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Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#141

Post by soheil »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #12
anjc wrote: post #7

Someone who should be a multi billionaire says to ignore marketing and sales and just work. Edit: I'm not saying that he WANTS to be a multi billionaire, but the fact is that he has attained disproportionately less value than he's created. By rights he should be one of the wealthiest people in tech. He might have 150m but that's peanuts given what he's done. The wealth of the guy who made Instagram dwarfs that. The g…

You somehow make it unclear whether or not Linus not being a multi-billionaire is a good or a bad thing. Are you saying that because he didn't try to monetize his code as much as he could have, it somehow makes his opinion less valuable? The man created Linux AND git, it doesn't matter whether or not he's got billions. He's got something more important than that, a legacy.

It's not black and white, good or bad, that's the OP's point, it depends. If your goal is to accumulate wealth perhaps LT did it wrong, if your goal is to build something great then you should perhaps choose his route. Those goals may intersect and that's great, but that's not a necessary condition.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#142

Post by mtdewcmu »

xvcnmdfs wrote: post #94
tylercubell wrote: post #56

Chris Anderson: So you spoke to me last week about these two guys. Who are they and how do you relate to them? Linus Torvalds: Well, so this is kind of cliché in technology, the whole Tesla versus Edison, where Tesla is seen as the visionary scientist and crazy idea man. And people love Tesla. I mean, there are people who name their companies after him. The other person there is Edison, who is actually often vilified…

Linus is right that it's about the work you put in, but he's wrong if he thinks Tesla didn't work hard to develop his visualization abilities There's a myth that some people are born with amazing powers (Tesla, Einstein) but what people don't see is the hours they put in from a young age Therefore, both Tesla and Edison worked hard, except Edison bragged about it

I'm pretty sure that the "work" Linus is referring to is work on the project, not work educating yourself and building up your abilities ahead of time.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#143

Post by jonathanyc »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #130
emodendroket wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you should go back to the history of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, which hinged initially on industrial espionage.

They didnt invent anything? Only duplicated others' work identically or with uglier, shoddier construction at lower prices? Im interested in a link with evidence of that if you have it.

That's a false dichotomy, but also, this is a well-known phenomenon. It was taught even when I learned history in high school here in California.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-02-01/piracy-an...

http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

I think it's a really interesting phenomenon how quickly we as a culture are able to imagine that what we're experiencing right now is without precedent.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#144

Post by erikpukinskis »

xvcnmdfs wrote: post #112
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course he bragged about it. He actually wanted people to use his technology to fund other ventures. Whats the point of creating things if no one actually knows about it?

You could say that if an invention is any good it speaks for itself, in which case you've saved yourself the effort of bragging and people still get to know about it

A good invention might speak for itself if you give it 20 years and wait. But you can't run a business if your marketing strategy involves "wait 20 years".

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#145

Post by SamReidHughes »

jacquesm wrote: post #115
torrent-of-ions wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I would say that a large portion of people who live in a society extract more value from it than they put in. If you are just merely doing your job you are not making any extra value. I could work hard as a hunter-gatherer, or work hard programming, but either way I'm just doing my job. In the second case I'm just using the infrastructure that other people have set up to be able to live a much happier life by…

> If you are just merely doing your job you are not making any extra value. That's got to be the most ignorant comment on HN in a very long time. Really? Think for just two seconds: Do you think a person would be employed at all if they did not make more value than they took home (including taxes and all that)? The whole reason our economy works at all is BECAUSE people make more value than they take home. If not for…

Well, there are some people who are not employed.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#146

Post by SamReidHughes »

NoGravitas wrote: post #108
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the fact is that he has attained far less value than he's created. This goes for an extremely large portion of humanity, probably > 99.99%. Very few people manage to extract all of the value they created (and sometimes more), and most of those people are not the nicest ones.

Our society is premised on the vast majority of people not extracting all of the value they create. The difference between what people create and what they extract via wages is the source of profit, and is extracted by the capital-owning class. This is...basic economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour#Marxist...

