Fashionable Problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Fashionable Problems

#161

Post by jlevers » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 11:46 AM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #144

jacques_chester wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I made this assumption for many years, and yes, that cost would be high. I eventually discovered that, more often than not, everyone assumed that someone must have already investigated a particular hypothesis but if you tried to identify that "someone" it turned out that they didn't actually exist. After doing this exhaustive search a few times in a few different domains and coming up empty handed, it changed my pers…

Would you be willing to give an example of an area where it was widely thought that "someone" had already checked all the obvious possibilities, but you were able to find an obvious possibility that actually hadn't been explored?

Re: Fashionable Problems

#162

Post by cmroanirgo » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 11:55 AM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #136

jandrewrogers wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

There are also the times when you discover a tech, a library, or a language that supposedly solves your issue, but in reality only goes 80% of the way.

Unfortunately, it can take a lot of work to then a) find workarounds (which in my experience tend to become a maintenance nightmare) b) try alternates (which may have other but similar limitations) c) pull out and start doing it yourself anyway.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#163

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

pnako wrote: post #159

ahartmetz wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno. As a mainly C++ developer I think Rust is a real alternative because it tries to solve the same problems better. Lisp and Haskell do not solve the same problems. Huge Lisp codebases probably become hard to understand quickly, and both Lisp and Haskell don't produce very efficient code (or make it hard to produce efficient code).

Time will tell. At the moment I'm not convinced. Rust is a marginal improvement which is not worth the trade-offs in terms of immaturity, lack of libraries, books, standardization, etc. It might end up just like D. Or it might actually find itself a viable niche.

AFAICS D screwed up with its "optional" but really not optional if you want to use the standard library garbage collection. Rust contains no such mistakes, and seems to contain fewers mistakes than C++. Any experienced C++ programmer should know that C++ contains plenty of mistakes. Exceptions are very awkward, the string class is useless, hash maps are much slower than they could be (the std API enforces that), modules should have appeared 20 years ago, non-const references as stealth pointers are bad for readability, [...]

Re: Fashionable Problems

#164

Post by codetrotter » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #112

darksaints wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but evolution has given us some pretty expansive diversity in traits across the biological world. No single trait is pareto optimal, but relatively superior/inferior depending on context. Wheels have some pretty extreme efficiency advantages, useful for both speed as well as endurance. They come with disadvantages too, but there are plenty of animals who never need to leave environments where legs are optimal o…

Evolution is content with a very long iteration cycle and a very high failure rate. Human engineering is much more efficient - building things we understand, we accomplish in decades what takes nature millions of years or is straight up not viable.

I sometimes think about evolution and its relation to human engineering, and I don’t know if it is a useful thought but, evolution created humans, and therefore, human creation is also in fact a product of evolution in nature itself.

In that way, evolution evolved itself by creating humans, and through us evolution is now happening at an accelerated rate in some aspects.

I try not to get all philosophical, because I know that other people, who are actual philosophers, have thought about these things already and I can’t compete with them but I can’t help but think about such things anyway.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#165

Post by Laakeri » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #163

pnako wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time will tell. At the moment I'm not convinced. Rust is a marginal improvement which is not worth the trade-offs in terms of immaturity, lack of libraries, books, standardization, etc. It might end up just like D. Or it might actually find itself a viable niche.

AFAICS D screwed up with its "optional" but really not optional if you want to use the standard library garbage collection. Rust contains no such mistakes, and seems to contain fewers mistakes than C++. Any experienced C++ programmer should know that C++ contains plenty of mistakes. Exceptions are very awkward, the string class is useless, hash maps are much slower than they could be (the std API enforces that), modu…

Why C++ string class is useless?

Re: Fashionable Problems

#166

Post by Timberwolf » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #138

My worry in solving an existing problem in a novel way is that the incumbents can catch up faster than you can scale. 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…

My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few cases where we were forced to match a feature you were looking at a lead time measured in years, tending to infinity if it threatened the influence of a powerful department. And this is the reactive stuff. Forget actual innovation, other than a few toy projects that never escaped the lab!

However, this was justified: even the most promising-looking competitors tripped over their own bad assumptions long before becoming a threat. We saw plenty of novel ideas but they'd always be sunk by a failure to understand the basics of how our market worked - things like trying to put a complicated app with a thousand options at a point in the journey everyone is trying to simplify and time-optimise, etc.

If someone who knew the market well had gone at it seriously and solved hard problems rather than apply the usual hand-waving "tech! blockchain! magic!", by the time we'd noticed it would have been too late to respond. You'd hope more recent incumbents like Netflix or Twitch might be a bit more responsive, but corporate inertia can build up surprisingly quickly.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#167

Post by m11a » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

blondin wrote: post #120

yeah but i am afraid pg is not relatable anymore (to most of us anyway). devoting more than 20 percent of your time to problems that are unfashionable but dear to you is ill-advised because: a. they don't pay the bill b. they take time and in the grand scheme of things spending time with others on things you all understand is better than being happy alone. but of course there are exceptions...

b) not true for everyone. the way different people want to live their lives is, well, different.

his essays don't necessarily have to be relatable, they just have to be useful. he isn't a life coach (though I suppose that is arguable). his expertise is in tech and startups, that's where he's proven himself, and that's the area where his advice carries weight.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#168

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

Laakeri wrote: post #165

ahartmetz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICS D screwed up with its "optional" but really not optional if you want to use the standard library garbage collection. Rust contains no such mistakes, and seems to contain fewers mistakes than C++. Any experienced C++ programmer should know that C++ contains plenty of mistakes. Exceptions are very awkward, the string class is useless, hash maps are much slower than they could be (the std API enforces that), modu…

Why C++ string class is useless?

It's basically no better than vector - i.e. it has no Unicode support whatsoever and very few string-specific convenience methods. Using algorithms is possible, but tedious.

Because I often work with Qt, I'm comparing it with QString, which is much more than a vector of chars. https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstring.html

Re: Fashionable Problems

#169

Post by m11a » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

Wistar wrote: post #28

simlan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I guess you can't see AI as a played out field yet. More likely it is just starting to take off. Say you find a new exciting spin on ERPs to replace e.g. SAP solutions that will have a large surface area. At least that is how i read the linked post.

... or payment processing. Look what Stripe is carving out.

There are still many problems in payment processing. One I can think of is acceptance. Merchant fees are way too high especially for physical payments. I can't pay using card at my barber or local convenience stores here. I suppose the reasoning is that card fees make it not worthwhile accepting for amounts below, say, £5-10 (inflated for microtransactions). Doesn't make sense for them to accept a big % loss in profits just to accept cards over cash.

If we're to become a cashless society extortionate merchant processing fees need to lower.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#170

Post by drchewbacca » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

ddxxdd wrote: post #149

drchewbacca wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In mathematics I'd put forward the conjecture that "for every proven theorem you could ask at least 5 more similar questions which are unproven." For example it is proven there are infinitely many primes. Are there infinitely primes that differ by 2? By n for any n? Are there infinitely many palindromic primes? Are there infinitely many primes of form n^2 + 1? Is there always a prime between n^2 and (n+1)^2? If this…

>Are there infinitely primes that differ by 2? Pardon the digression, but the Twin Primes conjecture was proven by a Subway restaurant worker a few years ago.

I'm not sure, I'm not an expert, it says here the twin prime conjecture itself is still unproven.

"On April 17, 2013, Yitang Zhang announced a proof that for some integer N that is less than 70 million, there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime