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Comment by devin | Hacker News Reader

When I was learning to play the game Go, someone told me that there's some old advice about "losing your first 100 games as quickly as possible". That's stuck with me.

Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.

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I got basically the same advice from my adviser about collecting data for my thesis. "If too many experiments are failing," he said, "just do more of them, and faster."

There is a photography adage that your first ten-thousand photographs are your worst.

I'm not sure I agree -- sometimes you get lucky or circumstance is favorable -- but I am certain that my second ten-thousand photographs were better, on average, than my first.

My iPhone photo’s are vastly better than anything I ever took with my DSLR, but I’m positive it’s mostly for that reason.

That said, the incredible digital processing helps a lot.

If at first you don't succeed, try two more times so that your failure is "statistically significant"

or: If at first you don't succeed, Sky Diving is not for you.

What part constitutes success? Jumping or safely arriving on the ground?

In that case it's still statistically significant ;)

Sometimes I wonder if failing twice is an optimal evolutionary state. Once is not enough to know if it’s worth changing for.

Yeah, as a kid this is what always bugged me about Wile E. Coyote.

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