21–30 of 195 posts
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
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 already existed. Ideas that diverged too much from the existing successful tech had a huge obstacle in their way: they had to recreate all of the existing solutions in their new model. So even if they would lead to a better solution over time, they may never get past that initial roadblock. And the longer we stay on the path, the bigger that roadblock becomes.
If we are all thinking of ideas around the existing model and assuming all of the existing assumptions, then we end up with similar solutions (fashionable solutions). We've reduced the solution space, leading to a limited number of solutions.
Perhaps groundbreaking/valuable tech can be found by questioning those existing assumptions; identifying where tech is still built on assumptions that are no longer true; or reexamining past solutions to see if they can be solved in better ways today with what we've learned since then...
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
Had the same thought. Some of his essays, no one else could have written them and brought a fresh, nuanced perspective. These couple paragraphs wouldn’t get any attention if not for the name of the writer. Maybe that’s fine—great writers have their share of banality—but does reveal how susceptible we are generally to brand name over substance.
Paul is authoritative on many topics. General thoughts about life and people are great to hear what he thinks. Why not? But he is no more special than 100000 other people who have no audience. Does he know this?
I've often thought he should do some A/B posting with his thoughts. Write something and then randomly decide whether to put it on his blog or some other place and see what the interest level is.
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?
Mmm, no. Which is why I really don’t get this post. The advice seems to boil down to something like : “don’t work on something fashionable! Do something like VC funding with a twist, or your own take on essays!” (which seems to be very fashionable).
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
It's not just fame, HN is PG's site. It would be almost rude if his posts didn't show up high here.
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
This itself is in need of a lot of conversation. I think a really ugly part of SV startup culture is, in my opinion, "it's okay to offend and hurt people, and it's sometimes demanded of you to..."
And I think we can be so much better than that. Being "disruptive" this way is just a lazy excuse.
> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area. If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793
What if all this cloud/k8s / serverless stuff is really all piffle? What if running stuff on dedicated hardware ends up a better solution in some fashion?
Is this the first PG essay that was composed on Twitter? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888