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You Are Not Late

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Re: You Are Not Late

#31

Post by jamesisaac »

petercooper wrote: post #21
Animats wrote: post #7

I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this…

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." Love your comment but man, I really hate this quote every time it comes up. The "best" minds aren't doing that.. they're working on the Large Hadron Collider, doing cancer research, coming up with pioneering surgery techniques, programming and landing robots on Mars.. the relatively small group of software engineers and…

I presumed it was a reference to employees of Facebook/Google/etc? I.e. some of the most talented engineers aspire to work for companies whose purpose is to become the dominant ad distribution network.

Re: You Are Not Late

#32

Post by jamesisaac »

MichaelGG wrote: post #30

The difference now is that it's much harder. The overall competence and just general knowledge level is higher. Sorta like physics - essentially no one is going to make a discovery today just sitting around and thinking, unlike hundreds of years ago. Even comp sci: look at the algorithms that are named, coming from the 60s or 70s. You could invent them just by thinking about a problem. (I did exactly this. I spent a…

That's only really the case in mature fields (e.g. compsci), but the article pointed out several newly emerged fields, where yes, you could well create a significant discovery just by sitting and thinking about it (providing you have a decently broad background knowledge).

Re: You Are Not Late

#33

Post by ColinCera »

dakrisht wrote: post #10
Animats wrote: post #7

I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this…

Might have to print this out and paste on a wall in the office. Awesome Unfortunately, a lot of young kids are wired to look for the next Yo and or spend their energy and talents on things that don't really matter. It's crazy out there - the whole "make an app, get users and cash out quickly" mindset. It's very bad and is a major reason why we see so many crap companies and apps launching all the time. But this won't…

I see a bunch of startup listing services springing up, e.g., Product Hunt and at least three others that have landed in my mailbox in the past couple weeks, which send out a daily list of new / newly discovered startups.

It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a small percentage of the real total.

From what I could tell after a couple of exhausting weeks reading these emails at least 99% of these startups are almost completely unnecessary. I'm not using "99%" and "completely unnecessary" as rhetorical bludgeons; I mean quite literally that less than 1% of these startups have anything more than the tiniest smidgen of utility or innovation to justify their existence.

I stopped reading those "startup news" emails because it was depressing to see so much talent and effort being squandered. I don't know exactly what else all these people could/should be working on, but if they can't find some genuinely useful ideas for startups then they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends.

Re: You Are Not Late

#34

Post by msutherl »

Animats wrote: post #7

I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this…

"Yo" is the next Facebook.

Re: You Are Not Late

#35

Post by ColinCera »

CmonDev wrote: post #17
dakrisht wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have to print this out and paste on a wall in the office. Awesome Unfortunately, a lot of young kids are wired to look for the next Yo and or spend their energy and talents on things that don't really matter. It's crazy out there - the whole "make an app, get users and cash out quickly" mindset. It's very bad and is a major reason why we see so many crap companies and apps launching all the time. But this won't…

Isn't it better to solve tough niche problems while being on a salary or already rich and experienced instead of adding that to an already hard problem of starting up a business?

That's somewhat true, and to the extent it's true, it's an argument for why most people shouldn't be doing startups -- if you're not yet able to start a business that solves a genuine problem, then don't start a business.

Re: You Are Not Late

#36

Post by beaner »

jamesisaac wrote: post #31
petercooper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." Love your comment but man, I really hate this quote every time it comes up. The "best" minds aren't doing that.. they're working on the Large Hadron Collider, doing cancer research, coming up with pioneering surgery techniques, programming and landing robots on Mars.. the relatively small group of software engineers and…

I presumed it was a reference to employees of Facebook/Google/etc? I.e. some of the most talented engineers aspire to work for companies whose purpose is to become the dominant ad distribution network.

Most of the employees of those companies do not work on those problems. This seriously underappreciates all of the amazing products, open source work, and research that these companies have provided - and that is what the vast majority of their employees work on.

Re: You Are Not Late

#37

Post by jordanpg »

Charming, feel-good piece for all the devs in the room, I'm sure.

But here are some other things to think about.

The availability of this cheap, ubiquitous networking technology is intimately linked to the availability of extraordinarily cheap energy from carbon-based fuels as well as cheap manufacturing in various emerging markets. How many more years of that do we have? Let's not forget too that the planet keeps warming up in spite of us.

Next, there are plenty of folks out there who seem keen on changing this giant network into a tiered shopping-plex. All of this optimism about the future is implicitly dependent on a neutral network. Is there anyone on this forum who isn't gravely concerned about the damage that will be done to free enterprise if network neutrality (in the most generic sense) is lost?

Finally, there is a solution space to consider here. All of the incredible dev that has been possibly in the last few years has been made possible because the barriers to entry have been brought down by things like online tutorials, IDEs, high-level languages, and object-oriented frameworks. It might be the case that there are is a limiting number of interesting problems that can be solved without the need for more complex technical work, which might proceed at a far slower pace than we've becoming accustomed to.

Re: You Are Not Late

#38

Post by platz »

nugget wrote: post #4

February 2004 I was a third year CS student in Boston. I remember complaining to a friend of mine that we had missed the boat - Yahoo, Amazon, etc - the web had matured without us and the window of opportunity was closed. If only we had been born 5 years earlier! As fate would have it, that was also the month I signed up for an account on a tiny site called thefacebook.com. Domains. Google. Facebook. Pinterest. Uber.…

And how many get stuck on "false waves", I.e. survivorship bias. Sure, there are more waves, but the ability to spot a wave is incredibly difficult.

Why not just stop everything you're doing now and invest in ethereum?

What would be really interesting is to calculate some kind of first derivative of a wave so as to know what the optimal risk/reward tradeoff is.

Or perhaps to know what the density of false to true waves are. For example I imagine everyone knew about the potential opportunities during the gold rush. What can we say about the potential opportunities now?

Re: You Are Not Late

#39

Post by [deleted] »

nugget wrote: post #4

February 2004 I was a third year CS student in Boston. I remember complaining to a friend of mine that we had missed the boat - Yahoo, Amazon, etc - the web had matured without us and the window of opportunity was closed. If only we had been born 5 years earlier! As fate would have it, that was also the month I signed up for an account on a tiny site called thefacebook.com. Domains. Google. Facebook. Pinterest. Uber.…

[deleted]

Re: You Are Not Late

#40

Post by mcguire »

chippy wrote: post #22
petercooper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." Love your comment but man, I really hate this quote every time it comes up. The "best" minds aren't doing that.. they're working on the Large Hadron Collider, doing cancer research, coming up with pioneering surgery techniques, programming and landing robots on Mars.. the relatively small group of software engineers and…

agreed about "best" but in terms of population it's not a "relatively small group" it's the majority. They are all working to sell stuff - digital marketing for other companies or having ads as a core income for a site. They don't need to be devising the advertising frameworks, they just need to be thinking "how to make people click on ads".

chippy, I'll agree with you about the population (the number of people working with the LHC or Mars landers---even indirectly, as the majority of Google employees aren't working on ads---is tiny compared to say, the ad- and social-media-supported technical population of Silicon Valley), but I'm going to have to disagree with "best".

The cohort of people working on the LHC, cancer research, etc., is largely the same as the faculty of any medium sized or larger university. If you went to any research-oriented university, your professors were the ones doing that kind of research. Still impressed?

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