The answer is definitely still a big no, but for me the reasoning is because it will make it worse. And you apparently aren't the target audience anyway, so why should I care if you stick around.

(Whereas in the case of harry potter, the goal was to sell books, not just to produce something good).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496278

Points: 43

# Comments: 2

> Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you.

Exactly, the big factor driving healthcare costs is that people like expensive providers. They like the fancy plan that covers their doctor, that doesn't limit them to a community hospital. Any choice that involves retaining even the slightest market leverage is a deal breaker for many people. I think all the clever stuff we do to optimize costs and increase transparency is worth doing and helpful, but like, it will still be expensive. We want that!

Meanwhile it is not really better to go to an expensive doctor, in terms of health outcomes. So the public health problem is to stop people (and employers) from voluntarily wasting their money on healthcare, so we can use it for better stuff.

Naively of course it seems like investors don't like it when sales go down, so there'd be an extremely tight link between financial market and product market feedback. But I imagine you disagree, that this breaks down easily and creates problems?

What do you say to this interpretation? In particular do you think most cases could be framed as "the key audience/customer/market has shifted"? Is it possible to find greater financial success while doing things the primary audience doesn't like?

Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.

I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.

This is exactly it!

Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.

> Historically index providers were in the business of making these sorts of quality decisions, so that index funds were not forced to buy stocks they didn’t like.

> These rules create some tension between the idea that an index is a list of all the stocks and the idea that an index is a list of all the good stocks. Historically, it didn’t matter all that much: The point of the stock market is to tell you which stocks are good, so a company with a high stock valuation should be a very good company, so it should get a high weighting in both the Index of Good Companies and the Index of All the Companies.

> But SpaceX — and also maybe OpenAI and Anthropic in their coming IPOs — will probably break that link. SpaceX will probably (1) do all sorts of stuff that index funds hate and that index providers have specifically tried to exclude and also (2) be gigantic, because the market loves it.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-26/ind...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48237163

I think it's common to claim to care about the people without really depending on them for much (like with perks) or to depend on the work but treat people badly, and doing both is hard.