Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much.
But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed.
I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause.
PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.
> I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups
This is certainly me. Generally interested in tech (and many of the other things that HNers seem to be interested in these days), but no real interest in startups. Hope I am not ruining HN for the old timers.
I started using this place a lot more in the last couple of years as Reddit went to shit, so I suspect that was a big driving force in changing the audience here.
Relative out-timer here. I came here because of smart people having smart discussions about life, universe, and everything (tech or otherwise). HN both got me to drink the startup kool-aid early on, and then cured me from it later on, ultimately making me a startup-skeptic (and infecting me with an unhealthy dose of cynicism). I guess this is how growing up looks like :).
Ultimately, I still hang around HN because of high-quality discussions; there's really no other place like it, or at least I've found none. Or maybe after all this time, it just feels like home. Still, were the balance to shift hard towards startup talk, I fear we'd lose all the intellectual curiosity driven submissions and discussions - they'd just turn into sharing tips and tricks to make moar moneys with tech, which I personally find BOOOOOORING AF.
This was always me, and I've been here 15 years. It was pretty much a tech forum then (arguably more then than now, there's much more discussion of culture war issues now, even when stories are flagged it's ever-present in the comments). I think the time when HN was primarily startups was much further back and much briefer than most people nostalgically remember.
As a Canadian in a low COL area working somewhere with almost absolute job security, a pension plan and plenty of opportunities for learning (I have a few 3 hours sessions on quantum computer starting next week :D ) I don't care much for the SV startup ...
I am here for the selection of interesting articles and the high quality
comments when it's not a political thread (those threads have less rational lower quality comments and I am also guilty of producing some os them, I apologize dang).
If I were to make an off topic comment and by no means I am picking on you personally, however as another Canadian, I find this general attitude of Canadians towards innovation unsettling and dare I say it's the reason why we are always playing catch up with US. It's also the number one reason why we are bleeding top talent to Americans which results our nation great economy loss.
I suppose you can argue that we have more of a "European" attitude, to which I would respond that while we pay high taxes like Europe, we hardly get any of the social security benefits that they enjoy, so in short we end up with worst of both worlds: high taxes, low salaries and limited benefits.
You can't expect a nation to develop the next FANG when people's idea of business is purchasing a home in the "suburbs" of Toronto and renting out its basement.
>be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups.
For me what hn use to be an interaction between art and tech in the theme of hackers & painters. Tech along is not so interesting IMHO unless it's in the context of art and/or humanity.
Maciej wrote "Dabblers and Blowhards" in 2005 (that was an eyeopening date to go check). Hackers and Painters was always for the fresh and easily impressionable to feel a sense of specialness.
Upvotes and downvotes are about art vs humanity.. ("painting with #s"[0])
see below
[0] an inane activity which has often been unduly embraced/denounced
>In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York accepted four early designs of paint by number by Max Klein for its Department of Architecture and Design, donated by Jacquelyn Schiffman.
Everyone is so negative, cynical, and bitter on HN now, it's really sad to me. I went through YC in 2012 and I feel like the community here is unrecognizable, the quality of discourse is so low it feels hard to participate.
I'm not cynical, but my relationship with technology has surely become adversarial.
I still remember the days when self-driving cars seemed just around the corner and inevitable. When Google was organizing the world's information and ethically pure. When I trusted software to do the right thing.
But nowadays... Good luck finding any trustworthy megacorp. We've commoditized trust for profits (e.g. from Couchsurfing to AirBnB) and the result is that people became less trusting.
I can understand complaining about cynicism, but it's dishonest to pretend it's not coming from a real place. All the complaints people are voicing elsewhere in this thread are true:
- it's true that you will get jack squat if you're employee #4 or later (and in the process you'll work more hours with less job security than at a FAANG)
- it's true that the startup scene has delivered basically nothing of real value to the economy in the last fifteen years: it has all been regulatory arbitrage, intrusive ad-tech, financial engineering, and, of course, shitcoins
- it's true that the people at the top turned out to be amoral psychopaths who practically tripped over themselves to kiss the ring when authoritarianism arrived and their talk about improving the world was hot air
If you're going to complain about the cynicism, you should at least respond to the above instead of pretending it's just grumps wanting to ruin everyone's fun.
