value assessments which are in fact emotional upvote blankets. It feels like a vibe shift over the last 10 years from a community of optimistic entrepreneurial types to a community of, as another commenter eloquently put it, Nietzschean "Last Men."
a) The youtube market is not like other markets, his strategy is successful because (among many things) the youtube algorithm promotes frequent posting. He knows youtube very well, but it's clear from his other business ventures that he's not good in other markets. I don't think you can translate ALL the stuff there into other markets.
b) There's a lot of unhealthy stuff mixed in with the parts that seem like they drive his success. If somebody does X, Y and Z and gets insane levels of success, they may not realize that it's X and Y driving the success, and Z is actively harmful. But I guess it depends on what you consider "harmful" - some might think "harmful" means "hurts the bottom line" and some might think "hurts those lowest on the rung". Either one of those might be true. It's like people who think being an asshole like early Steve Jobs is the way to be a successful leader, when he arguably achieved more lasting impact when he mellowed out.
With that context, I think some of the critiques you mention have substance.
"He's making low value content" -> I think this is true, because he's optimized for the market he's in. I think it's a legit critique that this strategies may not be sustainable or applicable to "high value content". He even expressly says this: "Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible."
"the culture of the company is horrible" -> I absolutely think this is worth talking about, and I find it hard to see building a long term company on his approach. The myth that you need to push people to breaking points to be successful is poison.
"he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill" -> Well anyone saying that is just wrong. He obviously is very good at what he does.
Personally, I don't think it's a good long term business strategy to depend so much on a single larger company, one who has a history of changing the algorithm without warning or explanation. But it's a good, but painful, short term strategy, and he will come out of it perfectly fine whenever he suddenly becomes irrelevant. But there are others who won't/haven't come out with much, and I think it's good to have a discussion if this is right or not.
But there are good things there, the critical components, the importance of communication. The direct feedback of "You are my bottleneck" is good, but it easily could turn into passive aggression and ways to pass the buck. I'm sure there's plenty of low quality comments here, but don't just write off all criticism as virtue signalling or whatever. There are def lessons in here, but that doesn't mean it's all above questioning.
Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is well known for being very anti-HN). <>>40826280 >
I'm not going to beg you to share it after all, but just letting you know: if you would, I'd read it.
Fix both of these, and HN would have far fewer issues related to what you are describing.
All other explanations of this phenomenon which don't talk about the above two are not even close to on point.
HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous than he ever was in their own eras.
It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all of the garbage from the french post-modern neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks. You are the thing you hate.
You should expect reward from dedication because you’ll get it. Not from some god on high or some random person called Tyler Smith. It’s from yourself or the fruits of your labor.
I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts. (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that when you see posts with that kind of social signaling, downvote and flag them.
The downvote is because these posts are always extremely uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.
The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread."
This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.
The points in the OP boil down to:
* Focus on your product
* Hire well
* Be extra diligent towards bottlenecks
* State your metrics clearly
* Communicate often and immediately
________
These are standard guidelines for running businesses. HN commenters are unimpressed because there are no novel generalizable takeaways from his document.
For a few years, Adam Sandler was producing low-brow schlock that made 100s of millions in the box office. It was effective. It's not clear if there was a takeaway
________
There is 1 takeaway from Mr. Beast that appears generalizable.
Sometimes, for a short duration, you hit gold. During that time, obsessively extract all value you can. Merch, videos, exploitation, what have you. For a solid minute, you're Midas. So touch as many things as you can. Be shameless beyond recognition.
Too often, businesses see their hockey-stick moment as a sign of long term sustainable growth. That's a lie (in expectation). A moment is all it is. Wring out your business for every dollar you can extract, liquidate as much as you can, and bail before you're past the crest of the wave.
I'm confident that Mr. Beast's Youtube stardom will die in a few years. But, he will leave behind a legacy of obsessive extraction that is unlikely to be matched for quite some time.
Props to this guy for producing popular content and piecing together some management concepts, but this is so far from anything corporate leaders “need” to read.
In the section quoted below for example, he starts off by writing about critiques, in which he appears to have immediately grasped for words that aren't suited for the purpose, such as how the nonsensical "personalized to" should have been "focused on". He add the completely unnecessary pseudointellectual "to one extent or another", to make it seem like he is intensely judging ideas. He then says the "social purpose" is "universal" which I'm not following the meaning of at all. I doubt many others are either, but it just seems like another pseudointellectual throwaway. He then follows that with "which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview", which is perhaps the most atrociously nonsensical and poorly laid out sentence fragment I've read in a long time. In the part following that, he needed a period before "actually" for it to make sense as he likely intended.
