Hacker News Reader

Comment by vdaniuk | Hacker News Reader

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude.

Sure, validation is not a silver bullet. However, lots of startups make it or break due to luck and no-one(yet) can't eliminate randomness in a stochastic(debatable) system like technology entrepreneurship ecosystem. Validation helps to decrease the chance of failing, though. The famous quote by George Box reads "Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful."

Also validation is not listening to what people tell, it's also observing actions of users when they interact with the MVP.

View on HN

>"There are no rules for good photographs, there are just good photographs". I disagree with this and think that it is a self-defeating, irrational attitude.

Yeah, I think he's misinterpreting what his photographer friend means. There are TONS of rules for good photographs, everything from technical ("sufficient lighting") all the way up to art theory ("rule of thirds"). The guy's point was probably that any subject, at any time, can possibly be photographed in a way the conforms to the requirements of an artistically pleasing image. Trying to fit that notion to the idea that entrepreneurs should just leap for the stars without checking to see if their figurative lens cap is off is not really very sound.

It's funny that I mentioned randomness in my second comment as well :)

I tend to agree with you to some extent, even about the quote for the comment. But, startups as an example fails to me, because as we all know, most of the startups fail anyway.

p.s. there are rules for good photographs but following the rules can only put you on bar with other people. Learns the rules so that you can break them. Learn to validate so that you know when NOT to validate.

Hm, I have an interesting thought. If "rules" is a consensus about best practices it is a standard model of the particular domain. Conditions of narrative manipulation and tragedy of the commons apply.

With that in mind, one should break the rules only if they have a high degree of confidence in their ability to discover a model that is better than standard model or understanding that the entire modelling approach is tainted. However, Dunning-Kruger effect hypothesis states that less competent are irrationally sure of themselves and vice versa. Are we in a situation where most actors on the market are trying to break the rules to their own detriment?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com