> Everyone is so negative, cynical, and bitter on HN now
Our profession got hollowed out over the years. Of course the vibes at the bar next to the plant will be down.
> it's really sad to me
There's a thing I've seen on HN a few times over the years, where people expect HN to be like a secret oasis of fun away from the realities of the professional pursuits that brought us together in the first place. Why is that?
the only thing that I've seen growing that I hope is pushed back is the growing number of jokers. I see people posting here like it's reddit or slashdot. it's not, and that's part of what makes it valuable. every joke comment is a loss of signal in the forum.
jokes are great, but unless it's a joke that has some truth squirreled away in it that's worth knowing and well transmitted by the joke, it shouldn't be here. especially on its own. little joke at the end of a long relevant anecdote? great. just replying because you had a moment of wit you'd like to share? think twice and don't, please.
there are plenty of places to be a comedian. I enjoy it myself on more than a few. but I would prefer it not be here.
The promise of technology was different. The stories of engineers at FB making millions in options were still fresh in people's minds. The untapped potential of mobile and SAAS and a dozen other things.
Tech lost its glitter. It is now just another arm of rentier capitalism, not too dissimilar from banks and finance.
> But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group
This miracle is probably just hard work in disguise -- dang et al. HN also has a self-censorship bias and some self-enforcement, but mostly not an abrasive kind -- people (mostly) gently remind each other of the rules, and sometimes viciously downvote comments that are not useful/in the spirit of HN.
HN and Dan’s work are arguably worth more than the VC part of YC. The VC side plays the capital musical chairs game (selling the equity to a greater fool before the music stops), this is the valuable output from that.
Oh I entirely concur; I think there's a team of sorts, not just Dan, but I'm sure the gentle steering is a huge part of the reason things are still on course.
This is just another public website, various people come here since its interesting and discussions engaging. Its one of the last places which is free/public and discussions don't immediately turn primitive, political and emotional unlike rest of internet. People from various backgrounds come and have interesting things to say, which is often refreshing and enlightening (at least to this fella).
Many if not most of folks at this point have nothing to do with neither startups nor hacking. Neither do I for example, and I am here for a decade+.
I'm a startup founder doing startup right now. I'm experiencing burnout, by which I mean, after half a year of working 6-7 days a week 10-16 hours a day I really needed an 8 hour workday to get my focus back. Specially after working non stop for two weeks for a demo for McDonald's with only 6hrs sleep per night and then two devices fried because of a messed up 5v connection so we missed the demo. Went to bed at 20:30 today because the startup hustle is real. No rest for the .. startup founders.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
I guess it's mostly the same people on HN as those 12 years ago. Apparently I'd created my account in 2012 and at that point I'd been lurking for some time.
Well I'm still here but I've gotten a lot older. And you have, too!
Yeah I'm here because reddit's programming community became unusable in the late 2010s but especially over the last few years. For example, I'd see a post about CockroachDB and every single reddit comment would be some low effort joke making fun of the name. Meanwhile I'd come here and the creator would be in the comments answering questions. When reddit changed their default sort away from upvotes and towards engagement metrics in 2021, most of the useful places there sort of withered away.
This is definitely true. I'm working on a project to recap 2024 HN.
Two things that immediately jumped out at me:
1. 40% of the posts/comments in all of 2024 came from accounts created IN 2024. There are a LOT of new people on HN.
2. The most commented post of the year was a news article about Donald Trump's election victory, so TV news-esque content is definitely getting more traction than expected.
Good point. I started looking at HN a few years ago, and though I knew it was run by YC it didn’t even occur to me that it at one point was startup-oriented
I stopped reading hn regularly a couple years ago just because the top-voted comments were so reliably negative cynical takes. And not just for articles related to startups.
I'd say starting a company to make something people want in order to sell it for money is still relevant. It's just that you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years, slowly growing the business and balancing the risks and opportunities along the way. You won't be looking for an "exit" because you want to take care of the company you built. That's a very different story from whatever vibe it is that startups acquired after the dotcom boom, i.e. find something that hasn't been done before, scales quickly, and sell the company after a few years for 1000x, and then something.
That never was sustainable, I think, and effectively it became a glorified hiring process for big tech who bought the best toy companies to get to the people behind. And now even big tech figured it's cheaper to just hire the talent directly and not buy their token company for a few million first just to get the guys in.
Not saying a good company with a good idea and execution at the right time couldn't still make it big quick: there always were some lucky ones and there will always be. But the process isn't repeatably stable enough that there's a lot of wasted effort to make a few shooting stars. And everybody seems to be slowly accepting that. Go for it if the opportunity arises but if you spend 10 years trying and trying without the fish biting you're likely better off saving off from a decent salary when those years have passed.
> you're looking at working quietly, humbly, but perseverantly for the next 25 years
> That never was sustainable, I think
Another aspect with this being (un)sustainable is lack of affordable healthcare. I bet many people would take more risks if they didn't have to worry about this aspect of their lives.
The Swedes sure seem to think so. Per capita Swedish entrepreneurship is like 7x the rest of the euro zone, and they’re convinced that it’s that aspect of the social safety net that help prop up that high level of personal risk taking.
Agreed. I was starting a small law firm (small biz, not a startup) and asked other dudes who had done the same what they did for healthcare. The all said the same thing -- I had my wife get a job at a bank.
But at that point, does it fit a startup definition?
In my view, startups always involve rapid growth and VC money to achieve it. If the company doesn't meet that criteria, isn't that simply a regular business?
I agree however it's the 'Paul Graham' definition. i.e. a trade off must be maintained between the bottom line and growth and a startup is a business that prioritises growth over basic financial sustainability.
I've seen economists argue the opposite saying a startup is no different to a regular business. It depends on which definition you wish to subscribe to.
What makes you think that? Still plenty of startups being founded, many achieving success. It's long odds, of course, but what exactly is "unsustainable" about this? (And unsustainable to whom, exactly?)
IMHO building startup became a status symbol which means that the payment in respect for making a courageous adventure is lost and commoditized. We are slowly seeing the same for academia.
Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.
For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.
I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.
I highly agree. And I think in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product. I think part of the reason why is that all over social media and the internet there are gurus telling people "you can be the next to be rich and you deserve it". But that's the wrong motivation to have ingrained in every potential founder.
> in practice, what is driven by curiosity and passion ends up being a better product.
If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.
> For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
Do you think some of this is idea related? If you're building software, many new ideas are not truly innovative in a way that would make execution seem like the place to focus?
An experienced person might hear the idea and instantly have a general idea of how to build it -- but know that the real hard parts are distribution, finding customers, talking to customers, and building the profit flywheel that lets you do more of the previous.
Taking AI as an example just because it's hot right now, but it's a very different conversation if your idea is building a alternative to the transformer (assuming you're talking to someone who could even speak authoritatively on the subject!), versus building an "chatgpt wrapper" app, even if it's very complex/tailored to an industry. Most people won't be able to discuss the industry specific bits so they focus on the tech bits, and then the differences seem to be mostly execution?
When I pitch my calorie counter app that uses AI - fair, that is not new.
But eg. working on an idea around decentralized dating app that utilizes federated learning, blockchains, en cryptographic distributed filesystems to make a truly open and algorithmically transparent dating app - and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that" instead of starting to jam on good privacy preserving techniques in FL that still yields good results. ...
In honesty, I think the main issue is that the people have _not_ been able to understand these technologies. It has probably been _too_ innovative?
> I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns
That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.
> For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
I think this is in part a market correction. Whether it's over correction, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
There's been a lot of really bad startups making a big splash, often without any experience or knowledge of the field they were trying to disrupt (so they don't actually know what the problems really are, or what was really needed), and with far too vague hand wavey ideas on how they'll actually reach sustainability.
There's been far too much of engineering being a hammer, and seeing every problem is a nail
> every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem.
Talkers hate doers and those who dare to think of doing something.
A big trend in science now, at least for those less fortunate researchers, is basically only being allowed to do research that you already know the outcome of.
> entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed
If you're in for-profit sector, I don't see why being concerned with the main goal first and foremost would be a bad thing.
No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
So if the problem is worth solving in this ecosystem it's worth it because it does actually turn a profit instead of some fantasy that it will magically appear at some imagined scale.
I also don't focus solely on the fact that I earn money from my job, when I speak to my colleagues - no, I wouldn't be on that job, if it didn't pay.
