[HN Gopher] How to get new ideas
___________________________________________________________________
How to get new ideas
Author : elorm
Score : 290 points
Date : 2023-01-24 12:24 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| Hi, Idiot here.
|
| How can I reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge"? Especially in
| fields I'm not savvy in?
| js8 wrote:
| Walk (study and be curious) in a single direction, eventually
| you'll reach the frontier.
| sargstuff wrote:
| walking the engineering lattice allows for way more vector
| intersection considerations.
| sargstuff wrote:
| > ... reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge" ...
|
| currently, search engines/chatgpt seem to fill that roll vs
| more historical library/university.
|
| aka search term "frontiers of knowledge" <replace with subject
| area field(s) unfamiliar with>
|
| compared with traditional library/university book
| writer/teaching assistant
|
| note: sed & awk not required to do text replacement, but good
| editor certainly helps
|
| But if patient enough to wait, will eventually show up on
| internet as a video(s) way before the random monkeys typing
| away at a type writer get to it [1]
|
| [1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
| wbharding wrote:
| The "gaps that seem obvious"-notion describes exactly how I feel
| about pull request tooling these days. The status quo for PR
| review has very obvious-seeming improvements that have not been
| pursued (ex: de-emphasizing moved code vs. deleted code, making
| AI predict what comment will be left before dev starts typing,
| auto-reviewing trivial changes).
|
| If I'm correct that PR review is currently much less efficient
| than it will be soon, it won't be because I'm smart or this is a
| new idea. It would just be because our company has spent last
| five years building code review tools, right place right time.
| Eventually there was enough infrastructure accumulated (and
| ambient events unfolding, ie OpenAI) that it became a small step
| to pass the edge of what PR review meant circa 2022.
| bamazizi wrote:
| One of the oldest saying in entrepreneurship is "need is the
| mother of invention"
|
| It starts with finding the right problem/need and before jumping
| into to solutioning, the smart person would validate and pitch
| the problem to as many relevant target customers as possible.
| Once the problem is validated and tangible root cause is flushed
| out then it's time to explore the solution and pitching it to the
| same customer research group for validation before going into
| building mode.
|
| Finding ideas is not hard, but the process is gruelling,
| frustrating and potentially rewarding. Good luck!
| sargstuff wrote:
| yeah, 'news'/documentation/commentary one way to find
| 'problems' with possible unmet solutions.
| ljlolel wrote:
| ChatGPT
| jadbox wrote:
| I've yet to find an original idea from it. It can help with the
| process of brainstorming.
| sargstuff wrote:
| so, try feeding chatgpt random garbage? unlike humans,
| chatgpt wont physically go after you.
| themantalope wrote:
| Agree. ChatGPT can help with taking a rough or vague idea and
| better articulate what you are trying to say.
| dboreham wrote:
| Eliza 2.0
| Octokiddie wrote:
| > Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could
| answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas
| come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So
| I asked: What would I have said?
|
| It's not entirely clear whether or not the essay was written by
| GPT because it's not clear who PG asked. Himself or GPT?
|
| I'm leaning toward the former, but can't rule out the latter.
| Maybe that's the point.
| 3dsnano wrote:
| i think new ideas come from being naive and possessing the "no-
| mind" or a childlike sense of wonder. the older i get, the less
| plastic my brain is and the more depression and other issues
| start to seep in, get in the way, overcomplicate shit.
|
| to be completely free, uninhibited, released from guilt and
| predjudice. to just think, play, laugh, fart, and yawn. boring
| days spent looking out the window wondering how crows fart, or
| what makes zebras sassy.
|
| the only limit is our own adult psychosis. we are prisoners of
| our own minds, locked and shackled by constructs of our own
| design. too focused on the failures of the past and anxieties of
| the present to take a moment and b-r-e-a-t-h-e. like who fucking
| cares about businesses and startups and shit. saas my ass. when
| you actually stop trying, give up, and stop caring, and truly let
| go (like in the movie frozen) you can actually go in and through
| and back out the other side.
|
| just learn to get out the way of yourself. that's what im working
| on, but it's really hard. you think you're supposed to be there
| and generate brilliance 24/7 but it's not possible.
|
| go outside and find a patch of earth where things are growing.
| get really close to the ground and start looking at it real hard.
| there's honestly so much stuff there, it's wild. like who knew?
| wow thats nuts. acorns, rocks and shit. touch the dirt and rub it
| on your face. mushrooms are literally everywhere. the water in my
| body was once in a bowl of rice that your great grandma ate at
| becky's 27th birthday party.
|
| just give up just give up stop caring be free
| [deleted]
| sargstuff wrote:
| or be around long enough that have time/resources to find a
| soluion to what have wanted a soluion to which noone else seems
| to want to provide.
|
| edit: needs of the many refinements out weight the needs of the
| few refinements
| [deleted]
| toss1 wrote:
| >>wow thats nuts. acorns, rocks and shit. touch the dirt and
| rub it on your face. mushrooms are literally everywhere.
|
| If you want to really blow your mind, start looking into soil
| biology. Entire ecosystems of bacteria, fungi, multicellular
| creatures, plants, minerals, water....
|
| And ALL OF IT IS CRITICAL TO LIFE.
|
| People just think "oh, it's just dirt", and move on, when
| nothing could be further from reality
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why
| people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of
| some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get
| out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people
| has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of
| bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs
| pure functionality.
| graeme wrote:
| Here's a quick tip: remove the word "bullshit" from your
| personality and assume that people aren't morons.
|
| People obviously _do_ do dumb things, and some stuff is
| obviously crap. But if you change perspectives a lot of stuff
| actually....makes sense?
|
| Like, looking at the world and seeing a bunch of bullshit is
| actually a flaw in your own thinking, not the world.
|
| Take fast food for example. Widely derided, clearly poisons
| the body, not the best taste, produces a lot of waste. More
| expensive than cooking.
|
| But, flip it around:
|
| * Standard experience --> you know exactly what you're
| getting
|
| * Much cheaper than restaurant food
|
| * Much faster than restaurant or home cooked food
|
| * Tasty
|
| * Easy
|
| It's something with obvious downsides but also obvious
| upsides.
|
| It isn't obviously dumb. It is only obviously dumb if you
| decide the downsides outweigh the upsides and then ignore all
| the upsides. Which is flawed thinking.
|
| You can repeat this analysis and find that on their own terms
| most people mostly aren't doing things that are totally
| irrational.
|
| Even something like a lottery ticket gives someone hope
| despite the clear negative EV. You can take that too far,
| but....