No, it's extracted by the customer. Which all workers are in other contexts.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#147

Post by mtdewcmu »

whsheet wrote: post #6

I like the header and experimented with current trends: - Talk of AI is bullshit. Shut up and get the work done. - Talk of Machine Learning is bullshit. Shut up and get the work done. - Talk of VR is bullshit. Shut up and get the work done. - Talk of Smart Contracts is bullshit. Shut up and get the work done. - Talk of IoT is bullshit. Shut up and get the work done. Not sure if I entirely agree with him but there's s…

I think you could sum up Linus's message as something like "don't try to coast on your smarts; they only count for so much."

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#148

Post by erikpukinskis »

oumua_don17 wrote: post #53
frederikvs wrote: post #39

It's funny how he says "Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that", apparently without realising that Apple did exactly what he's talking about. Almost all of Apple's big innovations were stolen from other places, and then they shut up, and got to work : making it work properly, making it user friendly, making it sexy, and then selling it. Apple's slogan may have been "think different", and they have the imag…

Picasso said "Good artists copy, great artists steal" which is quoted again by Steve Jobs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU Even to do something like a simple library and to publish it professionally will need `high quality`: code, tests, documentation (user/developer/guides), examples at a minimum. Basically the long tail of polishing is that 80% perspiration, 19% perspiration is to get to the stage (MVP…

I don't generally write documentation or tests when I start a library. I'll maybe write a couple tests if I want an indicator of when I'm done. I get it working, and then release.

Then, as I use the library, if a bug comes up that seems like it might come back, I add a test. If I break something accidentally, I add a test for that. And if I can't remember how an interface works, I document it in the readme.

That's it. Over time my documentation and test coverage come to match my use of the library. Anything I don't use gets deleted. And I end up with pretty ok documentation and test coverage.

The philosophy is: your first interface is never right anyway, so don't bother testing or documenting it. Just document the stuff you fix.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#149

Post by sfifs »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #105
tylercubell wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree -- you need a little bit of both qualities. The vision of what to create and the execution to carry it out. The two go hand in hand. I think Linus is putting the emphasis on hard work because we mere mortals aren't endowed with the same genius that Tesla had and for us, the best way to achieve something great is through hard work instead of "divine" inspiration.

The Chinese made a whole industry out of executing without visionaries. It's called cloning products of visionaries. Or slightly improving them based on marketing feedback.

have you actually spent sufficient time in China recently? I go there every quarter nowadays and find the innovation and impact of mobile tech on the everyday life of people a couple of years at least ahead of the West. I also see India beginning to leap ahead - kind of where China was 3-4 years ago.

Historically, it's only taken a decade or so for copying to move into innovation in Japan. China's already completed that decade now.

Re: Linus Torvalds: Successful projects are 99% perspiration and 1% innovation

#150

Post by mwfunk »

I think we're all reading lots of different things into what Linus said here. My interpretation is that he's just saying that we tend to overvalue ideas and undervalue the less glamorous work involved in bringing those ideas to fruition.

The Tesla vs. Edison narrative is always couched in terms of the idea guy vs. the more pragmatic (perhaps more business-oriented) guy, not unlike the popular Woz vs. Jobs narrative, or the Jobs vs. Gates narrative in the '80s. These are popular narratives and archetypes that reflect the people involved, but can lead people to mythologizing history rather than understanding it.

In a different field, Lennon vs. McCartney.

So, among my peers at least, conventional wisdom is that Tesla was 100% an amazing visionary and got screwed over by unfair forces of history, and Edison was the villain whose contributions are overrated by historians. There's some truth there, but more than anything else it's a historical narrative where people are slotting Tesla and Edison into archetypes.

When a lot of people talk about Tesla vs. Edison, they're really just talking about those archetypes, and revealing to what degree they value inspiration vs. perspiration. I think that's all Linus is doing here, saying that in his mind perspiration is undervalued and inspiration is overvalued among his peers. I don't think he's really trying to make a historical argument, which is what a lot of the commenters here are assuming.

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