131–140 of 195 posts
I love this mini-essay. The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-fashionable problems. If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.
So what? Raising is not success.
People think raising is a signal for success, when it's more like kissing the dice at a casino
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Of course it does; it has kept a close association with this meaning throughout literary history. An essay is an attempt, a sketch, thinking out loud. It's the literary genre equivalent of informal conversation. In an essay, you discover what you think by writing it, just as in exploratory programming you discover what your program is by programming it. To say that essays aren't for non-authoritative musing is like s…
I strongly disagree with this. The greatest essayists are not putting a "sketch" into the world. I cannot imagine reading an Isaiah Berlin essay and saying, "this is just informal conversation." Consider Didion, Foster Wallace, Sontag, Mailer, Orwell, Hitchens, Paine, Zadie Smith, the founding fathers of the United States via the Federalist Papers. There is no lack in seriousness, no lack in rigor, and no lack direct…
I haven't read all the authors you list, but the ones I have support the point. They were not specialists writing about topics they were authorities on. They were good writers and thinkers exploring the topics they were writing about.
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If anyone is taking pg's essays as what they they ought to think rather than as what he happens to think, that's their problem, not pg's. I don't think anybody is taking them that way, though; people are just conjuring this up for some strange reason. Some even suggested that HN has this response! Actually, I think I know the reason. pg writes to maximize brevity and directness. He's always interested in the shortest…
Anyone can be direct. Fewer can be direct while having a lot of money. I'd bet the latter is on more people's minds.
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The fact that many large and lucrative code bases are written in c++ should disabuse you of the idea that c++ is suicidal.
“Many” is almost underselling it. It’s literally EVERY web browser that anyone uses. I don’t know where people get these ideas. OP has a shallow understanding of programming languages, software development, and their history.
And is a fine example of path dependence.
No one can write a browser in any other language not because C++ is necessarily better but because the activation energy to bootstrap to a useful browser is so large (for example, one must provide a smoking fast Javascript engine before one even considers the web page rendering pipeline).
It will be interesting to see how much of the Firefox codebase gets taken over by Rust as time passes.
I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that al…
An interesting theory as to why we never evolved with wheels is the idea that an evolutionary improvement requires a viable intermediate state...something that works well enough in the transition from inferior to superior. It is worth noting that human inventions can evolve in much faster timelines than biological evolution, but no matter how fast they come, there does need to be a way to fulfill intermediate needs,…
How useful do you expect a set of wheels would be on the tundra? Or are you conceptualising a theoretical monster truck human? We'd be better off with tracks...
I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that al…
This is called "first principles thinking" and is one of the most reliable methods for producing novel insights into a problem space. It is uncommon in practice because it has a high cost both economically, because you are re-deriving everything you think you know from scratch instead of "standing on the shoulders of giants", and socially, because you are deviating from orthodoxy promoted by high-status individuals.…
I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that al…
Meaning: the rareness of disruption is to be expected, because most disruptions fail in stifling silence.
If I were to take on Netflix/Disney/Twitch with some new kind of video entertainment product, they'd have deep pockets to fund a competing offering.
The lever of equity might work to attract better talent, but only if you succeed. There's a lot of risk.
Scaling rapidly also means giving up control as you seek capital. It'd be hard to organically grow and go unnoticed.
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This is called "first principles thinking" and is one of the most reliable methods for producing novel insights into a problem space. It is uncommon in practice because it has a high cost both economically, because you are re-deriving everything you think you know from scratch instead of "standing on the shoulders of giants", and socially, because you are deviating from orthodoxy promoted by high-status individuals.…
There's also the cost that you are likely to just spin your wheels retreading old ground. Examples to the contrary are notable, but notable because they are rare .
Two great examples come to mind right away, both from Elon Musk. SpaceX was founded on first principles and now he's been able to undercut competitors by an order of magnitude. Conversely, his attempt approaching car manufacturing from first principles in the gigafactory has proven to be a complete disaster.
This post sorely lacks evidence for its big first claim: > I've seen a similar pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. Anyone want to step in with some examples? Without them, the thrust of the essay seems to be: "If only other people understood what…
Agreed.
I think the premise is true, but PG has given no actual insight.
NGO's are a good anti-example. In developing countries we know of working solutions but fashionable rules. I like computers so I'll give them to the poor.
Elon is a good working example, rather than looking at existing tech in space craft he looked at how to make them cheaper using steel and methane.
There's a Just So Story about rapid prototyping that I think fits how to break the mold. I can't remember which competition, but the winner won by working out how to cheaply rapidly prototype working models rather than tackling the problem head on.
So they didn't so much not be fashionable but created a system that allowed for non fashionable ideas.