|
| The point is if you think everything is bullshit, your
| analysis is probably crap. And merely allowing yourself to
| use the term bullshit rewards this sort of lazy, negative
| analysis.
|
| Whatever you sell doesn't have to be the absolute best of all
| possible things. But it has to meet a need, and the vast bulk
| of stuff which sells does exactly that.
| sargstuff wrote:
| long as it's legal/legitimate, does it really matter if can
| make enough $$$ to earn a living?
|
| nerf was last minute class project.
| agumonkey wrote:
| yeah we have to blur it out... your excellence can be sold
| but only to a few, the rest will want various degrees or
| simplicity, cost etc
|
| anything in that game requires a lot of planning to make
| something livable that can be sold at many groups over many
| years so you can finally get enough leverage to move the
| minds along some value axis
| gizmo wrote:
| You don't have to cynically exploit your customers just
| because that's what other businesses do. If you can make an
| excellent product that solves a real problem and charge a
| reasonable price for it you'll likely do pretty well. Sure,
| other people will become immensely successful by cheating or
| by gaming the system in some way. But what difference does
| that make? Just do your own thing.
| userabchn wrote:
| We like to believe that the problem is just "our own adult
| psychosis", but I spend my days around many people over quite a
| range of ages (including elderly) and it is very obvious to me
| that cognitive abilities decline in the way shown in the charts
| you have probably seen (or, it feels to me, even more
| dramatically) and that it is apparent at an earlier age that we
| would like to think. Old people lose the ability to infer - if
| they know two Johns and I say something about one of them (just
| referred to as "John"), they will be confused even though it
| should be easy to infer which I meant. That might not be a
| surprise, but from my experience the same effect can be traced
| back linearly to much earlier ages, to those mature students in
| your university class, who were probably only 40, and who
| continually caused us to roll our eyes by asking questions with
| obvious answers - even at that age they had lost some of the
| ability we had to infer the answers from what we had already
| been taught. Such abilities are useful when coming up with
| ideas for new products, so I have no doubt that the likelihood
| of doing it successfully declines rapidly with age.
| tchaffee wrote:
| Good communication has long been known as difficult to
| achieve. I could easily infer answers. But by asking
| questions with "obvious" answers I regularly uncover
| miscommunication. Try it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You have inferred something that may well be untrue.
|
| A 40 year old mature student was last in school more than 20
| years ago. Younger students were last in school as recently
| as 1 year ago. Learning is a skill and it's perfectly
| possible to be out of practice. There may also be some
| knowledge gaps because recent practices and knowledge are
| different to common knowledge 20 years ago.
|
| It's also possible that mature students are more assertive
| about asking questions.
|
| And also - what some of the students in a class consider
| "obvious" is not at all obvious to all of the class.
|
| Of course if someone is showing clear evidence of dementia,
| that's a different issue.
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities in
| your 40's?
|
| I don't have a specific reference but if you google it, you
| should find what I mean.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I thought your mental faculties peak in their abilities
| in your 40's
|
| different abilities at different ages, on average, but
| IIRC, some as early as late teens, some as late as the 40s.
|
| EDIT:
|
| Actually, some as late as 50+.
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/when-
| do...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Old people lose the ability to infer - if they know two
| Johns and I say something about one of them (just referred to
| as "John"), they will be confused even though it should be
| easy to infer which I meant.
|
| Old people have been bitten by the "A 95% inference will be
| wrong 1 in 20 times" thing a lot more, and also have been
| exposed to a wider array of experience where they might often
| judge an inference as being less certain than someone with a
| narrower range of experience would.
| zachthewf wrote:
| The example from University is not a good one. There are
| bright and not-so-bright young people too, but older people
| typically have fewer misgivings about asking "dumb" questions
| that may have obvious answers.
| iamwil wrote:
| Also, I think older people have seen more exceptions
| through experience, and know that sometimes, "dumb"
| questions don't have obvious answers.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's an interesting phenomenon where middle IQ people
| see bright people as rather stupid. They can't see the
| extra layers of complexity and possibility that bright
| people can, so they read "Yes but...?" questions as naive
| and uneducated.
|
| Obviously I'm not suggesting all mature students are
| hyper-intelligent, but I do think it's not as easy to
| tell as it might seem to be.
| somethingreen wrote:
| Name 3 things you own or use that were invented (even at
| conceptual level) by a child.
| sargstuff wrote:
| [1] has more researched 10 list.
|
| https://inventionland.com/blog/ten-kid-inventors-that-
| change...
| somethingreen wrote:
| The fact that one needs to google the list and even then
| may still fail to answer is kind of the point. The struggle
| to give an answer is the actual answer.
|
| This myth that children's ideas are somehow more valuable
| that adult's is nonsense. If this was true, businesses
| would organize and act on it. Parents would be hired to
| bring children into brainstorming sessions. Filled idea
| diaries would be sold and bought in bulk. Sponsored
| kindergarten and school networks would be established to
| gain access. Children hackathons with prizes would be held
| every day of the week. Video games would be designed to
| siphon ideas.
|
| None of this happens. Because the reality is: children are
| great, their ideas are useless, most beautiful genius
| things in your life weren't invented and designed by a
| child or a nameless enlightened being in a tropical
| bungalow, but by a perfectly boring adult at their desk in
| their work time.
| tchaffee wrote:
| The many fictional worlds of my nephew. I use them for
| entertainment and they are an excellent fit.
| acuozzo wrote:
| If you're willing to accept innovations in place of
| inventions and if you're willing to consider the central
| message of OP's post i.e. needing a childlike sense of
| wonder, then...
|
| 1. "Mum, when I grow up I am going to invent a telephone with
| no wires that's also a flashlight, a compass, a map, a
| jukebox, a movie theater, and even an ENTIRE computer!"
|
| 2. "Dad, when I grow up I am going to invent a table saw that
| will JUST KNOW when it touches your finger and it will
| disappear so fast that you'll only get a little cut next
| time!"
|
| 3. "Sis, when I grow up I am going to figure out some way to
| make it possible for even six year olds like you to have
| their own TV channel and put whatever you want on it! You can
| show everyone your toys and dresses. We can call it Roxanne-
| TV!"
| sargstuff wrote:
| well, era of antibiotics was started with the curiosity
| about empty space in a petri dish.
|
| both telephone and rubber tire vulcanization process were
| because of an unintended oops mistake while exploring /
| trying make sense of world.
|
| adults tend to have wider interaction with world than kids,
| but kids dont have the baggage of years of preconceived
| notions/rules of adult experiences.
