Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to get new ideas

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 222 posts

Re: How to get new ideas

#141

Post by acuozzo »

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…

> 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

Re: How to get new ideas

#142

Post by toss1 »

3dsnano wrote: post #40

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…

>>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

Re: How to get new ideas

#143

Post by sargstuff »

acuozzo wrote: post #123
somethingreen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name 3 things you own or use that were invented (even at conceptual level) by a child.

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…

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.

Re: How to get new ideas

#144

Post by sargstuff »

somethingreen wrote: post #119
exevp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This space is getting so much interest that OpenAI will not be the only one providing LLM as a service forever.

Like web search in the 90s.

until to much tangle, then jump ship for something with less initial entangements

Re: How to get new ideas

#146

Post by bryanmgreen »

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.

Re: How to get new ideas

#148

Post by borroka »

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.

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.

Re: How to get new ideas

#149

Post by tchaffee »

userabchn wrote: post #103
3dsnano wrote: post #40

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…

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…

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.

Re: How to get new ideas

#150

Post by kqr »

gizmo wrote: post #42

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 i…

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.

Post reply on HN