Yesterday I tried to ask a genuine question in AskHN. It was my first question here, so I may have made a mistake somewhere. I genuinely wanted to get feedback from fellow founders and hackers. So I described the problem and then I asked a questions related to it. But within seconds it was marked [flagged] and I have no idea why.
I checked the FAQ it says it may be off-topic but the purpose of the question was to seek advice and feedback from HN community, so I am not sure whether it was evaluated as off-topic or if so why.
I am not a native speaker so I used AI to fix the text and help me concisely express it since I sometime delve into details that confuses people. Was this the issue?
In short. What is the proper way to ask for advice from HN?
PaulHoule•5h ago
samikama•4h ago
May be I over described the problem? Or was the questions made you to think it was a phony question? Or the question is so obvious it is too simple to ask?
Thanks for your response regardless.
PaulHoule•4h ago
I think the biggest argument I've seen between sales people is "Do you sell something that will increase the customer's revenue or reduce their costs?"
For a well established business saving $1 in costs adds $1 to the bottom line whereas adding $1 in revenue also adds some cost of revenue so maybe it just ends 20 cents to the bottom line or something.
I think every business using AI is different but right now many users are in a "gold rush" phase where they don't have a rational economic model for the whole thing: they might be happy to have GPUs at all and not be worried that they have 30% utilization. Internal politics plays a big role, say my unit has a GPU cluster, I might be really possessive of it and resist sharing it with other units. For that matter I might get a big Mac Studio for my desk because then I can run any model I want that fits on it and never have to have a talk with anyone about model licenses and data privacy and token costs, none of that. From that point of view I could care less about utilization fraction and the one thing I care about is having my head.
I guess there is somebody who can say GPU compute is part of their cost of revenue and increasing the utilization fraction has a clear impact on the bottom line. That somebody probably knows a lot about cost optimization already (or thinks they know!) and might think you are bringing a tic-tac-toe master to a chess tournament! Might still be the kind of person you want to talk to just to talk to.
samikama•3h ago
That is the problem I am having. What we built is addressing all the points you mentioned, reduces costs as well as adds revenue at the same time. There is no issues with model licenses and privacy because it is still your machine. Whenever you need it, it is available to you. It should be attractive to people.
But you are making a very good point which I may have missed and in hindsight it matches some of the observations we have. `That somebody probably knows a lot about cost optimization already (or thinks they know!) and might think you are bringing a tic-tac-toe master to a chess tournament! ` I don't believe it is true but I can see people may think that and that may be my issue.
What would be the best way to overcome this? Would it be data? if so what kind of data?
Thank you Paul, your comment is great help!