> No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
This is a very specific understanding of startups as entities receiving foreign capital or debt.
The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives - or should be IMHO. Money is what makes it possible and not the core reason to do it.
And by that we return to my core reservation as written out in the initial comment.
I think several factors have changed over time, which have made the startup landscape—and for us mere mortals who dream about it—less exciting:
- Massive consolidation in tech: Large tech companies can easily acquire and neutralize potential competitors by offering founders a few million dollars, leading to fewer truly groundbreaking success stories.
- The evolving role of accelerators and VCs: They’ve turned startups into something akin to product management roles within their own agendas. Whether it’s cloud, AI, or the next big trend, founders often end up building what investors want rather than pursuing their own unique visions.
- A lack of truly groundbreaking ideas: We don’t see as many revolutionary concepts anymore—the kind that once gave birth to companies like Google or Amazon. This is likely tied to the investor-driven focus mentioned above.
- A shift in cultural expectations: Perhaps we—or at least the HN audience—are becoming more like Europe, with an increasing expectation that governments will take care of us, whether through healthcare or other social services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does shift the mindset around risk and entrepreneurship.
Pretend all you want but interest rates make a ton of difference.
If you can make a safe, compounded, perhaps leveraged 5% from treasuries the financial bar that a successful startup has to pass is so much higher
Interest rates are like a dial which turns economic activity up and down.
I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild.
A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold.
It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I’m glad I saved some money rather than thinking it was going to last forever!
If you were older, you would still consider current rates low and recent past an obscurity that couldn't last long. I can say that definitely about Europe, ie here in Switzerland interest rates used to be around 7% for quite some time and economy was doing fine, then it dropped to negative and afterwards people complained when they rose to 1-2%. 0.4% now, not complaining.
To really drive the nail in... consider what advances have been made in software over the past 30 years. In software specifically, NOT software enabled by faster hardware.
What can we do now in software which would not have been possible in 1995, even if we were to somehow make our hardware today usable by programmers then?
When you consider that the dot com era had mortgage rates similar to or maybe even higher than now, and same with federal rates, I tend to think there's a combo of recent startups having poor/LCD ideas w/ recency effect leading to overvaluing current rates against potential growth.
Absolutely, and in practice it's not a well analyzed spreadsheet problem with a smooth transition. The change in interest rates moved necessary payoffs from the "later" bucket to the "soon" bucket.
A whole segment of product stories only worked when investors wanted to believe in them so that they could park their money there. With everything oversubscribed, products would get investment as long as success wasn't provably impossible - so CEOs and PMs optimized for inscrutability and constant pivots. More thoughts here:
Here are a few anecdotes from the U.S. that can hopefully add substance to this conversation:
1) I am an investor in startups, and I have slowed my investments to a trickle since the beginning of Covid. I have noted that this has been generally true of other investors like myself.
2) There are still tons of problems to solve through technology applications; but there needs to be a moat between your solution and what AI will likely disrupt in the next few years. So, think about solving problems in the physical world.
3) Many startups create a pool of equity at around 10-15% of total shares for awarding to key employees. If your startup doesn't have this, then that is a red flag.
4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution?
5) startups are still thriving at universities that support entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.
6) financial stability of startups, especially technical startups, is greatly affected by non-dilutive grants and contracts, e.g. SBIR awards. Investors look for this.
My bet would be on material science to become the new software. Thanks to 3D printing, we now have lots of ideas of things that people would like to make. So the demand is there and quantifiable. But we lack the technology to produce it.
4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution?
---
I've worked at three start-ups. The answer was yes to the first question for all three. But the second question was really hard to answer going in. In hindsight, only of the companies had a valued solution. And I left 9 years before IBM bought them for big money.
I had a lot of fun and excitement but the financial uncertainty is tough.
"The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find."
It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was demand for maybe five computers in the world. These inevitably tend to be wrong because they misunderstand the dynamics of progress. Because technology is fractal, every invention spawns several others. The explosion of web was built on top of a lot of technology, and has supported a lot of technology too. Being an app or website has lots some of its initial novelty, but really this novelty was lost many years ago. Web itself has spawned many other frontiers - like innumerable frameworks, databases, languages etc. Those will spawn their own, etc.