Honestly, it seems like he's just trying to write words as they come to him as if in a heated and rash spoken conversation, in which he has a elevated personal impression of erudition, compared to the people he believes he communicating down to.
"The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that."
Does this guy know his business? Oh, hell, yes. He clearly knows his business cold. Success always has a significant chunk of luck, but skill is a part of luck, and he clearly demonstrates that skill.
However, just because someone really knows their business and does well at it does not mean we simply give them a complete pass. For example, payday lenders know their business very well yet we still consider them to be exploitative and parasitic.
This guy is super-specializing in explicitly targeting pretty much mostly teenaged males with purely dopamine hit content with very little benefit (if any and possibly a negative effect) to the audience. He is pushing the video equivalent of junk food to an audience with weak, underdeveloped impulse control.
This is going to get pushback, and it absolutely deserves that pushback.
> excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.
Which priors should I reexamine? The fact that he is effectively targeting adolescent males? The fact that YouTube is all consumed with feeding the ad machine and should be forced out of Google? The fact that social media has turned out to be a pox upon our society?
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
your priors.
I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
When someone writes something that goes against what most people
think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
think about changing your mind on this topic.
And there isn't anything wrong with profit maximisation; we use profits to make decisions about resource allocation. That matters a lot, small inefficiencies leading to waste magnified over the entire economy represent huge damage to the people scraping by on the margins.
So we don't want to break people, but adding one more person makes the company worse. So a very successful company is probably going to push people very hard, because otherwise communication costs eat it alive. I've been in way too many companies that got way worse over time, just because the headcount increases ruined productivity.
I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the word "understanding"), but an opinion.
There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that "everything has been turned only into profit maximization". It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview, an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree, very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with little empirical basis.
As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing them at every turn is boring, and against the purpose of HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate for HN:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm of generic tangents and internet tropes.
There's a place for activism, but it's not here.
By the end they were doing clear and obvious fraud, particularly in how they orchestrated the incoming funding for projects, and it had become clear that M2M was not working, but I don't think this was the only possible outcome.
To give an example with interpersonal relationships- never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all the time.
Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.
* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.
* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...
It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.
- don’t sneer at the rest of the community
- don’t comment about the upvoting of comments
- don’t say hacker news is turning into Reddit (not explicitly the case here, but similar in spirit)
Yeah, some responses will be less thoughtful than others, but that’s what voting is for.
Plenty of very successful people that I know personally think that attention-hacking stuff like Mr Beast videos, YouTube/Instagram/TikTok shorts etc are bad news.
Hell, I wouldn't consider myself Steve Jobs level, but I think I've done alright, and I feel that way, so, er, where does that leave me? Do I need 700 million or whatever for it to not be sour grapes? There are plenty of extremely successful (whether financial or otherwise) individuals that I do respect.
That doesn't mean the criticism is false. But it's always weird to me when I see it put forward as a new thing.
There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest improvement.
I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make a difference?".
Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...
Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
whether that is convenient altruism masquerading as a disdain for greed or sheer jealousy at their own lack of agency or fortuna or virtu is for their own ego to hopefully one day confront.
completely incorrectlyUnder a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.
HN also has a lot of the "other" type (those who are rational but honest and objective), and the main distinction should be which of those dominate. And I'd argue instead that on HN, that group dominates with their comments and upvotes/downvotes.
Eg. I consider myself the "engineer" or "hacker" type of person: someone who critically looks at most things, and is quick to come up with ideas for improvement ("what could be better?", which is really, to criticize), and need to remember to acknowledge the positives and praise the good. I drew more motivation from being involved with free and open source software or academia than from ever wanting to be "the next Steve Jobs". I totally don't see HN as the echo chamber, but quite the opposite.
It's really not that hard. If they sincerely thought they were doing something legal they would have sat back and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-Shredder 2400™ in a panic and started feeding it what, for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to call "evidence".
That's a line, crossed pretty definitively.
Cockroaches.
The Enron scandal took place over nearly a 10 year period. The company was weird but likely not illegal for probably half that, most of even senior leadership appeared to be in the dark about the actual fraud (willingly or otherwise) until probably a few years left. They only started shredding evidence with weeks left. This is a 20k person company, no matter how you slice it that many people aren't committing a large conspiracy together and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
Don't dismiss the entire community because of the loud people and their upvoters though. There are other people here, and they don't necessarily browse HN at a high enough frequency to outvote or outcomment the majority.
(I personally think the document is very good, on-point, and great advice for ambitious young people. I'm no longer that young any more, and I'm also aware of a different side: when you push really hard, you can end up burning out. That's the other side of the intensity the document advocates. You can burn out. It's the single biggest reason I don't push so hard these days.)
Act with morals, work hard, self-improve, and everything will work out!
I'm not the least or most successful of my peers, but I am sympathetic to bitterness and pretty bitter myself that people aren't better, that banal evil and selfishness and deceit are so omnipresent.
I've founded two start-ups in my life, both still generating revenue and still alive but practically failures for their intent. The first one failed primarily since I didn't know how to execute, had no understanding of business model and distribution, all the classics. The second one I think should have been much more successful were it not for a lot of random factors: covid, scheming employees, much harder sales cycles, etc. You may think I'm rationalizing this, but I've had enough self-doubt to reach this conclusion.
I am jealous of the people that founded start-ups 10 years before me, and which gave bad advice that I realized too late to be bad. But at the same time, does this invalidate my view that the entire ecosystem is deeply corrupt and unfair?
Success and failure are a matter of luck and circumstance to a large degree. This implies that outside of a fee meritorious success stories (see the original 90s video of Bezos arguing why book are best to start as a niche), most success stories in the startup world have no more merit than your own, so why wouldn't you expect negative feelings to exist?
I found it quite clear. But then I agreed with it.
The "social purpose of the critiques is universal" is saying that, in opposition to the disparate and varied, personalized, nature of the specific critiques, their social purpose is all the same.
This universal purpose is saying "I felt uncomfortable ... might have to re-evaluate world view ... I'll upvote all the detractors".
> elevated personal impression of erudition
This is ironic, I have to say.
Anyhow, I found it easy to read the comment. It does flow a bit like stream of consciousness, but it's comprehensible, probably in part because I agree with a good amount of it. You shouldn't expect polished prose in comment forums on the interwebs.
If you felt that it talked down to you (personalized), then perhaps evaluate the social purpose of your own comment (did you feel uncomfortable? I got the impression you did).
This isn't the case here. Most people do not want to be rich at any cost. I might feel some jealousy about Microsoft or wolfram.com, but not about a YouTuber whose massive team produces bland addictive videos, especially if YouTube is full of good videos if you know where to look.
I think it was well written because you could clearly hear his voice through the writing and empathize with his internal struggle with being in a position of authority while also feeling unqualified for the job.
> Did it provide any useful or unique insights?
As someone who has been very frustrated in the past by my perception of the inefficiency of communicating "up and over" instead of talking laterally to an engineer on another team, I thought he succinctly communicated why it's often necessary and helped me understand the value of that practice.
> The writing itself seemed terrible and riddled with spelling errors.
Orthography is only one aspect what makes writing good or bad. And a relatively less relevant one IMO.
Bezos won because he is a cutthroat entrepreneur who deeply understands the rules. The Amazon story is a Bezos creation, specifically designed to draw attention away from the ugly parts of Amazon and to make Bezos look like a plucky underdog fighting for consumers. It's a PR narrative and hilariously distorted.
I don't really care for Mr Beast (but don't think about him much either) and I don't think this is especially revelatory stuff, but I think most of it is pretty sound advice for how to be effective.
This account name is not my real name, but I have thought about making an HN account with my real name. Mostly I just try to spend less time on HN these days.
As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.
Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).
As to your second to last comment, I wouldn't have even mentioned it had the other commenter not mentioned how they found the prose jarring. To your question in your final line, I didn't say that I felt I was being talked down to, I said that the author seemed like he thought he was talking down to an audience below him, such as with his line where he mentions his startup friends whom he shared his text with, but wouldn't share the same with HN.
That's certainly true. I'm surprised there wasn't an embedded provocative thumbnail for the document at the very top.
HN feels like a bunch of people bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable. Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
The archetype HN holds in highest regard would be an anonymous European socialist lone Mother Theresa/Jack Reacher hacker living off the grid (privacy reasons, of course) and grinding away at open source dev utilities out of the goodness of their heart. Anything outside of that? Profit maximizing drivel intended to trick the dumb masses!
