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

171–180 of 222 posts

Re: How to get new ideas

#171

Post by agumonkey »

Existenceblinks wrote: post #87
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…

I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs pure functionality.

yeah we have to blur it out... your excellence can be sold but only to a few, the rest will want various degrees or simplicity, cost etc

anything in that game requires a lot of planning to make something livable that can be sold at many groups over many years so you can finally get enough leverage to move the minds along some value axis

Re: How to get new ideas

#172

Post by bob1029 »

cjwebb wrote: post #166
bob1029 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still do things like client-side prediction with streaming, but imagine if you controlled all of the clients and could always trust them. You could have the actual simulation running in a big bunker in Ohio somewhere on entirely synchronous terms ( The game concept itself can be engineered around vertical scale constraints. For instance, imagine flight routes in WoW. If the cost to take a flight was modulated…

Interesting. Can’t think of any faults in your logic! Are you actively working on this?

Yes - Right now it's entirely side-project mode, but I am averaging about 10-20 hours per week.

Re: How to get new ideas

#173

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

You have inferred something that may well be untrue.

A 40 year old mature student was last in school more than 20 years ago. Younger students were last in school as recently as 1 year ago. Learning is a skill and it's perfectly possible to be out of practice. There may also be some knowledge gaps because recent practices and knowledge are different to common knowledge 20 years ago.

It's also possible that mature students are more assertive about asking questions.

And also - what some of the students in a class consider "obvious" is not at all obvious to all of the class.

Of course if someone is showing clear evidence of dementia, that's a different issue.

Re: How to get new ideas

#174

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

iamwil wrote: post #159
zachthewf wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example from University is not a good one. There are bright and not-so-bright young people too, but older people typically have fewer misgivings about asking "dumb" questions that may have obvious answers.

Also, I think older people have seen more exceptions through experience, and know that sometimes, "dumb" questions don't have obvious answers.

There's an interesting phenomenon where middle IQ people see bright people as rather stupid. They can't see the extra layers of complexity and possibility that bright people can, so they read "Yes but...?" questions as naive and uneducated.

Obviously I'm not suggesting all mature students are hyper-intelligent, but I do think it's not as easy to tell as it might seem to be.

Re: How to get new ideas

#176

Post by jasonb05 »

kqr wrote: post #150
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 succe…

Man I love SOMs. When Kohonen's book came out in 2000, I read that thing a bunch of times.

Seems like an expensive way to structure a "this is like" or "people also bought" compared to an SVD.

Re: How to get new ideas

#177

Post by corobo »

sargstuff wrote: post #130
corobo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand I ditch a handful of film/TV ideas each week. Many because they'd be crap of course, but the rest because there's no way in this lifetime I'll have the resources to bother thinking about them, never mind have the time to actually write them out. Gotta do regular people work till I die. So glad I was dragged out of the universal energy just to pay rent for 60 years haha. Fuck I wish I could afford to…

> ... arty farty... so, take appropriate precautionary measures and stop flushing crap down drain ?

There ain't no time for my dumb stories to get written down, the rent's due soon. Back to work.

Re: How to get new ideas

#178

Post by yamtaddle »

seydor wrote: post #51

"ChatGPT, gimme 10 startup ideas" TBH, at this point, if there is a problem that hasn't been solved, its because some people tried and failed and found that the problem is not solvable currently. It may be more fruitful to start with something promisingly popular, and improve upon it (e.g. tiktok)

I'm finding the whole AI thing discouraging. Nothing like earlier tech gold-rushes. Every single idea I have starts with "have, or acquire, an absolute shitload of capital"—because you need huge, tagged datasets to move forward with any of them. That means capital, and lots of it. And if you find a way around that you're still burning non-trivial amounts of money on every little experiment (for compute time) all in search of an outcome that may not materialize, i.e. you may never even have anything that you could attempt to sell or raise money with. Seems impossibly expensive to engage in just to fail several times, unless you've got a large pile of capital.

Re: How to get new ideas

#179

Post by seydor »

yamtaddle wrote: post #178
seydor wrote: post #51

"ChatGPT, gimme 10 startup ideas" TBH, at this point, if there is a problem that hasn't been solved, its because some people tried and failed and found that the problem is not solvable currently. It may be more fruitful to start with something promisingly popular, and improve upon it (e.g. tiktok)

I'm finding the whole AI thing discouraging. Nothing like earlier tech gold-rushes. Every single idea I have starts with "have, or acquire, an absolute shitload of capital"—because you need huge, tagged datasets to move forward with any of them. That means capital, and lots of it. And if you find a way around that you're still burning non-trivial amounts of money on every little experiment (for compute time) all in s…

It s not like google invented the web, or that they wrote any web pages. Yet they made all the money

Re: How to get new ideas

#180

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN