Hey hacker news! I wrote this and I’m glad it connected with folks.
To answer a few of your comments:
Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft.
The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have.
Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.
You left out the higher entity that takes away a significant portion of the snow that was accumulated at regular intervals.
It doesn't need to ruin the metaphor, though:
The sun could do that job. It could also explain the fact that the portion that's taken differs depending on where on earth you are creating the snowball.
This is one of my favourite styles of illustration and I really wanted to know the source. I read so many children’s books for my son and sometimes I take books from the library just for this clean style.
I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art.
As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did.
I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.
> As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets
Buying digital drawing tools before you have the fundamentals nailed is a bad idea.
For anyone reading this who wants to learn how to draw: look up dynamic sketching, it’s a method that was developed by Norm Schureman at Art Center in LA in the 90s, targeted to getting product design students quickly up to speed. It’s very analytical and works well with engineer-brained people in my experience.
It’s mostly carried by Peter Han, a former student of his, these days, you can easily find resources online.
I completely agree. But, it’s one of those things you do “as a hobby”. I have also been gifted some Japanese drawing pencils because of my interest and occasional scribbles, but I have refused to open them because I can’t do justice to them.
Shoot a way to contact you to tecoholic at bawolf.com and I'll invite you to a copy of the board you can duplicate and mess around with.
I appreciate the sentiment and I agree. While I think there are countless humans who could do way better, I was never going to hire someone to illustrate this. Furthermore, I don't think it reads very interestingly without the images. I doubt it would have even gotten published.
But now thousands of people have seen it, it's shown that it can strike a chord. Maybe it is worth polishing a little more. It would be adorable as a small book
I bought the starter membership which is 20k credits for $18 and I have 5.7k credits left. They charge 50 credits a generation for nano banana. There was some LLM usage to plan the images too so the math is a little blurry but that should give you a rough sense
The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for.
I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.
Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey.
I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different.
And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates.
And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
> I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large.
You first have to find somewhere that involves pushing it mostly downhill instead of uphill. Otherwise this turns into the tale of Sisyphus.
Yes. But a hill is easy to push up when it’s small and sticks to the snow. As it gets bigger, you can still go uphill but you just have to be strategic about it (as mentioned in the story). But small snowballs can go uphill all day long, they just have to make it to the top of the hill before they get too big.
What parts felt too stretched? Or just as a composition would you have preferred I narrow it down? I thought it was fun that it goes a little overboard. To me it felt like doing so captured just how much these journeys can change over time.
I tried to focus on 3 main bits:
Early exploration, problems between people, and then how much is ultimately in or out of your control
Pushing snowballs is a cute sentiment, albeit an incomplete metaphor, but it is also quite romanticized as depicted here.
I get that it is about cooperation, "pushing" and growing the size and impact of organizations, but applied to the wider world it quickly becomes complicated; the snowballs interact.
Everyone is pushing multiple snowballs over complex terrain. For many their snowballs are melting as they roll them, sometimes actively counteracted by institutions or higher powers.
And don't forget that huge snowball we all roll around on, called earth, because it's losing snow...
Great story, thanks for sharing. Besides the part where it says "Other people will see its glory and join their smaller snowballs into it.", it sounds a bit like marriage too.
Seeing a borderline hustle culture article illustrated with AI slop in the style of Bill Watterson, who famously opposed commercial exploitation of his work, is deeply saddening.
I don't think this post reads as AI at all. It has none of the tell-tale signs either (em dashes, common constructions like 'not just ____ but ____, bullet points, headers, etc.)
The images are AI-generated. This makes them automatically bad in some people's view, but I think they're reasonably fitting here. With a little bit of work (e.g. attention to consistency between frames, blending into the site background) they could even be good.
The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s.
Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
You did do pretty well! I don't think the final result was ruined at all. Not many people will notice things like his pants only being brown in the first image, or their eyes only having whites in the third image, or his jacket sometimes having a hood and sometimes not.
Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.
I too am skeptical we’ll really be able to catch everyone. By making public tools we just create evals to beat the tools etc.
Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable
Hey hacker news! I wrote this and I’m glad it connected with folks.
To answer a few of your comments:
Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft.
The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have.
Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.
You left out the higher entity that takes away a significant portion of the snow that was accumulated at regular intervals.
It doesn't need to ruin the metaphor, though: The sun could do that job. It could also explain the fact that the portion that's taken differs depending on where on earth you are creating the snowball.
The end result is quite stunning. quite beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to create it.
Thank you for saying so. I’m glad it connected with you
This is one of my favourite styles of illustration and I really wanted to know the source. I read so many children’s books for my son and sometimes I take books from the library just for this clean style.
I know it wouldn’t have happened easily with Nano. Banana to keep things consistent across multiple images. I haven’t tried recently, but image generation gets progressively worse (darker and off base) as you generate multiple of them. So kudos for the amazing art.
As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets, but never had the time & developed the skill to actually create the things that I imagine, I completely understand what you did.
I know some people are going to be upset at model generated illustrations. But I think the alternate is probably, no illustrations. There’s a lot of unnecessary AI image slop all around and most add no value or worse makes you just avoid reading the content by their awfulness. This was done really well and I am not sure I would have read it fully without it.