There will always be more to find out, but there are a ton of counter-examples to your claims. Engineering related to radio was huge in the 1920s and 1930s and is... not today. A lot of key problems got solved and the focus turned to other industries and other problems.
The world will continue to have interesting problems. Whether those will have much intersection with writing software is less certain.
The point is about a specific technology, like software, not technology at all. For example, we continue to use the same vehicles (e.g. cars) with a well known technology while SpaceX is advancing on sending rockets to the space. Technology is advancing but some technology is well known.
This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business development (e.g. selling).
But there's still a ton of innovation going on in cars. Tesla and BYD are some of the biggest companies in the world. And conversely, rockets was regarded as a sleepy, government contracting business for a long time.
I don't particularly understand why (some) people say X technology has stagnated, like web or apps. There's a ton of innovation going on - off the top of my head, WebGPU and WASM will unlock huge amounts of performance for web apps, creating a lot of possibilities like much more powerful web game engines. There seems to be widespread beliefs that the market is "saturated" or "well developed". This always struck me like saying automotive startups won't work because rubber tyre technology has stagnated. Webs and apps are just the delivery mechanism for software.
I think there's two flawed reasons people think this. One is that they only perceive the change in people using it. So they think anything which has a lot of people already using it means it's saturated. Two, they as consumers don't perceive the vast, complex systems used to deliver those services. So a website is a website to most people, but they don't understand the massive changes it has undergone over the decades.
The only technology that really dies is very specific ones competing with others in a narrow field. For example vacuum tubes lost to the transistor.
But while cars are a well known technology, the last 15 years have spawned a 1.3T company in that space - Tesla. There's room to innovate anywhere, maybe but the most basic commodities.
Point 5: even if your startup exits successfully, the math of exits are brutal for employees (even early ones).
Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios.
Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.
This is why later companies can be better. Either they are public or private but it is clearer what the stock is and could be worth. Best deal is to get actual stock not stock options.
I don't know anyone who took any significant pay cut for the expectation of future return. If you join startup for huge return as an employee in any case you are doing it wrong.
Readit News
Largely, the make up of the audience in HN. I sincerely doubt that the hard core of people doing startups, thinking of doing a startup, or just very interested in the topic has gone away or changed attitude very much.
But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group, but from comments I'd be astounded if there were not a far greater proportion of people who are here because they are generically interested in tech topics and not specifically startups. That broader group was always there, of course, just its proportions relative to the hard core of entrepreneurs has changed.
I'd love to see some objective analysis of how things changed after the twitter and reddit kerfuffles, but I don't believe the article's thesis that the zeitgeist is the cause.
PS I could live without the stories that violate the precept of "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." ... but it's still pretty good here.
This is certainly me. Generally interested in tech (and many of the other things that HNers seem to be interested in these days), but no real interest in startups. Hope I am not ruining HN for the old timers.
I started using this place a lot more in the last couple of years as Reddit went to shit, so I suspect that was a big driving force in changing the audience here.
Ultimately, I still hang around HN because of high-quality discussions; there's really no other place like it, or at least I've found none. Or maybe after all this time, it just feels like home. Still, were the balance to shift hard towards startup talk, I fear we'd lose all the intellectual curiosity driven submissions and discussions - they'd just turn into sharing tips and tricks to make moar moneys with tech, which I personally find BOOOOOORING AF.
I am here for the selection of interesting articles and the high quality comments when it's not a political thread (those threads have less rational lower quality comments and I am also guilty of producing some os them, I apologize dang).
I suppose you can argue that we have more of a "European" attitude, to which I would respond that while we pay high taxes like Europe, we hardly get any of the social security benefits that they enjoy, so in short we end up with worst of both worlds: high taxes, low salaries and limited benefits.
You can't expect a nation to develop the next FANG when people's idea of business is purchasing a home in the "suburbs" of Toronto and renting out its basement.
P.S I hope you are staying warm in this weather..
For me what hn use to be an interaction between art and tech in the theme of hackers & painters. Tech along is not so interesting IMHO unless it's in the context of art and/or humanity.
see below
[0] an inane activity which has often been unduly embraced/denounced
>In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York accepted four early designs of paint by number by Max Klein for its Department of Architecture and Design, donated by Jacquelyn Schiffman.
