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by Xeoncross 1430 days ago
Drew has the right to cancel his projects, but I really hope others don't cling to the hopes of "the perfect rollout" with their projects.

Startups and side projects are messy and sometimes things don't go as planned. Contracts get canceled, DoS takes down your homepage when you launch losing all those free leads, people leak new features and your sixth deployment erases most of the production database.

There are a lot of great ideas that start out as bad as the first release of thefacebook, AirBnB, Twitch and Youtube. Still, they iterate on these wonky, almost-working sites and end up making something great.

YC pushes this idea constantly; put something in front of people and iterate. Drew was following that advice and I applaud him. https://www.youtube.com/c/ycombinator/videos
2 comments
marginalia_nu 1430 days ago
The amount of tweaking needed to make a search engine work well can't be overstated either. When you start out, it's inevitably going to be kinda shit. That's fine. Now you need to draw the rest of the owl.
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Xeoncross 1430 days ago
Yeah, I agree. I was certainly underwhelmed with my first small search engine. It was so bad even I didn't want to use it - and I had spent months and months on it.

Still, most projects aren't a search engine. I see people put high expectations on how things will go and often it's just really hard to realize some of those hopes.

Sometimes you just have to take what you can get and iterate. Don't give up.

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marginalia_nu 1430 days ago
I think, with search engines, it's best to work with them for the problem domain. It is a fractal of interesting programming problems touching upon pretty much every area of CS, programming and programming-adjacent topics, and take whatever comes out of it as an unexpected bonus.
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Xeoncross 1430 days ago
Well said, my next version will be focused on a niche I actually need instead of general search. Still, I haven't finished studying the CS books + 47 algorithms I'll need to actually implement it.
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richardsocher 1429 days ago
I love your post. I have to say that my experience is that many in the HN community are not nearly as kind as you. Folks here will rip you apart if you don't have everything figured out :(

So, I started rolling out new features of our search engine on Twitter, Slack, etc instead of here.

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