I know an "anti nitpicker" who is entirely opposite to that attitude when it comes to their social appearance and perception. One hair on their tie is catastrophic. One publicly searchable webpage that shows a decades old picture of them is an extreme problem that warrants hiring a company to clean up. It's interesting how, in matters that are important to some of these people, seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant details suddenly matter to an extraordinary degree.
The anti nitpicking stance is a byproduct of the extreme overvaluation of social perception. Often these people do not like to look like they have made a mistake. And thus they avoid conflict or paint it as irrelevant in belief that it will save their appearance.
I'm sure there's some disgruntled employee complaining somewhere, but I have not seen any legitimate complaints about him. All those "Mr Beast is a fraud!?!" videos have no substance, and are just people using his name for views.
It's pretty out of touch, exhausting and kinda makes me feel embarrassed for whoever posted it.
People think they are so high and mighty and have everything figured out. The fact is, they are just an average human trying to make it through this world like everyone else. Just like me, just like you. Nobody has it figured out.
And to go back onto topic, I thought the leaked PDF was fascinating. There is a lot of good management stuff in that document.
> Like a bunch of grumpy old men, we don’t like new things here, the 90s were the peak of the internet and computing apparently.
I invite you to consider, based on your own wording, that you are doing more feeling than rationalizing. It is some work, and perhaps not completely possible, to do a comprehensive and correct meta analysis aiming to gauge the state of rational vs non-rational commentary on HN.
> bitter about AI, bitter about social media, bitter about the Saas model, bitter about Crypto, bitter about ads, bitter about privacy, bitter about capitalism, bitter about Elon Musk, bitter about every damn thing imaginable
The fact that the world is imperfect is not a reason to ignore that the world is imperfect. One must of course satisfy their Ego and make some peace with the world that is around them that it is in some sense "good", but the act of a rational mind, after it is done indulging the (necessary?) behaviors of the animal in which it resides, is to relentlessly nitpick, criticize, deconstruct the world around it, as far is it is possible, without feeling.
Yes, all those things suck, or have things that suck about them. If one of them is the field in which you work, you may even resent the criticism. And yet, it is only by acknowledging what is wrong that we can build and do what is (more) right.
Perhaps what I will say, is that if HN is supposed to be a place of technical innovation, it is undeniably true that it is no longer possible to easily innovate, anymore. And if that is true, then there should some discussion of all the ways that what has been built now constrains/no longer makes possible the alternatives. That is not something you can change with a "happy go lucky attitude" or renouncing a cynical one. In fact, one can argue that "can do no harm" attitude is what has brought about this venture. Perhaps a slower, more considered approach, would have resulted in a better outcome.
It is the opposite of idealism to see the world as it is. Pragmatism is rooted in acknowledging both the good and bad.
Idealism is ignoring the bad in the name of "pragmatism". Maybe you have to ignore it for your Public Relations metrics, but not for your executive or engineering perspective(s).
I honestly don't know what you mean here, I hope you can clarify.
I'm a long time reader, but only recently registered to post. I think this statement is quite illuminating to illustrate the point of the person you're responding to.
I actually didn't know HN existed until a colleague told me about it as a place to find a bit more optimism about technology than has become the norm on places like reddit. The overwhelming vibe on reddit is that capitalism bad, big tech bad, AI bad, etc. And I have definitely noticed this a lot more on HN in the last few years than when I first started reading.
I don't know why, and obviously it is just my anecdotal opinion, but it is how I feel, and I have seen many posters who feel the same.
Obviously we should all be open to different views, but sometimes I just want a little haven where I can read about technology and cool stuff alongside people who are mostly optimistic about that stuff, without having to be swamped by "end state capitalism" sentiment, like everywhere else. That's just what I want, I'm not making any moral judgement on what others want.
I mean, this is evident in posts by one of "model" founders, Paul Graham. Many of his posts are about how most are doing things wrong, only framed in a positive way (for success, do this instead of the usual things you've been doing).
So perhaps you came in attracted by one side, but stuck around for the arguments, even if unconsciously ;)
Other's would know more than me, I'm just an anecdote.
All I can say is that I find many responses to be Pavlovian, not well thought out, overly negative or cynical, and in my humble opinion just part of a low effort zeitgeist against capitalism.