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.
I guess this is where employees come in
How to get new ideas
91–100 of 222 posts
Re: How to get new ideas
#92My algorithm for generating ideas: https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas
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.
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.
Re: How to get new ideas
#93Most 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 i…
> 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.
Re: How to get new ideas
#94It 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
Re: How to get new ideas
#95Most 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 i…
> 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. Expec…
> 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.
Re: How to get new ideas
#96HN 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…
That is an interesting concept in itself, if the idea is sound, why does the originator matter?
Re: How to get new ideas
#97Real 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.
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
Re: How to get new ideas
#98Lots 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…
What is the moat here?
I don't think a majority of these LLM/GPT companies will ever a moat apart from first to market.
Re: How to get new ideas
#99Neuroscientist 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.
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.
Re: How to get new ideas
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thi…
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.
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.