I still remember the days when self-driving cars seemed just around the corner and inevitable. When Google was organizing the world's information and ethically pure. When I trusted software to do the right thing.
But nowadays... Good luck finding any trustworthy megacorp. We've commoditized trust for profits (e.g. from Couchsurfing to AirBnB) and the result is that people became less trusting.
- it's true that you will get jack squat if you're employee #4 or later (and in the process you'll work more hours with less job security than at a FAANG)
- it's true that the startup scene has delivered basically nothing of real value to the economy in the last fifteen years: it has all been regulatory arbitrage, intrusive ad-tech, financial engineering, and, of course, shitcoins
- it's true that the people at the top turned out to be amoral psychopaths who practically tripped over themselves to kiss the ring when authoritarianism arrived and their talk about improving the world was hot air
If you're going to complain about the cynicism, you should at least respond to the above instead of pretending it's just grumps wanting to ruin everyone's fun.
Our profession got hollowed out over the years. Of course the vibes at the bar next to the plant will be down.
> it's really sad to me
There's a thing I've seen on HN a few times over the years, where people expect HN to be like a secret oasis of fun away from the realities of the professional pursuits that brought us together in the first place. Why is that?
jokes are great, but unless it's a joke that has some truth squirreled away in it that's worth knowing and well transmitted by the joke, it shouldn't be here. especially on its own. little joke at the end of a long relevant anecdote? great. just replying because you had a moment of wit you'd like to share? think twice and don't, please.
there are plenty of places to be a comedian. I enjoy it myself on more than a few. but I would prefer it not be here.
Tech lost its glitter. It is now just another arm of rentier capitalism, not too dissimilar from banks and finance.
I'm here for the tech porn mostly. I do read the business related stories but I mostly retain everything but whatever includes "founder".
(My account seems to be made in 2016, so i suppose i started reading in like 2013-2014.)
> But the profile of HN has grown. It's a miracle that it's still an interesting and curious group
This miracle is probably just hard work in disguise -- dang et al. HN also has a self-censorship bias and some self-enforcement, but mostly not an abrasive kind -- people (mostly) gently remind each other of the rules, and sometimes viciously downvote comments that are not useful/in the spirit of HN.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Many if not most of folks at this point have nothing to do with neither startups nor hacking. Neither do I for example, and I am here for a decade+.
Want to have one day of 8hrs of work only so I'm fresh tomorrow to visit a car factory and to write two papers in the weekend.
I just started a relationship though, you do get used to the sensation of falling down a cliff trying to build a plane as you fall while eating glass and barely being able to walk out of exhaustion because it needs to be ready tomorrow so you're the only office on a Sunday night at 3am with the lights still burning while knowing that if you cannot borrow money within 4 days you cannot pay rent.
It's an acquired taste :)
I agree that SaaS is a dead end. I had a talk with two of our investors this week who run a SaaS company trying to convince me to stop hardware and go 100% to SaaS because it's such a great business model. But for that I think you're too late. The only new SaaS I consistently see people trying out are AI SaaS.
Because of that I'm doing SaaS with AI but combined with physical devices. I do think manufacturing is going to grow in the US and Europe, simply because factories need (way way) fewer people. Regardless of tariffs, protectionism, etc., the playing field has changed. Labor cost has become a tiny fraction of manufacturing cost. Offshoring makes no real sense anymore.
Therefore I make real physical AI, cameras and robots, to help people, well people and bigger people like McDonald's and car factories, build ultra-low-labor factories. That's what's going on in the US and in Europe right now, not SaaS. But the principle is the same: Startups just move to where the money / growth is.
Well I'm still here but I've gotten a lot older. And you have, too!
Frankly, the greater discussion diversity has improved HN for me.
I found the site dynamics compelling early on, bit often felt the discussion was narrow and to some degree an echo chamber.
Arguments that counted as points made then often fall flat now and that is A Very Good Thing™
Two things that immediately jumped out at me:
1. 40% of the posts/comments in all of 2024 came from accounts created IN 2024. There are a LOT of new people on HN.
2. The most commented post of the year was a news article about Donald Trump's election victory, so TV news-esque content is definitely getting more traction than expected.
That never was sustainable, I think, and effectively it became a glorified hiring process for big tech who bought the best toy companies to get to the people behind. And now even big tech figured it's cheaper to just hire the talent directly and not buy their token company for a few million first just to get the guys in.
