Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fashionable Problems

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 195 posts

Re: Fashionable Problems

#181

Post by leesec »

warent wrote: post #139
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 .

This here is the real danger. Many people choose to reinvent the wheel and end up finding out that their approach was actually horribly flawed compared to what already existed, or they turned out not to have the resources to see it through. It takes a brilliant person with a lot of luck to make this work in an advantageous way. Two great examples come to mind right away, both from Elon Musk. SpaceX was founded on fir…

>Conversely, his attempt approaching car manufacturing from first principles in the gigafactory has proven to be a complete disaster.

Lol yes, manufacturing one of the best selling cars in the country was a great disaster.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#182

Post by Aloha »

ojilles wrote: post #176
Aloha wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the older and more competitive a space is, the less likely a first principles approach will bring success.

Perhaps it’s not the age per se, but the amount of players over time. (Number of car manufacturers >> space companies).

That was my general point (without making the wording too complex)

Re: Fashionable Problems

#183

Post by diehunde »

lquist wrote: post #2

If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?

I was wondering the same. I get the message from the post but I don't think the examples are good.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#184

Post by jcelerier »

the_af wrote: post #179
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).

> "[Lisp and] Haskell don't produce very efficient code (or make it hard to produce efficient code)." Curious here. Are you speaking from experience -- i.e. you tried and failed -- or is this simply something you guess must be true? People write high-performance software in Haskell, and it's their tool of choice.

> People write high-performance software in Haskell, and it's their tool of choice.

I've heard of those but have never managed to see one. Do you have some examples ? (to give you my "baseline" - handling >500k messages/second on a desktop cpu for instance as this is something quite easily achievable in C++)

Re: Fashionable Problems

#185

Post by ganzuul »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #67
rgbrenner wrote: post #23

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.…

It is common for the young, remember? It is also why you should vote for the young and idealistic; not cynical old farts like ourselves.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#186

Post by erikpukinskis »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #77
jbverschoor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that multi-layered problem solving is superhard to execute. It's not that it's hard to find a solution that would be orders better, but it's just that it's risky, as it's an all-or-nothing path. It at least requires a lot of confidence for the existing market. With waterfall-kind of planning, that would work. Unfortunately it got a bad name in the '90s and early '00s. The wild-west of inexperienced dev…

Aren't those companies great examples of this though? They have a great vision, but really try to play inside the existing system except for one thing. Tesla for example haven't yet done much innovation that the other car companies don't, except for betting hard on electricity (or more specifically, batteries). A more radical approach challenging the whole system on all fronts would be to re-think personal transporta…

Consider that Tesla is still an abject failure on their goal of converting the world’s transport to sustainable energy.

I don’t think the strategy you outlined will be enough. In addition to “advance batteries” I believe “full self-driving” as well as “mobility as a service”, “radically production-driven design”, and possibly “car bundled with energy production and storage devices” will be required for Tesla to hit their goal.

If you take those 4-5 things together I do believe that constitutes a total reinvention of the automobile.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#187

Post by ahartmetz »

hadiz wrote: post #173
ahartmetz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, you just kinda answered your question. There is STL, Qt and Boost. Like all other languages. They do the same thing but in different capacities, you should select based on your needs. I think std::string can be supplemented for Unicode support, I am gonna say the fmt library was the supplement but I feel like I am wrong. I used std::string and QString extensively for 4-5 years and find QString inexplicably bloa…

I don't understand your problem with QString, but anyway, AFAIK the common way to get Unicode support with std::string is ICU. ICU is quite large (~15-20 MB binary) and it breaks binary compatibility with every release.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#188

Post by homonculus1 »

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.

It bears notice that the Subway worker, Yitang Zhang, had a math PhD from Purdue.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#189

Post by gist »

dang wrote: post #98
gist wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought is that Paul should view his essays at least as seriously as someone who is writing an important college application essay given who the audience is (college admissions in that case; HN readers in this case among others). Or maybe someone writing an opinion piece for a newspaper that is widely read and taken as significant. Imagine as an extreme (and not what PG is doing) if someone writing an 'essay' were…

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…

Actually very good reply to my reply. But I think there is another reason PG is this way. He has a math and a programmers brain. As such he would be more likely not to wrap his writing in superfluous wording and he would be more direct in how he makes his point. I am sure many of us have ran into people like this (I know that I have).

> He's always interested in the shortest logical path from A to B. When language is optimized that way, it has a force that can sound like an implicit claim to authority.

Agree which is why someone should take that into account when they write (they don't have to of course they (and PG) can do what they want that makes them happy).

I make money writing. And I do really mean 'make money writing'. I am not an author or a professional writer (what people think that means) but I earn a really good living and I do so by writing. And for the purpose of my comment here it's not important what it is that I do to earn that money. But it's considerable let's say. One thing that I do is always take into account what tone or mood I am trying to achieve to get what it is I want when I write. I don't obviously put the same effort into HN comments as I would when I am writing to make money or if I was writing something that many people would read of any importance (that I might be broadly judged on). So I guess this is my judgement on what PG has written and the way he writes. Fwiw I was not an english major, didn't study philosophy or the classics, didn't do particularly well in English class, didn't know even what you first said about essays either. My point is to me (in order to earn a living) the audience is super important.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#190

Post by FreakLegion »

dang wrote: post #91
FreakLegion wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The word means 'attempt' It can, but doesn't in this context. 'Essay' was a sort-of polyseme (like 'passion', which can still mean 'suffering') that has long since severed ties with its origin. Outside certain narrow academic discussions, the etymology and current use of 'essay' have effectively nothing to do with one another. In any case though pg does pretend to some amount of expertise. "How to Do Philosophy" is…

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 didn't say essays aren't for non-authoritative musing. My points were:

1. 'Attempt' is the origin of 'essay', not its current meaning. This sort of mistake is so common there's a fallacy (genetic) named for it, but a more compelling read than some entry in a dictionary of fallacies would be The Genealogy of Morals, Essay 2, section 12.

2. pg's essays aren't non-authoritative musing. I don't think he himself claims they are, even in the essay on essays. Exploratory and a process of discovery? Absolutely. But these things aren't necessarily evident in the final product and in any case can coexist with the pretense to authority.

Side note:

> In an essay, you discover what you think by writing it

This is simply a description writing, whence the dictum "writing is revising".

Post reply on HN