| seydor wrote:
| "ChatGPT, gimme 10 startup ideas"
|
| TBH, at this point, if there is a problem that hasn't been
| solved, its because some people tried and failed and found that
| the problem is not solvable currently. It may be more fruitful to
| start with something promisingly popular, and improve upon it
| (e.g. tiktok)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I'm finding the whole AI thing discouraging. Nothing like
| earlier tech gold-rushes. Every single idea I have starts with
| "have, or acquire, an absolute shitload of capital"--because
| you need huge, tagged datasets to move forward with any of
| them. That means capital, and lots of it. And if you find a way
| around that you're still burning non-trivial amounts of money
| on every little experiment (for compute time) all in search of
| an outcome that may not materialize, i.e. you may never even
| have anything that you _could_ attempt to sell or raise money
| with. Seems impossibly expensive to engage in just to fail
| several times, unless you 've got a large pile of capital.
| seydor wrote:
| It s not like google invented the web, or that they wrote any
| web pages. Yet they made all the money
| sargstuff wrote:
| > ... problem not solvable currently ...
|
| pre or post order traversal of copyright/trademark?
|
| perhaps switch heap stacks?
| cableshaft wrote:
| This can work. I've done this for some of my game designs.
| "ChatGPT, I have a game design with this theme and these
| mechanics. What are some ideas for some new special tiles /
| cards I can add to the game?" And it'll give me 5-10 ideas,
| some junk, but a few that are worth exploring and I might not
| have thought of on my own.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| My algorithm for generating ideas:
|
| https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas
| Jun8 wrote:
| Using combinatorial mechanics to generate new ideas is a
| powerful technique, perhaps first popularized by Ramon Llull in
| his _Ars Magna_ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull).
| Similar techniques are also used in TRIZ
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ).
|
| The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and
| experience to judge which generated ideas are good.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| Wow, thank you for the amazing links.
|
| _> The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and
| experience to judge which generated ideas are good._
|
| This comment reminds me of my grandpa.
|
| I occasionally call him when I have a "brilliant" idea, and
| he dismembers the idea with simple questions.
|
| It's like magic. Even if my idea sits outside his domain
| knowledge, he has an incredible gift for finding fatal flaws
| in things.
|
| This gift has proven to be lucrative over his lifetime, and I
| suspect it makes him deeply unhappy.
|
| I'd like to acquire this power too, one day.
| sargstuff wrote:
| or enough connections outside of one's area of interest to
| generate comments about where the idea is considered
| good/$$$$
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| Have a anomoulus brain, that recombines things that do not belong
| together (conspiracy theories) but have enough filter to
| recognize the the bad recombinations. Train said brain with
| rewards for recombinations, even ridculous ones.
|
| Also recongize that inventors would be excellent in story
| writting when asked to produce a recipe for creativity. So the
| step by step instructions may be nonsense.
|
| Creativity, the far reaching one, not the incremental one, is
| topological adjunct to insanity. Which is why the radical new
| things, only get funded in times of desperation. If I were a
| inventor, i would be heading for ukraine or russia right now.
| reffle wrote:
| This essay is very short. Has he given up on writing? Maybe too
| much Twitter has melted his brian.
| baxtr wrote:
| He is pretty active on Twitter, so short form content is
| nothing new for him.
|
| Maybe he's trying out if he can use his blog for short form
| too, since Twitter is going down a new / strange? path.
| brap wrote:
| I really liked the length of this "essay".
| Dave_TRS wrote:
| Me too. Most blog posts have one pretty simple idea that it
| takes a ton of reading to figure out what it is. I appreciate
| the time he put into distilling it.
|
| If he were to make it longer some examples might be
| interesting to read about and drive home the message, he no
| doubt has examples in his mind, and his readers would no
| doubt be curious as to what they are
| sargstuff wrote:
| > ... melted his brain.
|
| wouldnt that require a 'back to the future' tie-in?
| Separo wrote:
| "I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to
| write a short one." - Mark Twain
| sargstuff wrote:
| much more subject material with a joseph campbell / wierd al
| yankovich take on 'jason and the argonauts' aka weighted gram
| and the arc-a-oughts.
| sargstuff wrote:
| though moving away from pg rating to statistical r, might
| result in some twisted python stuff. especially if ast
| taken to the limitless turing resources extreme.
| valstu wrote:
| Well, I asked GPT-3 to make this longer:
|
| One of the surest ways to come up with new ideas is to pay
| attention to what doesn't fit in. We're used to seeing things
| in a certain way, and often times it's the things that don't
| quite fit into our preconceived notions that can provide the
| best insights. The most obvious place to look for these
| anomalies is at the frontiers of knowledge.
|
| Knowledge grows like a fractal; from a distance its edges may
| appear smooth, but when you get closer you begin to see the
| jagged gaps and spaces. These gaps can be surprisingly obvious;
| it can seem strange that no one has thought to ask a certain
| question or investigate a certain problem. When you explore
| them, you can often discover entirely new areas of knowledge
| that have been previously untouched.
|
| That's why it's useful to investigate these gaps in knowledge.
| It may feel uncomfortable at first; we don't always like to
| challenge our preconceptions and explore things beyond our
| comfort zone. But often times this can be the source of some of
| our best ideas.
|
| You don't even have to look far for these anomalies; they can
| be found in everyday life. Much of stand-up comedy is based on
| this, by finding the oddities and quirks about our daily lives
| that we normally take for granted.
|
| So don't be afraid to take a closer look at what seems strange
| or missing or broken. It could lead you to unexpected discovery
| and perhaps even uncover some of your best ideas. This may be
| challenging and uncomfortable, but it's often worth it.
| sargstuff wrote:
| per 'doesnr sem to fit in': is looking outside of ones field
| and/or historical anacronisms reframed to current
| day/technology cheating when comes to idea
| developement/gemeration?
| [deleted]
| specialist wrote:
| And I'm over here trying turn off my endless torrent of new
| ideas, to better focus on the work in front of me.
|
| During the apocalyse, it got really bad. Probably due to
| isolation and so I didn't have my usual inhibitors. ("Being
| polite company" turn upkeep.)
|
| --
|
| The one strategy I have "to let it go" for my idea factory is to
| journal. Write however much of the notion down in notebooks that
| emotionally allows me to mentally stop chewing on it. Sometimes
| just a one liner. Sometimes long white papers.
| interleave wrote:
| I love this.
|
| Short and concise, this combines two of my most favorite
| mindshares.
|
| 1. "Hackers and Painters" - I stumbled across in late 2004 at the
| Technical University of Vienna's (excellent) bookstore. Reading
| it changed my life.
