Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough. I'm just tired of seeing these articles pop up constantly and I have no downvote ability.
Submissions can't be downvoted (only comments) :)
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What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
41–50 of 124 posts
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Awesome. But hardly the main point for the OP.
Fair enough. I'm just tired of seeing these articles pop up constantly and I have no downvote ability.
You can flag a post, if you feel like it's offtopic for YC. If it's on topic, and you're tired of it, alas, you just have to suffer through it. Besides, there's plenty of other submissions to make awesome with your thoughts.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#43I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is not much of a business case behind them. Not everything interesting is monetizable. One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell,…
The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech. Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends t…
I seriously doubt the PC, radio, and TV examples. The benefits of radio would have been immediately obvious; the same with television. Nor were PCs considered a toy; they were simply too expensive for most families and businesses to own.
And indeed, with regards to radio, an operating radio station was built merely a year after the inventor received a patent for the first successful method of radio transmission (and within a decade of the first successful radio transmission). The first television station was built within 3 years after the first working TV (capable of showing moving images) was built.
Search was not considered non-monetizable; it simply was not as monetizable as a portal based on the technology prevalent when Yahoo--or even Google--launched. Google did not invent the business of bidding for search terms--it licensed the Overture's keyword bidding technology and later bought Applied Semantics (which developed and commercialized the technology that is now known as Adsense), which is what allowed it to monetize search. (If Yahoo hadn't granted Google that license, Google wouldn't be here today.)
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#44Whatever facile point this article had, it immediately blew it by saying Bitcoin and NoSQL are the wave of the future.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#45Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…
This post is brief, but not fluffy. I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.
And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it. We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between inventing the future and merely playing around?
Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech. Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends t…
I seriously doubt the PC, radio, and TV examples. The benefits of radio would have been immediately obvious; the same with television. Nor were PCs considered a toy; they were simply too expensive for most families and businesses to own. And indeed, with regards to radio, an operating radio station was built merely a year after the inventor received a patent for the first successful method of radio transmission (and…
To clarify, when I said radio, I mean it as the broadcast medium we know today, not just the point to point wireless analog transmission. It's only obvious to you the benefit of radio as a broadcast medium, because you live in the future.
"By 1916, along with Armstrong and de Forest, [David Sarnoff] was using his newfound fame to push the idea of commercial radio, something he called the "wireless music box," although this idea was before its time. Even as late as 1920, one potential investor wrote him to say, "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" Even the Marconi Company, his employer, rejected the idea of radio as anything but a communications medium. So he went to work for the Radio Corporation of America [RCA] in 1920. -- Radio Pioneers enter story of the wire on David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in radio." http://www.radioworld.com/article/radio-pioneers-enter-story...
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming." -- Wikiquotes -- Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions#Televisio...
As for the PC, I don't have a quote. But I remember IBM was the way "serious people" had their computational needs met, and it was not PCs.
I never made claims that Google invented the business of bidding for search terms. It is true that search was considered non-monetizable, or if you like, less monetizable. Either way, it wasn't considered fertile ground for making money, but there were people trying anyway--which is my point:
Smart people try things that don't make money, aren't cool, seem weird, etc, and while not all of them will be mainstream in the future, there's a good chance that a some of them will be.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#47Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…
That's funny because most i've met are narrow minded about their own field.
At least when I went chatting with lawyers and interviewing after I first got out of law school, every non-academic lawyer I met in the field of IP law was fairly narrow minded.
Even asking them things that their businesses depended on, like "What do you think will happen as patents on computer implemented inventions become significantly more popular?" and "If large-money companies start suing each other over these kinds of patents, do you think it will eventually cause significant scaling back in what is allowed?"
The answers I got told me that most couldn't even theorize/be visionary/plan about things absolutely critical to their current business//field.
Note: I was talking to people who were managing partners/etc, who were making significant money due to the upswing in patenting software. They were also not stupid people, just, AFAICT, bad at business. Most lawyers i've met are actually very bad at running businesses, but i'll save these stories for another topic.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech. Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends t…
I agree if the sentiment is just: everything which is today popular was once more of a niche, experimental activity. But that is not so exciting a claim, is it? The more difficult part is going in the other direction, and figuring out which of today's niche hobbies will be popular tomorrow. Taken at face value, the article is claiming that it will be all of them , at least if they were niche hobbies of the "smartest"…
Well, like pg said above, I wish the OP dove into the forces at hand. However, that doesn't mean that we can't.
I don't know why cdixon wrote the article. But I suspect that it's only not an exciting claim to you because you're already at a certain place in your understanding of innovation. I think there are plenty of people that believe innovation happens when an inventor hides away in a basement and tinkers with stuff, and one day, he has a big reveal and the world says how awesome it is. That story's reinforced when you tell the story of successes looking backwards.
In reality, early innovation doesn't look like that. It looks like people doing weird things you don't understand, or seems like they're wasting their time, doing things that seem to have nothing to do with the real world. The only thing in common is that they seem to be doing it for shits and giggles, while having lots of fun.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#49What smart hobbyists are doing now is part of the picture. There are other elements that are needed for a "thing" to become a "big thing" that the whole world uses. Tech hobby trends need to conspire with other trends in business and society (and also have the right timing) to become a future industry and a widely adopted technology. Two counterexamples off the top of my head: MUDs and ham radio. I think the original…
sometimes, ideas might need a little tweaking. Perhaps MUDs inspired MMORPGs? It seems likely.
I'm not sure what the equivalent for ham radio would be, if at all.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#50Whatever facile point this article had, it immediately blew it by saying Bitcoin and NoSQL are the wave of the future.
Bitcoin itself may have any number of problems - it is though, the first algorithm that allows truly distributed ownership of objects in a network.
I think that changes the game totally. I don't yet know what application of it will go mainstream first.
Agreed about NoSQL. Its vision is too narrow (scaling within one organisation, rather than truly distributed, syncing, forkable data)