Don't plug leaks when you got no boat | Hacker News Reader

Don't plug leaks when you got no boat

humbledmba.com

36 pointsbenehmke11 comments

TLDR version:

We were solving problems that hadn't occurred yet! And I see this all the time. You invest emotionally in a dream and begin to believe in it as if it's already happened. And if you let those big fictitious plans infect your product development process, you're in a lot of trouble. Product development is about figuring out the single most important problem that exists right now and doing that and only that.

Just to be civilized, here's an explanation of why I downvoted you: I go to HN to find interesting stuff to read and discuss. I don't like this new trend of posting the "TLDR version" (and I have a special loathing for those who request it). It annoys me to have people try to chew my food-for-thought for me.

You do realize that his posting the TLDR doesn't prevent you from reading the article and having your own opinion, right?

Many people do like summaries and I don't think anyone should be penalized for providing them... Assuming they aren't too off-base.

I guess that what puts me off is the "TL;DR" expression itself. It passes a judgment both on the content ("it was too long, so I didn't read it") and the readers of the comment ("since you don't read stuff that's long, here's what it's about").

I'm certainly not criticizing hammock's summary. As these things go, his is pretty accurate. But the best you can say about a summary is that it doesn't really add anything to a discussion -- that's what makes a good summary.

Think of it more like metadata. I've had good summaries get me to read the entire article, when I would have blown it off by the title alone. (Time isn't infinite... You have to choose somehow.)

So in that respect summaries can indirectly add to the discussion.

I'm sitting on an HN self post on this topic, which largely follows your logic and expands it a bit more (though not too much for a self post). Haven't been able to figure out if I should post it or not.

I at least would love to see it.

I agree. There's a fine line between preventing problems before they occur, and wasting time fighting problems that don't exist.

For a startup, I maintain that your time is better spent developing like a crazy person and let the chips fall where they may. (There are extreme cases, of course, but I hope that any customer issues are driving development, since that's kind of the point of a startup in the first place.)

For an established business, a lot more time needs to be spent on the customer's experience and maintaining that relationship.

But there's a fine balance to strike here. There's a massive spectrum of solutions to the problem of "Prevent the site from being swamped with spam and other inappropriate comments". Just because it isn't a problem now, because you have no users, doesn't mean it isn't going to be an immediate problem as soon as you start acquiring them. And just because there's an arbitrary upper limit of the complexity of those solutions doesn't mean that there's no point in addressing the problem at all right now.

"Keep V1 as your minimum viable product" is the advice. And the V1 solution could be as simple as "have an emergency global off-switch for the commenting system".

Lack of any kind of arbitration mechanism can spell the death of a site like this. There's definitely a balancing act.

Don't carry around an umbrella, except if you are a banker

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