|
| 2. "Ideas are the Enemy of Observations (2012)" - Just Three
| months ago yamrzou shared this gem of a text. For me, it has
| become the most meaningful post ever shared on HN.
|
| "How to get new ideas" seems to fit snuggly right in the middle
| :)
|
| [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355094
| borroka wrote:
| I read the essay and found it reasonably entertaining, but not
| exactly in a good way. What exactly is the writer trying to
| accomplish? I didn't get it, but maybe it's about having an
| "unbiased" look at the world, probably/maybe in the context of
| inferring causality, not just for lolz.
|
| The essay writer's main problem is that they are attempting to
| infer causality from observation or to find an explanation of
| the data that justifies or supports their worldview. After all,
| "why?", "how curious", "I wonder how that happens" are powerful
| questions and statement that have led to countless inventions,
| investigations, novels, and pleasurable, although at times
| frustrating, time.
|
| I would recommend something more scientific: observe the world
| (data/observations), develop a hypothesis that is hard in
| Platt's sense (meaning it should be discriminating) and test
| the hypothesis on new data and observations, where new means
| not used to develop the hypothesis to be tested. And they will
| see that they should not only collect observations that
| describe the world, but develop and test hypotheses that can
| test the mechanisms that lead to those observed facts.
|
| Sometimes this is possible, sometimes it is not. But it is
| always entertaining.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Most of the truly new innovation that happens is between
| established disciplines. Biology <-> Chemistry, Biochemistry.
| Statistics <-> [insert field].
| gizmo wrote:
| Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that
| you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but
| almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to
| think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just
| barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become
| today's good ideas.
|
| For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental
| improvements in li-ion batteries, and suddenly electric cars are
| "unlocked".
| FranGro78 wrote:
| Progress in the technology landscape, which makes previously
| impossible ideas barely possible, sounds like just the thing
| wardley maps are good for.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you
| couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today.
|
| Streaming gaming is something I am still laser-focused on. Our
| networks are only getting faster. I feel there is a gigantic
| opportunity here that is being passed up by efforts like
| Stadia.
|
| To do this thing correctly, the game engine itself needs to be
| developed with these concerns in mind. Expectations of things
| like having GPUs available on the same machine that is
| servicing player input events should be eliminated. The
| simulation itself may benefit from being distributed across
| multiple nodes connected via a low-latency network.
|
| The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will not be
| feasible if every player's computer will be required to
| replicate and render all of that game state.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > The future of shard-less, million player MMO worlds will
| not be feasible if every player's computer will be required
| to replicate and render all of that game state.
|
| I think the problem here isn't render, on that scale you'll
| have to shard on the server end anyway.
| aeonflux wrote:
| MMO seems to be in decline, not due to technical limitation.
| Also, I've just tried GeForce Now and I was blown away. I
| don't think that huge changes in the model are practical in
| order to get 1% improvement over what's available now
| cjwebb wrote:
| What kinds of things do you think has to change with game
| engines?
|
| Sharding would have to happen to handle geographic distance
| between people, wouldn't it?
|
| I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
| bob1029 wrote:
| You can still do things like client-side prediction with
| streaming, but imagine if you controlled all of the clients
| and could always trust them. You could have the actual
| simulation running in a big bunker in Ohio somewhere on
| entirely synchronous terms (<1ms node-to-node), with a
| bunch of "player" nodes geo-distributed talking to the
| shared simulation and operating with CSP.
|
| The game concept itself can be engineered around vertical
| scale constraints. For instance, imagine flight routes in
| WoW. If the cost to take a flight was modulated by the
| system load _in the desired target region_ , you could
| create a much more seamless way to make this work. Think
| about real-world flight routes and system demand... The
| determinism goes down a lot for the technology owner, but
| the effect is much more compelling to the end customer.
| cjwebb wrote:
| Interesting. Can't think of any faults in your logic!
|
| Are you actively working on this?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Yes - Right now it's entirely side-project mode, but I am
| averaging about 10-20 hours per week.
| kqr wrote:
| A similar strategy is to find things which were invented 10-100
| years ago but considered insignificant then, but due to
| changing _environments_ can be adapted to be useful today in a
| way that wasn 't possible then.
|
| My day job is to work on software working with self-organising
| maps, which were last popular in 1980. As far as I know, they
| were never really used for anything significant then. The
| reason we can be so successful using them is that we discovered
| a relatively new environment in which they can improve profits
| fairly immediately: e-commerce.
| jasonb05 wrote:
| Man I love SOMs. When Kohonen's book came out in 2000, I read
| that thing a bunch of times.
|
| Seems like an expensive way to structure a "this is like" or
| "people also bought" compared to an SVD.
| JackFr wrote:
| "With a big enough engine even a brick will fly." - famous
| quote about the F-4, which captures that much of early airplane
| development was engine development rather than aeronautics.
| It's no coincidence that Glenn Curtiss got his start in
| motorcycles before moving onto aircraft.
|
| I think to some extent we are seeing the same thing with the
| latest AI models, where if you just throw enough parameters and
| GPU's at a problem, you can get pretty good results.
|
| In a way, I see some parallels to aircraft, in that it was
| important to study birds as the best example of heavier than
| air flyers early on, but understanding the nuances of the
| biomechanics of flapping wasn't necessary to surpass them.
| [deleted]
| andjelam990 wrote:
| Ask chatGPT :D
| topherPedersen wrote:
| I thought GPT wrote what Paul posted! I guess I cannot tell the
| difference anymore between who's saying what. I actually thought
| what Paul wrote sounded like a poor imitation of Paul Graham...
| spooky!
| biscuits1 wrote:
| The question wasn't answered.
|
| How to fill those gaps? Write.
| sargstuff wrote:
| painting works wonders at filling the gaps. more colorful than
| plumber spak.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| My problem isn't a lack of ideas. It's having the bandwidth to do
| them all. What I really need is the ability to clone myself.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I try to find forests of related idea, so that working a bit on
| one, will contribute vaguely to another. I'm discovering
| logarithms
| exevp wrote:
| So cloning yourself is the actual idea you should pursue? ;)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It's called hiring?
| affgrff2 wrote:
| 'leveraging your talent by means of labor'
| sargstuff wrote:
| no, that's what caused the romans/greeks to avoid making
| use of steam for labor -- what will the current slaves
| do?
| exevp wrote:
| Psssst, if you put it this way it won't attract VC $$$
| sargstuff wrote:
| > ... wont attract VC $$$
|
| because of clone cache coherencey issues?