Not saying a good company with a good idea and execution at the right time couldn't still make it big quick: there always were some lucky ones and there will always be. But the process isn't repeatably stable enough that there's a lot of wasted effort to make a few shooting stars. And everybody seems to be slowly accepting that. Go for it if the opportunity arises but if you spend 10 years trying and trying without the fish biting you're likely better off saving off from a decent salary when those years have passed.
> That never was sustainable, I think
Another aspect with this being (un)sustainable is lack of affordable healthcare. I bet many people would take more risks if they didn't have to worry about this aspect of their lives.
Dead Comment
In my view, startups always involve rapid growth and VC money to achieve it. If the company doesn't meet that criteria, isn't that simply a regular business?
I've seen economists argue the opposite saying a startup is no different to a regular business. It depends on which definition you wish to subscribe to.
What makes you think that? Still plenty of startups being founded, many achieving success. It's long odds, of course, but what exactly is "unsustainable" about this? (And unsustainable to whom, exactly?)
Point 2 resonates with me. Risk adjusted it is very unlikely that one will make a reasonable salary doing startups. So it is conviction and heart that needs to drive it.
For me, the main issue is that every time I voice the idea about building something I get bombarded with premature growth and commercialization concerns instead of excitement about how to solve the problem. I think this is endemic - the entire sector is short sighted and profit obsessed.
I feel this. I keep thinking there has to be a competitive advantage in being more conscious about the creation than the extraction. The latter seems to be a strangling force on the former.
Bozo brainrot
If it can survive. The problem here is that startups compete in the same economy as those more sustainable, passion-driven businesses - and because of their ruthless focus on growth, as well as access to vastly more capital, they win, effectively suppressing good products or outright preventing them from entering the market.
Do you think some of this is idea related? If you're building software, many new ideas are not truly innovative in a way that would make execution seem like the place to focus?
An experienced person might hear the idea and instantly have a general idea of how to build it -- but know that the real hard parts are distribution, finding customers, talking to customers, and building the profit flywheel that lets you do more of the previous.
Taking AI as an example just because it's hot right now, but it's a very different conversation if your idea is building a alternative to the transformer (assuming you're talking to someone who could even speak authoritatively on the subject!), versus building an "chatgpt wrapper" app, even if it's very complex/tailored to an industry. Most people won't be able to discuss the industry specific bits so they focus on the tech bits, and then the differences seem to be mostly execution?
But eg. working on an idea around decentralized dating app that utilizes federated learning, blockchains, en cryptographic distributed filesystems to make a truly open and algorithmically transparent dating app - and the response is: "But how are you ever going to make money off that" instead of starting to jam on good privacy preserving techniques in FL that still yields good results. ...
In honesty, I think the main issue is that the people have _not_ been able to understand these technologies. It has probably been _too_ innovative?
That general mindset was a major source of pain for me. I used to say I had founded a startup just to get along with the other entrepreneurs, but in fact I couldn't care less about fast growth, product-market fit and other common concerns in the field -- heck, "consulting" was in my list of services and some of my peers couldn't even wrap their minds around that concept -- and the ones who did, frowned upon it. They just kept asking about product, competitive edges and so on, while all I cared about was joining a growing market served until then by a handful of small but profitable companies in my country.
I think this is in part a market correction. Whether it's over correction, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
There's been a lot of really bad startups making a big splash, often without any experience or knowledge of the field they were trying to disrupt (so they don't actually know what the problems really are, or what was really needed), and with far too vague hand wavey ideas on how they'll actually reach sustainability.
There's been far too much of engineering being a hammer, and seeing every problem is a nail
Talkers hate doers and those who dare to think of doing something.
If you're in for-profit sector, I don't see why being concerned with the main goal first and foremost would be a bad thing.
No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
So if the problem is worth solving in this ecosystem it's worth it because it does actually turn a profit instead of some fantasy that it will magically appear at some imagined scale.
I also don't focus solely on the fact that I earn money from my job, when I speak to my colleagues - no, I wouldn't be on that job, if it didn't pay.
> No one's doing business or lending money to not see a return on that.
This is a very specific understanding of startups as entities receiving foreign capital or debt.
The act of doing entrepreneurship or stating up is inherently devoid from profit motives - or should be IMHO. Money is what makes it possible and not the core reason to do it.
And by that we return to my core reservation as written out in the initial comment.
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- Massive consolidation in tech: Large tech companies can easily acquire and neutralize potential competitors by offering founders a few million dollars, leading to fewer truly groundbreaking success stories.
- The evolving role of accelerators and VCs: They’ve turned startups into something akin to product management roles within their own agendas. Whether it’s cloud, AI, or the next big trend, founders often end up building what investors want rather than pursuing their own unique visions.
- A lack of truly groundbreaking ideas: We don’t see as many revolutionary concepts anymore—the kind that once gave birth to companies like Google or Amazon. This is likely tied to the investor-driven focus mentioned above.
- A shift in cultural expectations: Perhaps we—or at least the HN audience—are becoming more like Europe, with an increasing expectation that governments will take care of us, whether through healthcare or other social services. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does shift the mindset around risk and entrepreneurship.
I’ve always understood that in theory but it’s the first time I’ve actually lived through it and it’s wild.
A few years of higher rates and half of the tech industry and the people who buy tech seems to be on hold.
It makes me realise how vacuous the last decade was and how a lot of our jobs and businesses existed because of dirt cheap money. I’m glad I saved some money rather than thinking it was going to last forever!
What can we do now in software which would not have been possible in 1995, even if we were to somehow make our hardware today usable by programmers then?
A whole segment of product stories only worked when investors wanted to believe in them so that they could park their money there. With everything oversubscribed, products would get investment as long as success wasn't provably impossible - so CEOs and PMs optimized for inscrutability and constant pivots. More thoughts here:
https://coldwaters.substack.com/p/the-mystery-box-is-out-of-...
1) I am an investor in startups, and I have slowed my investments to a trickle since the beginning of Covid. I have noted that this has been generally true of other investors like myself.
2) There are still tons of problems to solve through technology applications; but there needs to be a moat between your solution and what AI will likely disrupt in the next few years. So, think about solving problems in the physical world.
3) Many startups create a pool of equity at around 10-15% of total shares for awarding to key employees. If your startup doesn't have this, then that is a red flag.
4) When assessing a startup, consider two things first: are the founders experienced in the industry and market they are attacking? Is the value of the solution obvious? i.e. people will likely willingly pay well to have the solution?
5) startups are still thriving at universities that support entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.
6) financial stability of startups, especially technical startups, is greatly affected by non-dilutive grants and contracts, e.g. SBIR awards. Investors look for this.
I had a lot of fun and excitement but the financial uncertainty is tough.
Dead Comment
"The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find."
It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was demand for maybe five computers in the world. These inevitably tend to be wrong because they misunderstand the dynamics of progress. Because technology is fractal, every invention spawns several others. The explosion of web was built on top of a lot of technology, and has supported a lot of technology too. Being an app or website has lots some of its initial novelty, but really this novelty was lost many years ago. Web itself has spawned many other frontiers - like innumerable frameworks, databases, languages etc. Those will spawn their own, etc.
The world will continue to have interesting problems. Whether those will have much intersection with writing software is less certain.
This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business development (e.g. selling).
I don't particularly understand why (some) people say X technology has stagnated, like web or apps. There's a ton of innovation going on - off the top of my head, WebGPU and WASM will unlock huge amounts of performance for web apps, creating a lot of possibilities like much more powerful web game engines. There seems to be widespread beliefs that the market is "saturated" or "well developed". This always struck me like saying automotive startups won't work because rubber tyre technology has stagnated. Webs and apps are just the delivery mechanism for software.
I think there's two flawed reasons people think this. One is that they only perceive the change in people using it. So they think anything which has a lot of people already using it means it's saturated. Two, they as consumers don't perceive the vast, complex systems used to deliver those services. So a website is a website to most people, but they don't understand the massive changes it has undergone over the decades.
The only technology that really dies is very specific ones competing with others in a narrow field. For example vacuum tubes lost to the transistor.
Between double dipping for investors, accelerated vesting for the c-suite, and taxation intricacies, employees make out much less than they'll think even in good scenarios.
Everyone makes 10X less than their head in the food chain: investors -> c-level -> VPs -> directors -> senior staff.