[HN Gopher] Doing something that's never been done before (2025)
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Doing something that's never been done before (2025)
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 33 points
Date : 2026-06-05 14:30 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (talglobus.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (talglobus.com)
| gmuslera wrote:
| Is not about doing something never been done before. Feels more
| like doing something that can be sold, because else there could
| be legal problems, competition, captive markets and so on. That
| is about the current state of the world, not yourself.
|
| You can't know everything that has been done in the past, or is
| being done and finished before you ended. But as far as you are
| not just cloning something that you already seen working, you can
| explore what you are capable of doing, for the sake of it, for
| the experience of doing it and make it work, for the things that
| you think are useful or nice or whatever in what you did.
|
| And if all that effort don't end in something that can be sold,
| you still grow through the process. You are not ensured
| commercial success even if you try something truly new. But maybe
| that is not always a bad thing.
| anyaaya wrote:
| What do you mean by "is not about...?" The article is precisely
| about that. If you don't like what the article is about, go
| write your own? Weird take, buddy.
| jongjong wrote:
| I think gmuslera is right to point out that being the first
| doesn't really matter (for most people). You also need
| support from the right kinds of people and it's not a given
| that being first and eventually being 'proven right' (which
| is itself highly subjective and contested) translates to the
| right kinds of people automatically gravitating to your idea
| and helping you to make a living out of it. There are many
| great innovations which stayed in the shadows long after the
| death of their creators. Many were never given due credit.
|
| Humans fundamentally haven't changed since the time of
| Galileo or Socrates. Being too early tends to be a bad thing.
|
| It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is
| both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is
| essential, probably more so than at any other time in
| history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established
| financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment
| required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.
| Animats wrote:
| > It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which
| is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is
| essential, probably more so than at any other time in
| history. All new ideas must fit precisely within
| established financial incentive structures. The degree of
| alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be
| ticked, is huge.
|
| That's a real issue. In the US today, you have to get to a
| minimum viable product early and find someone to throw
| money at it to make it scale fast. Things that take years
| to make work at all are hard to fund, even at a modest
| level. Xerography and color TV are technologies that took
| decades to make work at all.
|
| This is partly the effect of a weakened patent system.
| 10000truths wrote:
| One of the important functions of a government is to act
| as a backstop for capital-intensive investments with
| long-term ROIs. The interstate highway system started as
| Eisenhower's proposal, GPS and the moon mission were
| funded to one-up the Soviets, Arpanet/Internet was a DoD
| brainchild, and so on. All of that was enabled by
| Congresspeople who were willing to carve out a good chunk
| of the federal budget for large-scale, high-risk, long-
| tail-reward projects. That sort of thinking has not
| existed in Congress for some time (least of all during
| the current "starve the NSF" administration).
| Animats wrote:
| That's what favorable tax treatment of long term capital
| gains is supposed to be for. But that's not what that tax
| treatment is used for.
|
| It shouldn't require socialism to get anything long term
| done.
| 10000truths wrote:
| > That's what favorable tax treatment of long term
| capital gains is supposed to be for. But that's not what
| that tax treatment is used for.
|
| The minimum duration for that qualification is one year.
| One year is nowhere near "long term" for a public works
| project. The Columbia shuttle took almost a decade to
| build. The interstate highway system took over three
| decades (and requires costly and ongoing maintenance).
|
| > It shouldn't require socialism to get anything long
| term done.
|
| What it ultimately requires is a trifecta of power (to
| fund the thing), vision (to plan the thing) and longevity
| (to see the thing through). Those three requirements
| could be satisfied by a government body or by a
| munificent billionaire, but democratically-minded people
| tend to put more faith in the former than in the latter.
| socketcluster wrote:
| I started building something pretty obscure about 14 years ago;
| https://socketcluster.io/ an open source, WebSocket-based RPC +
| pub/sub library with a focus on in-order async stream-processing
| with backpressure monitoring.
|
| It didn't start out like that. Initially, it was just another
| WebSocket library with a focus on making it easier to scale to
| multiple processes.
|
| It's kind of mind-bending to me though that it still feels like
| it's "too early." You'd think that the ability to efficiently
| process RPCs and pub/sub messages from clients whilst maintaining
| ordering would be critical... Yet if you look around the
| industry; callback-based event handlers are still the norm for
| most application logic and people are still not using queues
| where they should be. People think of queues as some
| expensive/bulky system with overhead which requires additional
| architecture (e.g. RabbitMQ, Kafka, STOMP, NSQ) and always
| requires exactly-once delivery, they have not tried to make the
| idea a core part of their application logic. Software today is
| FULL of race conditions because of this blind-spot. Yet I still
| cannot communicate my message. It's too difficult to explain the
| benefits.