| moneywoes wrote:
| I guess this is where employees come in
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yep. Or somehow focus more, that would help knock a few more
| ideas out as well.
|
| My backlog of games/puzzles/stories I'd eventually like to get
| out there might be >100 at this point.
|
| Focusing mostly on a bit more of an ambitious game right now,
| and it's probably still 6 months before I get it into Steam
| early access (coding in my spare time and energy, which is
| sparse lately), so everything else is just waiting at this
| point.
|
| But sometimes I get an idea that I need to at least get some
| playable prototype with index cards, pen, paper, and tokens, at
| least. Just had another concept pop into my head a couple days
| ago for a roll-and-write I should at least make a board and
| write up some rules for before I forget.
|
| Waiting for the day when something like ChatGPT can code up a
| basic but working game based on my description of its
| mechanisms. Even if it can only handle abstract games on a
| sqauare or hex grid, that'd still be useful for me.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| After I hit midlife I decided that I just didn't have enough
| time to do them all, and started pruning aggressively. I now
| keep three projects alive and bounce between them as interest
| directs. It takes discipline. But it also exercises my focus
| which was never a strength.
| cableshaft wrote:
| I'm mainly working on one video game and one board game
| design at the moment, mostly the video game right now.
| Sometimes if I want a break from the game I'll do a tiny
| bit of work on a library that should facilitate future web
| game development, or trying to get a personal site up again
| to showcase all my games (including past ones that have
| been released and videos for board game prototypes I've
| pitched to publishers before).
|
| I do have a list of what to work on next after that,
| though. I did used to try to juggle a lot more and bounce
| amongst several projects at once, but it's been too long
| since I've released something, so I've got to knock it off
| for a little while. But if I don't scratch the creative
| itch when it strikes at least as far as some notes and some
| card ideas or something, then I start feeling pretty stuck,
| since a lot of my current game is just getting all the UI
| running and polished right now, not exactly super creative
| stuff.
| sargstuff wrote:
| > ...proto type with index card, pen, paper ....
|
| go e-ink & vr and save the $$ not spent on consumable
| resources for venture capital.
| babuloseo wrote:
| I am interested in that? Maybe we can use ChatGPT or related
| tech to change Dungeon Crawler games or related procedural
| generated games? I think DCSS would benefit from this,
| imagine designing entire levels so that they fit your
| character well. A common frustration between people that play
| Felid, draconians or Octopodes according to the dungeon crawl
| subreddit is that, a lot of armor that generate that they
| can't use. I think if we had better code or algorithms that
| targetted even something as basic as item generation based on
| class or race you play will make games more immersive for
| people that pick them. It's always weird when I play DCSS,
| and I am playing a human brigand or something and I see
| Centaur warding or armor that I can't wear. Some of the best
| games I have had are where the character that I play, gets
| items or environments or vaults that help my character
| progress, this means the correct spells, items, stat
| increases, enemies and so on.
| sargstuff wrote:
| alway dinkstra's maps[1] but a reverse hascii [2] might be
| more future proof
|
| [1] : http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php/Dijkstra_Maps_Vis
| ualized
|
| [2]: https://github.com/jaromil/hasciicam
| affgrff2 wrote:
| Collect a list of problems. Then roll a dice. Work on the
| matching problem and let the other yous in the multiverse work
| on the others.
| smallerfish wrote:
| The issue is having a full time job, leaving little time where
| I have creative energy to work on side projects. Strongly
| considering trying to find a part time consulting gig once my
| current is played out.
| sargstuff wrote:
| google glasses / vr & double down on what can do at any one
| given time?
| adversaryIdiot wrote:
| God that's so toxic lol. But it's what capitalism wants!
| sargstuff wrote:
| does extend the life span of outlook.
| steele wrote:
| 1) have capital 2) bet capital on people with ideas 3) exploit
| their labor 4) declare yourself their muse
| sargstuff wrote:
| wonder if that's what einstein was thinking when came up with e
| = m (c squared).
|
| 1) aka two see m is to b without [need for financial] backing.
|
| 2) sed e/two/to/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'
|
| sed e/m/money/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'
|
| sed e/b/be/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'
|
| 3) crap -- type face doesnt do this justice --- gotta go re-
| invent tex for ycombinator
|
| 4) ha ha ACME; errr.. sed e/ol/al/
|
| sed g/ol$/lol/
|
| sed g/al$/ai/
|
| sed g/capit/car(cdr(ulate)) /
|
| ^Gli movie ref[1]
|
| ^G ed ^D
|
| [1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigli
| sargstuff wrote:
| so, must vi 4/attention
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Real progress in any field or endeavor comes down to about 5% new
| ideas and creativity, 95% hard work putting those new ideas into
| practice or building something functional out of them.
|
| That 5% is pretty critical however, as without it you're just
| continuing to redo what's already been done.
| valgor wrote:
| This is very true. Ideas are pretty cheap to come by.
| Implementing, building, teasing them out into a practical
| scenario is hard.
| gizmo wrote:
| I don't think it's easy at all. Try to come up with an
| original plot for a hollywood big budget time travel movie.
| Take the plot of Edge of Tomorrow. I could never come up with
| that. Ideas are easy when it's just "Grand theft auto in
| space", but actual originality? Extremely difficult.
| sargstuff wrote:
| novelty or origial application of combination of ideas?
|
| working fax machine was a 1800's idea.[1]
|
| [1] : https://www.damninteresting.com/curio/the-fax-
| machines-of-th...
| corobo wrote:
| On the other hand I ditch a handful of film/TV ideas each
| week.
|
| Many because they'd be crap of course, but the rest because
| there's no way in this lifetime I'll have the resources to
| bother thinking about them, never mind have the time to
| actually write them out.
|
| Gotta do regular people work till I die. So glad I was
| dragged out of the universal energy just to pay rent for 60
| years haha. Fuck I wish I could afford to do something arty
| farty instead. Such is life.
|
| I passed my GCSE English literature (end of high school
| exam in UK) writing a time travel story, haha.
| sargstuff wrote:
| > ... arty farty...
|
| so, take appropriate precautionary measures and stop
| flushing crap down drain ?
| corobo wrote:
| There ain't no time for my dumb stories to get written
| down, the rent's due soon. Back to work.
| sargstuff wrote:
| guess why producers such as spielber and lucas draw from
| literature -- starwars from joseph campell 'warrior myth' &
| japanse 'magnificant 7'
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| That expression, "ideas are easy, implementations are hard",
| is lacking nuance. No, new ideas are ridiculously hard: can
| you have the idea for an alphabet if you have never seen one
| before?, even the banal equals sign is a ridiculously hard
| idea, Euclid and al-Khwarizmi never had such an idea [1].
