What I Worked On • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Worked On

#341

Post by username90 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 6:58 AM UTC

opportune wrote: post #337

abhinav22 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s so much more difficult these days to get significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition, many of the low hanging discoveries and technologies being completed - I would love to make billions writing a chat app or simple CRUD database like Facebook!) that most of us are predisposed to focus on the luck part of things and not the hard work element. I agree with you - people are missing the fac…

Even when facebook came out there plenty of other apps like it. Same with Instagram and whatsapp. Same with the myriad delivery companies. The success comes from users rather than a revolutionary idea

You can have a revolutionary idea without it being a new kind of product. For example Facebook did many things very differently than its competitors.

Firstly it didn't show when you looked at others profiles, all previous networks did that and it makes people think twice before interacting with it.

Secondly it solved real names, people actually used their real names at Facebook which made it easy to find real friends and old friends on it.

Thirdly it only had an upvote button and no downvote making posting content at worst ignored instead of having to be scared of downvotes.

These three taken together greatly increased growth and user engagement. Without them Facebook would never have became a company capable of rivalling Google.

Google similarly just made a much better search engine than the competition. The revolutionary idea wasn't "Lets make a search engine", but "With this algorithm we can make the best search engine in the world, and that is worth a lot!".

Re: What I Worked On

#342

Post by tomcam » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:00 AM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #340

xapata wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.

Yeah we had a very emotional essay this week from Chris Crawford whose life work failed to materialise.

Interesting. I interpreted that as one of his favorite projects failing to thrive. If you look at his blog, or remember much of his career, he did a lot of stuff.

Re: What I Worked On

#343

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:05 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: What I Worked On

#344

Post by tempestn » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

abhinav22 wrote: post #145

pyb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Lisper, I had not been able to understand what Bel was when it was released, and still do not understand it after reading the shorter explanation in this post. Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just needs to be "sold" a bit better.

As somebody who liked reading about Bel but gave up after the first paragraph of the source code, something to note is that (a) most new ideas are failures, (b) I’m happy for Mr pg for trying new things, I like when people try to do something new, without regard for success, (c) great ideas take time to be appreciated in full - it may very well be tha t Bel will be a great success, but once understood by people far s…

Exactly. I think that's well captured if you extend the quote above:

> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I remember taking the boys to the coast on a sunny day in 2015 and figuring out how to deal with some problem involving continuations while I watched them play in the tide pools. It felt like I was doing life right. I remember that because I was slightly dismayed at how novel it felt. The good news is that I had more moments like this over the next few years.

That certainly sounds like a successful endeavor to me.

Re: What I Worked On

#345

Post by meheleventyone » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:15 AM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #342

meheleventyone wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah we had a very emotional essay this week from Chris Crawford whose life work failed to materialise.

Interesting. I interpreted that as one of his favorite projects failing to thrive. If you look at his blog, or remember much of his career, he did a lot of stuff.

Right but his focus since the dragon speech has failed to materialise. He’s done a lot of things in that time but towards the goal articulated there. So understandably he regrets the way his dots connected.

Re: What I Worked On

#346

Post by m463 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:15 AM UTC

When you read the last sentence, it's like you just saw a giant closing parenthesis.

Re: What I Worked On

#347

Post by tlb » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

it wrote: post #334

"""the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you against the ceiling. Which in turn means that prestige is a danger sign.""" Maybe this is usually true, but I can't help thinking Apple is an exception to this rule. They make high end products, but they sure don't seem to be getti…

Apple isn't really high-end -- they have a range from lower-middle to upper-middle. The high end is supercomputers, carrier networking gear, and high-availability OLTP systems for finance. Which are so thoroughly squashed against the ceiling that only specialists know what exists these days.

Re: What I Worked On

#348

Post by JackPoach » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

There's definitely a strong link between ability to write and ability to think/explain things clearly. Writing is an incredible skill, because if kind of forces you to organize your thoughts before expressing them. And not just writing. Standup comedy has a very similar effect.

Re: What I Worked On

#349

Post by mpfundstein » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:02 AM UTC

sdevonoes wrote: post #32

chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.

so we just discard all the amazing results we had in the last decade?

alpha go, alphafold2, gpt-3, image recognition benchmarks etc?

i work in ML as well* and while its certainly overhyped and often sold prematurelt, a lot of the stuff is real and works very very well.

* i build stuff for cities to more efficiently monitor their citizens (no tracking or personal identification, just aggregate numbers)

Re: What I Worked On

#350

Post by barry-cotter » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:05 AM UTC

wozer wrote: post #266

Very inspiring essay. But: > This was the closest thing I've had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was a bad employee. ... Toward the end of the year I spent much of my time surreptitiously working on On Lisp, which I had by this time gotten a contract to publish. Looks like he really was a bad employee. Not sure yet what conclusions I should draw from this.

Actual bad employees are a net negative to their employers. They don’t generally leave a good enough impression to get a steady stream of consulting work from them.