101–110 of 124 posts
Lot of interesting things I share with friends and colleagues would be some tricks which I come up with everyday things. Each wow or awesome from my audience would make me feel proud, if it is not good enough will try more new things.
YMMV, but I found this poisonous. At least mildly so. My hobbies are what I do for fun. I don't give one whit if they're ultimately "successful". I engage in them because I find them intrinsically interesting. After reading this, I feel like there is a peer pressure, however slight, to have hobbies that have "momentum" which will ultimately make them "the future". (Like, oh no, maybe I'm engaging in the "wrong" hobbi…
Right now my guess is 3d printing is going to be massive in some way or another. It's got that feeling. People love to make shit.
The problem with nerds and their hobbies is so many of them (or better stated, us) have hobbies that will NEVER be used in the mainstream. So which ones will? Right now my guess is 3d printing is going to be massive in some way or another. It's got that feeling. People love to make shit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 simpl…
> I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless. He was busy slapping all nerds everywhere on the back with reflected glory. You're just reading in what you wanted him to say and judging your desired reading, not the original. (Edit: and I did the same, fixating on the self-congratulatory fluff and ignoring the selection-biased hypothesis about making predictions.) > In…
Totally agree. Let's see what the OP is suggesting:
1. People make awesome products/services on the weekends.
2. These awesome products/services will serve new industries.
3. So that means all awesome products/services should be built on the weekends so we can create new industries.
It’s a good bet these present-day hobbies will seed future industries.
I vehemently disagree. This is not a good bet. You know what's a good bet? That IBM's stock will continue to rise.[1] That SAP's stock will continue to rise.[2] It's also a good bet that these companies will continue (as they have for years) to create technology products that businesses want. There is a risk they won't, but it's a lower risk than the guy creating a product in his garage over the weekend.
What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.
This is the comment that really irks me and dually why this whole post is seen as self promotion. A 'bet' is something you risk against someone else's risk. Are people willing to tell me that they'd put more money down on the weekend projects than the companies who have been doing this for 10+ years? The OP is suggesting that there will be a higher percentage of new industries created (which might be possible), but then states that these industries will cause the working population to shift to this new industry. Bullocks. What evidence does anyone have to suggest this?
Good on the OP though...he got my eyeballs. Black swan sightings sell well.
[1] - http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=IBM#symbol=ibm;range=5...;
[2] - http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=SAP#symbol=sap;range=5...;
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. It's a bit tricky to do the attribution. Looking at a current technology and giving it a single origin isn't realistic. In the comments Chris cites HAM being a precursor for BBSes. Maybe; but so were actual physical bulletin boards.
Ham is not an acronym. Nobody's quite sure of what it means, but it doesn't seem to be an acronym.
Just found the etymology here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio#Etymolog...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his newest book Antifragile. He makes a sort of evolutionary argument - people who are actively trying to invent the future must necessarily focus on what they think will be desired or necessary. But predicting the future is nearly impossible! So the huge masses of non-teleological tinkerers - considered as a whole - who simply work on what they enjoy for its own sake, have the advantage. In other words, any particular tinkerer will probably not invent the future, but the odds are good that eventually someone will stumble onto something.
"As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks. RCA’s president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Arm…
Let'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…
For example, regulatory laws must take into account political restrictions, economic theory and realities, and the goals and pragmatic realities and of the specific industry or industries being regulated. Criminal laws must do all that and take into account various socioeconomic factors. Tax law is a balance of economic theory, revenue generation, political restrictions, and pragmatic realities of accounting across thousands of industries.
What 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.
MUDs were definitely part of the inspiration for MMORPGs, but the success behind MMORPGs has a lot to do with commercial internet, the development of GUIs, etc...