| Ideas are hard, implementations are sometimes hard, idea
| collages or idea twistings are almost always easy, given a
| ripening context: sliced bread; sell things, but on the
| internet.
|
| [1] "Robert Recorde invented the equals sign (=) and also
| introduced the pre-existing plus sign (+) to English speakers
| in 1557." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Recorde
| sargstuff wrote:
| at least until gpt3 gets paired with 3d printer & amazon auto
| delivery to generate the crude diy precursor to star trek
| transporter
| borroka wrote:
| The problem with using percentages in these contexts is that
| they refer to something seemingly intuitive, but not
| quantifiable, and therefore ambiguous at best and useless at
| worst. What does 5%-95% refer to? Time? Effort/energy? We don't
| know.
|
| It is like saying that to lose weight 90% is about nutrition
| and 10% is about exercise. 90-10% of what, exactly? And what
| would change in my approach to diet/exercise if it was 80-20%
| or 70-30%?
|
| I think vague quantification does more damage along the way to
| achieving goals than we suspect. Maybe 10% more.
| naillo wrote:
| I couldn't really parse the header to tell if he authored this
| essay or if he asked chatgpt to make it up. (If the latter,
| pretty impressive!)
| whstl wrote:
| That's PG. The GPT answer is in the linked tweet.
| sargstuff wrote:
| there's a gpt arc?
| [deleted]
| baxtr wrote:
| It's actually so short, you can read it here. (If you're like me
| you head to the the comments section before going to a page...).
|
| Here it is:
|
| _How to Get New Ideas
|
| January 2023
|
| (Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could
| answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas
| come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So
| I asked: What would I have said?)
|
| The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems
| strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday
| life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best
| place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.
| Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth,
| but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's
| full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem
| inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the
| best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds._
| sargstuff wrote:
| > .. exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.
|
| so, 'through the looking glass' by another name?
|
| edit: at time of writing, in wrong hemisphere for summer's day.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Https mirror: https://archive.is/1YOzz
| kensai wrote:
| Well, actually the ChatGPT essays-fed answer
| (https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222536344764416/photo/1) is
| pretty close to what Paul Graham himself said, although he would
| not admit it. Real Paul talked about anomalies, and that's eerily
| close to "accidents and mistakes" in my opinion. :)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| A willingness to change one's mind and the cliche Socrates idea
| that one knows they know nothing always helps too.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| His take on non-natural lang for AI
| (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1612510768674795523) sounds
| right (bias: because it's also what I was thinking)
|
| So I'm not hyped about ChatGPT _at all_
|
| > much of standup comedy is based on this (anomalies)
|
| I think it's more about capitalize popular rants though. Not sure
| most of them are even feasible things to fix.
|
| It's an ok essay .. though nothing sparks new idea of thinking
| about new idea.
| josht wrote:
| Simply beautiful.
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| Of PG advice/tips/guidance, "Do things that don't scale" I think
| is still a great starting point and a piece of advice that is a
| bit less abstract.
|
| When you start from that, only the ideas that most people would
| never consider float to the top.
|
| It's worked for me and my business.
| sidcool wrote:
| Question. How does one feed content to ChatGPT and get such
| output?
| sargstuff wrote:
| chatgp isnt limited to spoonfuls, so guessing internet setup /
| tty typing speed.
|
| would tying infinate google search feeds to chatgp crash the
| internet or just reduce down to 42?
| swyx wrote:
| not an expert, but i think usually one of two ways - either use
| openai's finetune api (the right way) or embed all the docs,
| retrieve them using embedding of the questions, and add just
| enough of them to the prompt to generate a response (gpt-index
| or langchain help automate some of this).
|
| downside of former is lack of sources, downside of latter is
| context constraint
| firasd wrote:
| I'm not sure fine tuning helps with this kinda thing. Because
| the fine tuning mechanism involves sending the API a bunch of
| data like
|
| {"prompt": "<prompt text>", "completion": "<ideal generated
| text>"}
|
| So I'm not sure how you would feed it PG's essays in this
| mechanism
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Lots of truth to this. Just start building. Build for yourself
| and real people, not imagined profiles of people. The more you
| build, the more you explore, the more you'll find low-hanging
| useful ideas. As you encounter them it'll surprise you that the
| space is mostly empty.
|
| Patio11 tweeted about using ChatGPT to immitate social signaling
| by rewriting content. I thought that was fun so I started doing
| it. That grew into Spencer Westford: https://vc.blankenship.io
|
| That grew into a product: https://persona.ink
|
| That keeps snowballing. Ever since building for myself my
| notebook of ideas is growing faster than I can keep up.
| prmph wrote:
| But can you build products on ChatGPT with the assurance that
| they will not yank their service from under you in the future,
| like how Twitter did?
| exevp wrote:
| This space is getting so much interest that OpenAI will not
| be the only one providing LLM as a service forever.
| somethingreen wrote:
| Like web search in the 90s.
| sargstuff wrote:
| until to much tangle, then jump ship for something with
| less initial entangements
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Lots of truth to this. Just start building. Build for
| yourself and real people, not imagined profiles of people.
|
| I've been doing this for years and all it has done is drill me
| further down into super-niche rabbit holes that the majority of
| people don't care about.
|
| I mention this because I see this kind of advice all the time
| on here, but it so often comes bundled with the unwritten
| assumption that the kinds of things the reader will build won't
| stray too far from the mainstream.
|
| After more than a decade of "building", I can state with
| confidence that profitable ideas don't spring up from countless
| hours invested in building e.g. a better comb filter for NTSC.
|
| The reality of the situation is that if your interests are
| things like "doing cool stuff with AI" or "SaaSify yet another
| thing" or "shoehorn Merkle trees into yet another square hole",
| then this advice will likely work for you.
|
| If you're the kind of dude (not me) to write ld-decode1, then
| it will likely not.
|
| I mean, shit, Donald Graft2 has been "building" far longer than
| I have and yet none of his "building" has led to a business
| AFAICT.
|
| [1] https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode
|
| [2] https://www.rationalqm.us/mine.html
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Your careers and privacy policy page links in the footer just
| link to the home page.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| Aye, thanks for checking for broken windows! I haven't
| launched yet and they're both still on the todo list. Both
| should be done today.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| No problem. I figured!
| moneywoes wrote:
| What is the moat here?
| rd wrote:
| I don't think a majority of these LLM/GPT companies will ever
| a moat apart from first to market.