> As someone who had an interest in drawing as a child and have bought trackpads and tablets
Buying digital drawing tools before you have the fundamentals nailed is a bad idea.
For anyone reading this who wants to learn how to draw: look up dynamic sketching, it’s a method that was developed by Norm Schureman at Art Center in LA in the 90s, targeted to getting product design students quickly up to speed. It’s very analytical and works well with engineer-brained people in my experience.
It’s mostly carried by Peter Han, a former student of his, these days, you can easily find resources online.
I completely agree. But, it’s one of those things you do “as a hobby”. I have also been gifted some Japanese drawing pencils because of my interest and occasional scribbles, but I have refused to open them because I can’t do justice to them.
Shoot a way to contact you to tecoholic at bawolf.com and I'll invite you to a copy of the board you can duplicate and mess around with.
I appreciate the sentiment and I agree. While I think there are countless humans who could do way better, I was never going to hire someone to illustrate this. Furthermore, I don't think it reads very interestingly without the images. I doubt it would have even gotten published.
But now thousands of people have seen it, it's shown that it can strike a chord. Maybe it is worth polishing a little more. It would be adorable as a small book
how many iterations did you use for flora ai to generate the imagery?
I bought the starter membership which is 20k credits for $18 and I have 5.7k credits left. They charge 50 credits a generation for nano banana. There was some LLM usage to plan the images too so the math is a little blurry but that should give you a rough sense
The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for.
I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.
Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey.
I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different.
And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates.
And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
> The snowball grows passively over time naturally
Only if you push it down the mountain. Then it’s also susceptible to crashing and breaking down.
Normally what you do is you have to push the snowball manually. The bigger it gets, the more people you need to push it in a coordinated manner.
I think it’s excellent metaphor.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I don’t think that’s what I wrote.
Stay away from metaphors. They are higher than your rational level.
> I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large.
You first have to find somewhere that involves pushing it mostly downhill instead of uphill. Otherwise this turns into the tale of Sisyphus.
Yes. But a hill is easy to push up when it’s small and sticks to the snow. As it gets bigger, you can still go uphill but you just have to be strategic about it (as mentioned in the story). But small snowballs can go uphill all day long, they just have to make it to the top of the hill before they get too big.
> But a hill is easy to push up when it’s small and sticks to the snow.
Depends how steep it is. In this metaphor, I guess we're talking about something like product market fit.
A single metaphor cannot describe all aspects of company building.
That being said, this is definitely one that's particularly optimistic, particularly low-ego, centered around a curiosity one has with the world.
That I like quite a bit.
Seems to stretch an one analogy in too many different directions. I guess the point of losing control is the most true.
What parts felt too stretched? Or just as a composition would you have preferred I narrow it down? I thought it was fun that it goes a little overboard. To me it felt like doing so captured just how much these journeys can change over time.
I tried to focus on 3 main bits:
Early exploration, problems between people, and then how much is ultimately in or out of your control
[dead]
Pushing snowballs is a cute sentiment, albeit an incomplete metaphor, but it is also quite romanticized as depicted here.
I get that it is about cooperation, "pushing" and growing the size and impact of organizations, but applied to the wider world it quickly becomes complicated; the snowballs interact.
Everyone is pushing multiple snowballs over complex terrain. For many their snowballs are melting as they roll them, sometimes actively counteracted by institutions or higher powers.
And don't forget that huge snowball we all roll around on, called earth, because it's losing snow...
If I were to add, "winter" is the best time to find snow, and there is enough snow for everyone.
In some large western cities, snow has a second meaning.
Taking that meaning and the VC money required for the inflationary marketing, is probably closer to reality.
Great story, thanks for sharing. Besides the part where it says "Other people will see its glory and join their smaller snowballs into it.", it sounds a bit like marriage too.
Reminds me of Saras Sarasvathy's 2001 effectuation paper (https://www.jstor.org/stable/259121)
Founding is a lie.
Seeing a borderline hustle culture article illustrated with AI slop in the style of Bill Watterson, who famously opposed commercial exploitation of his work, is deeply saddening.
Beautiful
[dead]
Way too much AI-generated content in this post
I don't think this post reads as AI at all. It has none of the tell-tale signs either (em dashes, common constructions like 'not just ____ but ____, bullet points, headers, etc.)
The images are AI-generated. This makes them automatically bad in some people's view, but I think they're reasonably fitting here. With a little bit of work (e.g. attention to consistency between frames, blending into the site background) they could even be good.
I’d love some thoughts here on the consistency. I thougt I actually did pretty well! But I can see how I might be blind to mind own work here.
What ruined it for you?
The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s.
Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
You did do pretty well! I don't think the final result was ruined at all. Not many people will notice things like his pants only being brown in the first image, or their eyes only having whites in the third image, or his jacket sometimes having a hood and sometimes not.
Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
I actually thought a lot about the eye whites! He didn’t look nervous enough without them
Pangram says fully human written https://www.pangram.com/history/02d6eff5-f782-4978-9e60-bb02...
So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.
I too am skeptical we’ll really be able to catch everyone. By making public tools we just create evals to beat the tools etc.
Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable
[dead]