Fashionable Problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Fashionable Problems

#61

Post by seriesf » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

stephenamills wrote: post #49

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…

"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.” You’re so right! There are great examples of companies that preserved the existing ecosystem of solutions (Facebook with PHP, Microsoft with C++, Google with Java and C++, maybe also Amazon with Perl 5 and C++). There are also great examples of succe…

The fact that many large and lucrative code bases are written in c++ should disabuse you of the idea that c++ is suicidal.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#62

Post by jakobegger » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #47

shrubble wrote: post #29

In this thread a guy talks about using the Q language and then someone else jumps in and says 'it's not scalable etc.' 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?

It may be fashionable and overused, but I don't think we can talk about the cloud as if it was still something new and unknown. By now I think one can already do an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem.

> an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem

I doubt that really is the case. I think most decisions are made based either on anecdotes, or whatever someone happens to have experience with.

It's rare that you can accurately predict the kind of workloads you'll have to deal with ahead of time, and it's even rarer that the people making the decision have experience with multiple completely different stacks.

And I don't really think it matters that much. Some people solve the problem with distributed document stores and key value stores, other people use a big transactional database and just keep putting extra RAM sticks in their server... I don't think there's always an obviously "better" choice.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#63

Post by blueboo » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

Paul is confusing ignorance for insight here. It's the same phenomenon whereby a weekend visit to Paris has your uncle explaining the European soul but your year in Kyoto leaves you barely able to generalize at all from your (actual) knowledge of nuance, complexity and diversity of another culture.

Everyone is trying to break the mold at various scopes.

Meanwhile, you're welcome to reproduce your late-90s success at any moment, Paul. We'll wait.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#64

Post by mannykannot » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #52

Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread. But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as noone will care. Working on a problem with proven d…

The advice to not work in an oversaturated field, if you want to make an impact, looks to me a bit like the reverse of looking for one's keys under the lamp post, because that is where the light is. We should give some credence to the proposition that saturation is the wisdom of the crowd at work, figuring out where a breakthrough is likely, and it is usually only with hindsight that over-saturation is apparent.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#65

Post by FreakLegion » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #31

gist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually surprised that PG doesn't feel uncomfortable about the 'acclaim' that he is getting for writing many of the things he has said that are not related to anything he has expertise in. Reminds me of celebrities who opine about politics with their thoughts (sometimes not always with PG). Paul is authoritative on many topics. General thoughts about life and people are great to hear what he thinks. Why not? Bu…

They're essays. The word means 'attempt' and the genre has always been about non-expertise. Montaigne was the ultimate non-expert.

> 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 an example.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#66

Post by darksaints » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

An interesting theory as to why we never evolved with wheels is the idea that an evolutionary improvement requires a viable intermediate state...something that works well enough in the transition from inferior to superior. It is worth noting that human inventions can evolve in much faster timelines than biological evolution, but no matter how fast they come, there does need to be a way to fulfill intermediate needs, or else there is no path forward.

What follows is my own personal views on current technological evolution, which may be wrong. Regardless:

Electric vehicles have been evolving extremely rapidly, and now they are viable enough for most privately owned passenger vehicle use cases. Through continuous evolutionary investment, they may make their way to some commercial vehicles, maybe even small planes. But the chasm is so extremely large for large commercial vehicles like airliners and cargo ships, that we would need massive (several orders of magnitude) technological improvements in energy density in order to even start considering them.

SOFCs are inferior to batteries and supercapacitors from an efficiency standpoint. They may never be the power system of choice for passenger cars or other small scale and lightly used systems. But the thing they have going for them is their ability to evolve as the ecosystem evolves. They can run on diesel fuel, JP8, even crude. They can run on biodiesel, or renewable ethanol or methanol. And they can run on pure hydrogen. They can even run on a mix of all of those fuels. At every path in the transition to hydrogen, there is a viable intermediate state. For this reason, I think you'll see fuel cell powered cargo ships and airliners long before you see battery powered.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#67

Post by jandrewrogers » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

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.

This kind of relentless indifference to conformity is a rare quality in people.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#68

Post by jonplackett » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

It's not just people's desires and people following what is 'fashionable'. I read a while back that in Physics it was impossible to get funding for anything outside of what was fashionable, String Theory was their example.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#69

Post by bobbyi_settv » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

Fashionable problems are the ones for which you'll have the easiest time recruiting employees, raising funding and generating press coverage, even taking into account that their fashionability leads others to pursue them.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#70

Post by est31 » Sun, Dec 22, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #48

est31 wrote: post #44

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money t…

I think here by conservative he means doing what everybody else is doing. Risk averse. Following the mainstream. Going into COBOL May have been a conservative choice 40 years ago, but not anymore. The conservative choice is to go with the herd.

> The conservative choice is to go with the herd.

That's not conservative. Being conservative means that you only follow a change if it makes sense. If you adopt some new technology, you should do it because it convinces you that it's better, not because it's new, wasn't available before, everyone else is doing it, or any other such reason. If you are conservative, you don't neccessarily end up doing what the majority is doing, as most times, the majority is following some empty hype.

That's because his use of that word is wrong: everything said in that article contradicts that statement.