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How to get new ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to get new ideas

#41

Post by r3trohack3r »

xwowsersx wrote: post #26
r3trohack3r wrote: post #16

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 in…

Your careers and privacy policy page links in the footer just link to the home page.

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.

Re: How to get new ideas

#42

Post by gizmo »

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".

Re: How to get new ideas

#43

Post by valgor »

photochemsyn wrote: post #25

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.

This is very true. Ideas are pretty cheap to come by. Implementing, building, teasing them out into a practical scenario is hard.

Re: How to get new ideas

#45

Post by papito »

sarkhan wrote: post #38
TaupeRanger wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Burnout from doing same thing over and over.

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 :)

Re: How to get new ideas

#47

Post by swyx »

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?

Re: How to get new ideas

#48

Post by swyx »

sidcool wrote: post #46

Question. How does one feed content to ChatGPT and get such output?

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

Re: How to get new ideas

#49

Post by xwowsersx »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #41
xwowsersx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your careers and privacy policy page links in the footer just link to the home page.

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.

No problem. I figured!

Re: How to get new ideas

#50

Post by goshx »

swyx wrote: post #47

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?

http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html

http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html

http://paulgraham.com/organic.html

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

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