Blog/2026-01-27/The Obvious Isn't Obvious

When you live in San Francisco and around the Silicon Valley ecosystem, a mantra that everyone repeats is 'iteration'. Attempting to reach product-market fit is traditionally, here, described as an iterative process where you put out a minimum viable product and then work on it in response to customer feedback. This is so ingrained in the psyche here that if you were to say it, you sound like a freshman in Mathematics explaining this crazy thing called a set of simultaneous linear equations: it's far too basic to be talking about.

That is true. Here. But that's why so many startups come from here and so few from elsewhere. The traditional-for-elsewhere approach is far different and as Hacker News enters its Eternal September, non-startup software engineers who believe in another tradition dominate the audience. Every encounter with them reveals that the Iteration Dogma is something actually unique to startup culture, and that despite there being great successes from the approach, it may never actually break out into the mainstream.

Here are a few comments that illustrate this:

YHacker News

Comment on Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

On April 4, 2024, it was revealed that Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology was supported by approximately 1,000 Indian workers who manually reviewed transactions. Despite claims of being
fully automated through computer vision, a significant portion of transactions required this manual verification.

mjr00

YHacker News

Comment on Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

This was proven to be false on the WAN show. Only 20% of transactions were low confidence and handled by mechanical turk.

ed_mercer

YHacker News

Comment on Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

It's great that they faced essentially no consequences for this. A sure sign that we have a functional and sane market.

Cornbilly

The first and last comments are the most popular on Hacker News. Popular sentiments among programmers (or at least the kind who visit Hacker News) are therefore aligned on the Get It Right First Time and No Failures mindsets. What Amazon was doing is pretty standard in refinement of ML techniques. You build an imperfect program that gets you some of the way, then have humans review the output of the program, and that is used to refine the program.

Similar objections can be found on Hacker News and Reddit and other technology forums for other iteration-based businesses. Tesla Autopilot is frequently cited as failing to deliver on promises, but unsupervised rides are now available in Austin. The iteration seems to have gotten them somewhere.

TSLA99T @Tsla99T

I am in a robotaxi without safety monitor

Jan 22, 2026

Richard Coppola @AsylumHarbor

In celebrating the final launch of the workhorse Ariane 5, it's worth noting the attitude of many in the early planning stages for it's replacement, contributed to the launch mess Europe now finds itself in. It didn't have to be this way

Jul 3, 2023

Similarly, SpaceX faced scepticism from the kind of established operators who did not believe in the iteration dogma.

SpaceX primarily is selling a dream

— Richard Bowles, Arianespace ASEAN

I've often wondered how many modern small businesses (corner stores and restaurants and so on) make incredibly basic errors in operation. The explanation is probably that even in the case of non-rivalrous knowledge, many fields are diffusion-resistant. Semmelweis's famous hypothesis seems similarly obvious to most today, but faced great resistance during its time. The nature of knowledge revolution is that despite demonstrated better technology appearing, adoption is nonetheless slow.

This could be explained in rivalrous fields, where antagonists may render an innovation useless, but it is also interestingly the case in non-rivalrous fields. The market for knowledge may be efficient, but only eventually.