| hitchdev wrote:
| I had a similar issue. The blind spot was unit tests.
|
| I think the issue is just that it's incredibly hard to sell an
| abstract idea and incredibly hard to convince people to abandon
| ingrained habit.
|
| I created a testing framework where you wrote half a test in
| YAML and the framework filled in the rest based on program
| output.
|
| It made writing tests quick, easy and even kinda fun.
|
| Moreover if you added a bit of explanation prose to the YAML
| and used a slightly nicer example scenario it would generate
| you guaranteed up-to-date readable markdown how to docs. For
| free.
|
| But, these things are culturally chorey and there's a shame
| culture built around them.
| grebc wrote:
| If people aren't doing as you describe, maybe it's not cracked
| up to all you think it is?
|
| I can't think of many places, even one if I'm being honest,
| where I've needed what you describe.
| chaps wrote:
| Throwing yourself at something that's never been done is fun.
|
| But know what's _really_ fun? Taking something that 's been done
| before, has been forgotten about, and can be iterated on with
| your own spirit. There's so much exploration to be done.
| _def wrote:
| Any examples?
| aaulia wrote:
| Emulator?
| vax425 wrote:
| For example, the project I'm working on today...
|
| People have made orreries (rotating solar system models) for
| centuries.
|
| I'm designing a digital version with over 600 LEDs. It's a
| massive challenge and I'm pretty sure I'll be the first.
|
| I've been making things like it for years:
|
| Https://digitalhorology.com
| nbaksalyar wrote:
| Bret Victor's list of papers and references would be one:
|
| https://worrydream.com/refs/
|
| It's a deep, _deep_ rabbit hole.
| SpecStudioHN wrote:
| yes, our work with applying logical models of nondual systems
| like Advaita Vedanta, Daoism, Dzogchen as remedies for
| hallucination, sycophancy, adversarial instability and false
| continuity in AI systems is pretty unique and obscure.
| neilv wrote:
| This was the secret sauce of my best startup idea: something
| that once existed, but had been forgotten.
|
| (Because, I believe, either the flood of people into the market
| space never knew it, or it wasn't the dominant model for
| exploitation of the user base.)
| munificent wrote:
| _> So if you want to truly do something that no one has done
| before, do something obscure, do something time-consuming, do
| something difficult, and do something that has unknowns you'll
| only resolve once you complete the first bits._
|
| This is an excellent checklist for doing something novel, but it
| doesn't provide any guidance towards doing something _valuable_
| that 's original.
|
| I don't think anyone has tried to build an ocean-going floating
| platform for raising wolverines for the pet trade, and that
| certainly checks everything on the checklist. Likewise composing
| a seven-part symphonic cycle written for bagpipe, slide whistle,
| and djembe with aleatoric and audience-participation components.
| Or inventing a way to knit edible garments out of extremely
| gluten-rich pasta. Training ravens to play Roblox games.
|
| But are those _worthwhile_ projects? I suppose there 's only one
| way to find out.
| Isamu wrote:
| Actually knitting pasta sounds pretty worthwhile.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I want lasagna in which the sheets are actually knitted
| linguini. I think this novelty would be worthwhile. But would
| the Italians ever forgive me?
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I'm not Italian but I would help you eat it if you made a
| large enough batch. I'll bring the olive bread and herbed
| dipping oils.
| munificent wrote:
| Woven would be much much easier.
| Stevvo wrote:
| I never found myself in fear that I'm doing something unoriginal.
| However, I do find myself worrying I'm doing something a better
| resourced competitor is also working on. Most things worth doing
| are actually quite obvious. The determining factor in success is
| execution, not originality.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I don't really get the need for originality here. Why does it
| matter if someone else has done the thing too?
| mikrl wrote:
| On the other hand, after reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, you
| realize that as far as narratives go there's nothing new. It's
| all been done to death, remixed and rehashed for millennia. The
| great Ovid probably lifted ideas and tropes from somewhere else.
|
| Yet all those stories in all their forms still sell today, and
| still impress people.
|
| Not worrying about unoriginality frees you to just enjoy
| yourself... and just maybe do something original.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Just shuffle a deck of cards and write out the order on a piece
| of paper.
|
| You will produce a completely unique page.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I wonder whether we get more satisfaction from chasing things
| that no one has ever done or will ever attempt again or, whether
| we build a more satisfactory legacy of accomplishments by
| attempting things that we ourselves have never done, even if lots
| of other people have done those things.
|
| Would I rather reminisce in my old age about all the things that
| I could've done that would've set me apart from all of my peers
| or spend my old age in a constant brag about all the fun I had,
| completely satisfied because I had chosen activities and
| challenged myself to succeed at building skills and experiences
| that made my own life interesting and challenged me mentally or
| physically.
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