| sargstuff wrote:
| 1st to market & release the dragon scorching foames on
| competiton?
| goertzen wrote:
| It might not be good at generating original posts, but it's
| really good at generating HN comments.
|
| Try it! Generate typical HN comments to this PG post [ ... ]. -
| Include both positive and negative comments. - add replies that
| focus on annoying details that draw attention to the commenter -
| include fan boy defence of original post - point out obvious
| exceptions
| sargstuff wrote:
| sounds like enumeration of 1st order logic concepts
| martin-adams wrote:
| I was inspired by comparing DNA to information and used that as a
| formula for generating new ideas.
|
| https://meda.io/evolve-your-thinking/
| swyx wrote:
| i am genuinely surprised that pg is writing such a short response
| to a question that seems _right down his alley_ , seemingly very
| core to his subject matter. how has he _not_ written an
| authoritative "how to get ideas" post until now?
| starkd wrote:
| True. Not sure what he was trying to convey. It was just a
| paragraph. Not even an essay. So vague it makes you wonder if
| it was an AI response.
| sargstuff wrote:
| or attempt to get everyone else to fill in the blanks.
| goshx wrote:
| http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html
|
| http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html
|
| http://paulgraham.com/organic.html
|
| http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I think the key is _noticing_ , which implies being a more
| passive observer. Most people want to _find_ new ideas, which is
| being active. I 've never had success at actively finding ideas
| but much more successful just living life, listening and the
| ideas just come.
| sargstuff wrote:
| got to get out of oen's comfort zone/familar & figure out how
| the wierd/strange/unknown fits/matches up with what one is
| comfortable/familiar with.
|
| best done on one's own terms vs. letting life exclusively
| dictate when the wierd/strange/unknown happens.
|
| edit:' does result in lot more blue screen issues.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| It's not about whose terms you're living on, it's about
| listening. Most people around us are dealing with mundane
| things that need fixing, just listening to people's
| grievances is a great way to ideate. There are individuals
| who you just end up meeting through life that have great
| niche problems that require nothing else other than living
| and listening to attain them.
|
| Going out and "pursuing" ideas often leads to some
| confirmation bias as we're determined to "find" an idea,
| rather than sitting back and letting the lightbulb go off
| when you're not actively trying.
|
| To each their own though.
| sargstuff wrote:
| but the invariant of checking out/exploring just for the
| sake of being somewhere but 'here' does present one with
| way more opportunities to listen/hear.
| marban wrote:
| As someone who worked with Bill Gross* for almost two decades,
| I'd suggest watching this playlist.
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeabOFsFccYCkD9ZUsoI0...
|
| * Overture, Picasa and many more OGs.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| So PG has been automated?
| threeseed wrote:
| Some of his more recent political takes have been disappointing
| to say the least.
|
| So would be nice to have a PG bot without all of that.
| jarrenae wrote:
| I feel I can speak to this pretty well, over the past year I've
| launched 130+ projects as part of https://ae.studio/same-day-
| skunkworks and I've come up with ~250+ ideas.
|
| Similar to "look for anomalies" my general rule of thumb is to
| solve some sort of problem, even if it's rather small.
|
| So for example:
|
| 1. I pick a topic/product. Let's say: Gmail
|
| 2. I look for things that I'd like to be able to do, wish I could
| do, or consider frustrations I've experienced in the past.
|
| - I want to review how many emails I get a day on average, where
| are my "inbox metrics"?
|
| - I want to see threaded messages more clearly, why is the design
| so opposite a normal chat message?
|
| - I want to create emails faster, why do I have such an elaborate
| editor and format for something that I typically want to use
| informally?
|
| 3. I consider ways to solve said problems
|
| - Where are my "inbox metrics"? - Chrome extension to show
| average emails per day, and graph on a timeline which types of
| emails I get on certain days. Huge personal data opportunity
| here.
|
| - I want to see threaded messages more clearly - An app that
| connects to my gmail that intelligently restructures my emails to
| make them appear like chat messages. It handles all the noise, I
| just message as I would in any instant messenger.
|
| - I want to create emails faster - predictive text templates,
| quick starters, GPT powered replies, change the "bulky editor"
| out for a simple text box + clever replies.
|
| 4. I then research if there are existing solutions to said
| problems, and if there are, I either ignore and move on, or
| consider ways that I could quickly one up their product to make
| mine the better product in the marketplace.
|
| For my specific use-case, I'm trying to build a product per day,
| so I'll look for speedy ways to solve the problem that I've
| selected in a novel and agency increasing way. But I think this
| is a great structure for anyone looking to build a startup or a
| small side hustle.
| hooande wrote:
| 250 ideas is incredible. if only 1% of them grow to have ~$1MM
| in value (or anything close), you should have two or three real
| winners by now. If only by pure chance.
|
| I'm really curious about how that's going. I can't quite suss
| out what your biggest successes are on your website.
| sargstuff wrote:
| wonder what the typical painting brush stroke count is between
| posted writings.
|
| edit: perhaps a stippling[1] to stipulation [2] ratio tuppled
| with relevant/appropriate pruning technique(s)
| [1] stipplism vs pointillism : https://www.davidaccurso.com/the-
| art [2] document of concurrence :
| https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/stipulation
| robg wrote:
| Neuroscientist here. Closer I got to the physiology of mental
| health - sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition - realized it was
| another fractal for personal and population health. Problem
| remains navigating regulatory or reimbursement hurdles from
| wellness into professional care.
| aleks5678 wrote:
| 100%. Start projects, bet small, grow
| Schroedingers2c wrote:
| Would you mind giving a high-level summary of the physiology of
| mental health (like one paragraph or two, however much you
| like)? Just the main things that are currently known/believed.
| robg wrote:
| The autonomic nervous system and the glymphatic nervous
| system are both things I never really learned about in
| schools. ANS is taught as a textbook fact of homeostasis, not
| the constant fight-or-flight reflex that's on every second of
| every day and the impacts that causes on health. The
| glymphatic system has only been discovered in the last 10
| years but helps explain why sleep deficits explain cognitive
| performance decrements, mental health concerns, and age-
| related declines. And still so much we don't know like gut-
| brain health and neuroelectronics as for implants!
| paraschopra wrote:
| Wrote about the exact same idea a few years back:
| https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-f...
| samsquire wrote:
| I think that finding gaps as Paul Graham says is a good approach
| to finding ideas.
|
| My approach to finding ideas is to think, write and use words I
| like to explore creatively and join arbitrary ideas together.
| Writing and talking IS thinking itself!
|
| I even journal all my ideas in the open on GitHub! I share all my
| ideas with everyone, including startup ideas. Links are on my
| profile. I LOVE SHARING IDEAS.
|
| I enjoy reading people's problems to encounter inspiration for
| problem solving. I would read Slashdot when growing up to learn
| about computer issues people were solving.
|
| Some words I enjoy are "mesh", "parallel", "multiplex", "multi",
| "schedule", "marketplace", "tree", "additive", "auto", "query",
| "traversal", "graph".
| papito wrote:
| When I was in my 20s, I could code for days on straight. I had so
| much energy and the perception of the bottomless capital of time.
| Now that I am forty, the cost-benefit analysis is getting
| tougher.
|
| Can I have my big break and retire early? Sure, but the chances
| of that happening are not that great. Many serial entrepreneurs
| fail multiple times with nothing to show for it.
|
| All I think about now is - when I am on my deathbed, and I look
| back at my life, will I regret not living it, or that I didn't
| spend enough time writing code in front of my computer on an off-
| chance that my idea works out?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I can identify with that. One tidbit that might interest you,
| is that most successful startups are not done by kids, but
| middle aged people.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Sounds like burnout. The reason you can spend days on end
| coding is because you're excited about the thing you're working
| on. If you're coding something that you don't find exciting or
| that is just a pipe dream, you'll have thoughts about your
| deathbed. That's pretty natural.
| sargstuff wrote:
| so, software went to crap when the coder's square girl friend
| stoped emmitting random radiation that sparked idea
| mutations?
| sarkhan wrote:
| Burnout from doing same thing over and over.
| sargstuff wrote:
| well, didnt go from cooking meat to oven by not toasting /
| charing things over & over.
| papito wrote:
| Pretty much. Every project I start, it's the same kind of
| yak-shaving. Database schema, logging, authentication,
| display of errors, build tools, CI/CD, backend, front-end.
| Full-time is not even enough for this for one person.
|
| There is a ton of CRUD and mind-numbing tasks you have to
| churn through to get to the interesting parts, and I have
| been doing the boring parts for 20 years. The goals barely
| changed, but how we implement things has. New ways to
| build, new way to deploy, new languages, new frameworks.
| Just keeping up with it is a struggle.
|
| I think my next project, I am just going to go Rails. It's
| my way of giving up :)
| sargstuff wrote:
| clippers to sledge hammers & spikes -- pretty big jump.
| changing direction to up does get ne off the rail (way)
| plane.
| hristov wrote:
| HN should have a [chat GPT] tag for stuff generated by chat GPT.
| So that I can ignore it. I do not mind reading what paul graham
| said about how to get new ideas. I do not care what chat GPT
| said. What chat GPT said may or may not be a good summary of paul
| grahams thoughts, it may be wrong in an important aspect, etc.
|
| If Paul Graham wants to say something, he should say it directly
| and not hide behind a chat gpt layer.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| That is an interesting concept in itself, if the idea is sound,
| why does the originator matter?
| hristov wrote:
| Usually if one wants to take advice, one should consider the
| reliability of the source of advice as a factor.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| Most certainly we do, but I find the question interesting,
| a focus on advice verifiability helps both cases.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yes, but _is_ the idea sound? ChatGPT can produce fine-
| sounding nonsense at least as well as a human can. The
| difference is that I have a lot more experience calibrating
| my BS meter with humans than I do with ChatGPT.
| guptaneil wrote:
| This _is_ PG saying something... he linked to a chatGPT
| generated response and said he didn 't like the response so he
| wrote his own.
| hristov wrote:
| PG was a little ambiguous about this. He said "So I asked:
| What would I have said?" It is not clear whether he asked
| himself or ChatGPT.
| mediaman wrote:
| It appears pretty clear that PG wrote what he actually
| thought in response to ChatGPT's render of his potential
| thoughts.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| The thing is, I have to trust that PG wrote the words saying
| he wrote his own response. What stops ChatGPT from saying
| those same words?
|
| I'm wondering what ways/technologies we'll create to tell if
| someone actually generates text themselves. Right now, I can
| feel a rising desire to avoid text-based communication with
| people, almost a fear of getting catfished by text.
| olalonde wrote:
| I think that's why a lot of innovation comes from "outsiders"
| rather than industry veterans. You are more likely to notice the
| anomalies with fresh eyes and stop noticing them through time.
| david927 wrote:
| I agree. Things fall into existing grooves. Your band comes up
| with a new sound and people say, "That's kind of like Mazzy
| Star," and now you point it more that way. It falls into that
| nearby groove instead of continuing on its own. A lot of great
| sounds came out of the 1960s because there were so few grooves.
| No one knew what the rules were.
|
| Plus, a lot of low hanging fruit stays there because no one
| looks at it. Everyone is looking at x, y, and z, and there are
| a thousand variations of those, and they ignore a, b, and c
| because no one brought it up.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Conversely, I have seen that some of the most boring startups
| that you never hear of, but are killing it, are built by domain
| experts who know the task they're trying to solve inside and
| out. Two examples from my own country, Spain:
|
| - A man who built a SaaS for local administrations and has
| about a ~50% share of the market. He spent 30 years working for
| the Spanish IRS in different positions. I don't know the
| insider story, but looking at the website he just made a SaaS
| solution with good UX in a space where UX tends to be
| atrocious.
|
| - RatedPower's CTO. RatedPower makes a software that automates
| the design of renewable power plants. This guy had been drawing
| the plans by hand as a renewables engineer, realized a computer
| would be perfectly equipped to do it, and the competition in
| the space had grown complacent and barely innovated in years,
| so he did it.
|
| The older I grow the more I get excited by boring ideas. People
| pitch ideas to me frequently and most of the time I literally
| end up thinking "not boring enough"!
| paulorlando wrote:
| Love the comments here. I try to get ideas for what is becoming
| possible (not what's a good or bad idea) by visualizing how
| drivers of timing work. I wrote a bit about it here:
| https://startupsunplugged.com/why-now/timing-drivers-visuali...
| ok_dad wrote:
| I don't need _ideas_! I need some sort of "basic income" that
| allows me to pursue the ideas I have _today_ while providing for
| a family.
| corobo wrote:
| Right! I think we might be the only two on this site who have
| more ideas than money haha.
|
| How to get new ideas? How do I stop them coming?! My method is
| to scribble them on a piece of card and chuck that into a tub
| to get them out the way for now.
|
| I know that tub is being emptied with nothing in there seeing
| the light of day. Simple fact is if I work on my own stuff I
| don't get to pay rent or eat this month.
|
| One day. In the next lifetime if not this.
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