[eric_h]

Yes, it's unfortunate that "fake it 'til you make it" became such a popular meme in SV et. al.

There is value in that philosophy in some respects, but claiming that your medical tests are real and reliable when they are not most certainly does not fall under that particular umbrella.

[SilasX]

Yes! I had previously noted how Holmes was, in many ways, taking the HN/SV memes seriously, in believing:

- that an entire industry has been doing it wrong

- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup

- that once you have enough success you can just rewrite the laws that were slowing you down

- that no one knows what they're doing anyway, major projects are 100% guesswork, and you should just "fake it till you make it"

- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice

- that you can outsmart an industry before even passing or placing out of sophomore level classes

- that any self-doubt must be Impostor Syndrome, and so it's not worth your time to even check if that doubt has a factual basis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12068536#12071172

[return0]

I remember watching an interview where she actually said those things. I would be suspicious with a person who talks like that.

[GabrielF00]

This actually sounds a lot like Donald Trump's campaign message.

[notahacker]

I think the problems arise when you've moved beyond exaggerating putative customers' level of interest or how finished the software is to faking a solution which technical experts have very good reason to believe isn't actually achievable, or when your mistakes are likely to kill people. Often these two overlap, because when a solution is as important as life and death and the field is mature enough to actually have experts, you probably shouldn't assume the reason they didn't solve it was because their company culture wasn't as cool as yours.

That's why I'm somewhat more irritated about reading about an apparently very worthy electrical VTOL aircraft project featured on here boast of an apparently purely-hypothetical "300km range" on its website as if other engineers are just idiots for thinking battery weight might prevent that than I am about actually writing marketing material for people that have a lot more ability to solve problems than customers.