Going back to 1996? With what I know now? I'd try to make a lot less mistakes with the woman I was in love with back then.
Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
11–20 of 31 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#12Two chicks. Oh wait.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#13Don't you people watch movies? This never turns out well.
Quoting Jeff Goldblum: "Ooh, aah, that's how it always starts, and then later the running and screaming"
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#14I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.
No-one would believe you.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#15I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.
No-one would believe you.
the key would be to go back a bit farther so you had large pools of resources way before 09/11. Then use said resources to "plant" evidence of the upcoming atrocity.
But then, you in a cycle, because I am sure there are lots of past tragedies one would want to pre-empt.
Personally I would leave it as it is: harsh as it sounds, tampering with History seems a worrying path to tread...
(no reasons why you couldnt track down Osama - for example - then jump back in time to tell the US forces where he will be at XYZ date to pick him up :))
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#16I've got no idea but re-coining (or I guess pre-coining) the term web 2.0 into something that doesn't make me cry a bit on the inside every time I or others mention it is pretty high on my list.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#17I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.
Could the first black president have been elected with out it? (Serious question)
I doubt Bush would have gotten elected for a second time if it wasn't for 9/11 and I think Obama would have had a much harder time getting elected if Bush hadn't destroyed the public's opinion of the republican party.
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#18Anything I wanted to. But first, I would get enough money to completely opt out of doing anything like starting companies, worrying about what anyone thinks, etc., and find a lot of land in the middle of nowhere, drop my own fiber link in at vast cost, and ignore the rest of the world as much as I could.
what do you need a fiber link for if you're going to ignore the rest of the world?
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#19I would try my hardest to prevent 9/11.
... thus precipitating the dirty-bomb attack of 2006
Re: Ask HN: What would you do if you knew the future?
#20I think Zepolen is correct, so much comes down to timing. If you look at a lot of the "successes" that you would want to get there before they were reaching slightly beyond current tech/social environment. For example, Flickr/YouTube were predicated on the fact that storage costs were crashing and end user bandwidth was drastically increasing. You couldn't have created them much earlier. Wikipedia was timed for the e…
I think you are giving way too much importance to idea and timing. The reason Flickr, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc are succesful because they could execute better than their competitors and that might not change by going back in time.
True, but I was being a little ham fisted in my original reply. They did win out by executing better than their competitors in the competition of the moment, but what I was trying to suggest was that, in all probability, no-one could have succeeded in trying to do those things at an earlier time. You couldn't go back to 1996 and start YouTube.
With YouTube you couldn't have survived the storage costs at an earlier time, and also there needed to be ubiquitous playback, in the form of Flash. Flickr similarly would have been financially onerous due to storage costs ealier on.
In 1996 our bandwidth was so tiny that you really could not have done YouTube at that point.
Wikipedia is a slightly different point. It was launched in 2001, so in 1996 you obviously could have gotten a lead on it, but if you look at the growth curve it wasn't until 2005/2006 that it really took off. I just don't think that the community of editors/users was broad enough until that point.
You are totally right that good execution counts for most of the success and going back in time would allow you to do that much better with the hindsight gained. My thought is just that there are constraints over what is achievable at any given time and the common thread that I see in wildly successful companies is that they managed to jump on those turning points just before they are there, first mover advantage and all that gumph.