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

Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 208 posts

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#191

Post by writetoalok »

hkmurakami wrote: post #160
hluska wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago, a good friend came to me and excitedly pitched his latest invention - perpetual motion. He grew more and more animated as he explained how his device used magnets... Being young, I drew a diagram showing why it would fail. With each line, I could sense him deflating, but I kept drawing. Finally, by the time I brought up Newton, I realized that I'd gone too far. Our friendship didn't really work out…

This reminds me of Jeff Bezos' anecdote about telling his grandmother how much her smoking had shortened her life. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/inde...

Reminds me of the Harry Potter books. Somewhere in those stories, Dumbledore comments: "We are what we choose".

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#192

Post by TeMPOraL »

wtracy wrote: post #176
TeMPOraL wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, do share! And thanks for the TED link :).

Here's a dump of links on the subject that should keep you busy for a while. :-) http://www.ezfarmsandfish.com http://aquaponicscommunity.com/ http://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Herring-Gut-studen... http://www.herringgut.org/newsletters/2009_3.pdf http://www.growingpower.org/ http://www.sweetwater-organic.com/ http://www.plantchicago.com/?tag=aquaponics https://www.aquaponics.com/about/press.php?q=4&full=yes…

Thanks! :).

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#193

Post by ig1 »

MPSimmons wrote: post #44
ig1 wrote: post #36

Presumably PG can't answer because of confidentiality, but the the most ambitious one I've heard is a pitch for a company claiming they could build a trillion dollar company. (They were working on a cement/concrete replacement that was cleaner and cheaper)

Was that the company that said they could make concrete that extracted carbon from air?

Don't remember the details, Khosla was an investor though.

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#194

Post by Tycho »

pg wrote: post #42

I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret. If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.

Huh?! But ideas are worthless anyway, everyone knows that.

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#195

Post by ph0rque »

Sukotto wrote: post #185
ph0rque wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, chrome wants to install an app from the store, but firefox renders the feed just fine (it's not empty). What browser/OS are you using, or do you have stand-alone reader?

To reproduce: 1) Open Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader 2) click the red "Subscribe" button 3) paste the rss url from your site's sidebar http://blog.automicrofarm.com/rss 4) click "Add" 5) GReader says "You have subscribed to 'AutoMicroFarm Blog. ... "AutoMicroFarm Blog" has no items'

Followed your steps exactly, and got all the blog posts. Maybe it was some kind of delay?

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#196

Post by chronophilic »

Eliezer wrote: post #47
pg wrote: post #42

I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret. If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.

Can you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the following scale? 1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level…

Does anyone know of a sort of hacker news for 3 and up?

I think it would be good for my blood pressure to find a place where people don't equate "changing the world!" with "finding a new way to sell socks on the internet!"

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#197

Post by stcredzero »

rdl wrote: post #163
stcredzero wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go after "Railroad Baron Money." That is to say, to invest in a fundamentally new kind of very useful infrastructure, like a subset network of computers where DRM actually works. If not absolutely, then well enough in practice. That would mean it would take something like 2 to 3 years for people to jailbreak new hardware, and almost a year to break revisions to old devices that fix an earlier jailbreak. (We're gettin…

Yeah, some kind of trustworthy computing would be around a 4-5 on the scale. Maybe 6.

> Yeah, some kind of trustworthy computing would be around a 4-5 on the scale. Maybe 6.

A great sign for this idea, is that it gets pooh-poohed and shouted down, particularly by people who don't even hear the entire thing and just pattern match the security part. The idea that DRM can be useful and beneficial to society as a whole is precisely "What You Can't Say" for large swathes of the tech community and even more mainstream society.

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#198

Post by trafficlight »

ph0rque wrote: post #49
Eliezer wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the following scale? 1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level…

Eliezer, I believe you just created the Yudkowsky Ambition scale. My startup, http://automicrofarm.com/ , rates between a 3 and a 5, depending on how successful it becomes, in my opinion.

Kottke just picked this up.

http://kottke.org/12/09/the-scale-of-startup-ambition

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#199

Post by leolalabs »

Eliezer wrote: post #47
pg wrote: post #42

I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret. If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.

Can you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the following scale? 1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level…

...Its interesting....before Google all the investors were saying that you could not compete against yahoo....and before you could not compete against IBM....and you could not compete aganits microsoft....All this was BS then and it is all BS today...

Re: Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

#200

Post by naranja83 »

Eliezer wrote: post #50
ph0rque wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliezer, I believe you just created the Yudkowsky Ambition scale. My startup, http://automicrofarm.com/ , rates between a 3 and a 5, depending on how successful it becomes, in my opinion.

Holy schmaloly, that actually is a 3 if it works. Anyone else got 3 or higher?

www.loomio.org I would say rates between 3 and 4.
Post reply on HN