<story><title>The tiny corp raised $5.1M</title><url>https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-tiny-corp-raised-5M.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsynnott</author><text>I think there&amp;#x27;s a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; &amp;quot;oh, that&amp;#x27;s way easier than what I do, how hard could it be&amp;quot;. A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it&amp;#x27;s more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how hard could it be?</text></item><item><author>pavlov</author><text>Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people?&lt;p&gt;It seems like they&amp;#x27;ve been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and &amp;quot;neutral&amp;quot; politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable.&lt;p&gt;Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: &amp;quot;We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child&amp;#x27;s play in comparison.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thought frontend development was trivial and he&amp;#x27;d just be able to hack it out in a day.</text></item><item><author>thesausageking</author><text>For background, &amp;quot;geohot&amp;quot;, is George Hotz, who&amp;#x27;s a known hacker &amp;#x2F; tech personality[0]&lt;p&gt;This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn&amp;#x27;t have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale.&lt;p&gt;In 2016, Tesla and self-driving cars led to his comma one project (&amp;quot;I could build a better vision system than Tesla autopilot in 3 months&amp;quot;). In 2020, Ethereum got hot and so he created &amp;quot;cheapETH&amp;quot;. In 2022 it was Elon&amp;#x27;s Twitter, which led him to &amp;quot;fixing Twitter search&amp;quot;. And in 2023 it&amp;#x27;s NVIDIA.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to see an alternative to CUDA &amp;#x2F; NVIDIA so I hope this one breaks the pattern, but I&amp;#x27;d be very, very careful before giving him a deposit.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;George_Hotz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;George_Hotz&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zamnos</author><text>&amp;gt; Technical people suffer from what I call &amp;quot;Engineer&amp;#x27;s Disease&amp;quot;. We think because we&amp;#x27;re an expert in one area, we&amp;#x27;re automatically an expert in other areas. Just recognizing that helps.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=10812804&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=10812804&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The tiny corp raised $5.1M</title><url>https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2023/05/24/the-tiny-corp-raised-5M.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rsynnott</author><text>I think there&amp;#x27;s a certain type of person, particularly common in tech, who thinks this way about _everything_; &amp;quot;oh, that&amp;#x27;s way easier than what I do, how hard could it be&amp;quot;. A kind of reverse impostor syndrome. See the cryptocurrency space; it&amp;#x27;s more or less been 15 years worth of crypto people accidentally repeating all the failures of conventional finance from the last couple of centuries, because, after all, how hard could it be?</text></item><item><author>pavlov</author><text>Why is Twitter such a Waterloo for all these obviously accomplished people?&lt;p&gt;It seems like they&amp;#x27;ve been assuming Twitter is the way it is because it was staffed by technically incompetent leftists, and if only they could apply their own get-things-done attitude and &amp;quot;neutral&amp;quot; politics, then the problem would be trivially fixable.&lt;p&gt;Where does this fallacy come from? Is it because of the illusory simplicity of the tweet format? Something like: &amp;quot;We just need to come up with the right algorithm and do an embarrassingly parallel run over these tiny 280-character chunks of text. How hard can that be. In my own Very Serious Day Job, I deal with oompabytes of very complex data. This tweet processing stuff should be child&amp;#x27;s play in comparison.&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>My opinion of geohot definitely dropped after he started tweeting how easy it would be to fix Twitter, and then he started soliciting free work. He obviously underestimated the difficulty of shipping a feature across web and mobile. Hacking a prototype is trivial. Making it work well for all platforms, fully accessible, and across all supported languages is a bigger hurdle. It just gave me the impression that he thought frontend development was trivial and he&amp;#x27;d just be able to hack it out in a day.</text></item><item><author>thesausageking</author><text>For background, &amp;quot;geohot&amp;quot;, is George Hotz, who&amp;#x27;s a known hacker &amp;#x2F; tech personality[0]&lt;p&gt;This project fits the pattern of his previous projects: he gets excited about the currently hot thing in tech, makes his own knockoff version, generates a ton of buzz in the tech press for it, and then it fizzles out because he doesn&amp;#x27;t have the resources or attention span to actually make something at that scale.&lt;p&gt;In 2016, Tesla and self-driving cars led to his comma one project (&amp;quot;I could build a better vision system than Tesla autopilot in 3 months&amp;quot;). In 2020, Ethereum got hot and so he created &amp;quot;cheapETH&amp;quot;. In 2022 it was Elon&amp;#x27;s Twitter, which led him to &amp;quot;fixing Twitter search&amp;quot;. And in 2023 it&amp;#x27;s NVIDIA.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d love to see an alternative to CUDA &amp;#x2F; NVIDIA so I hope this one breaks the pattern, but I&amp;#x27;d be very, very careful before giving him a deposit.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;George_Hotz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;George_Hotz&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OOPMan</author><text>You hit the nail on the head. There are definitely these kinds of people and they are definitely highly concentrated in tech.</text></comment>