Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#71

Post by zonethundery » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

vaylian wrote: post #54

bob33212 wrote: post #50

This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin. 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progressi…

For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?

I'm new at this, having just purchased some miners, but have followed the space using a similar logic. For the 10% view I'd consider the insane amount of institutional money chasing the entire value chain, which will not be shy about protecting itself.

The policy environment is still evolving; the FinCEN travel rule will put the hurt on crypto ATMs and the exchanges (to some degree). But it's good collateral, it doesn't (generally) have storage costs like gold, the growth of supply is well understood. Potential positive catalysts remain, including a US btc ETF, the impact of cme's micro contract, and geopolitical developments further constraining the supply of ASICs.

Its clear from the above that I view it more as a store of value than something you should spend as a currency. Ethereum-world (incl stablecoins) seems to have a lock on the latter. It will be interesting to see what happens when ETH shifts to POS.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#72

Post by david-cako » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #55

> Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world. This is survivorship bias. He is not wrong in that yes, we should consider ideas from domain experts carefully and not be overly dismissive. But it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out.

Having crazy ideas seems to be a prerequisite for taking over the world with an idea. The alternative is having familiar ideas which are already pervasive, or having no ideas.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#73

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #29

I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box. Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's…

I don't think pg intended that crazy new ideas require someone to be a domain expert, just some expertise. Slight wording difference.

In the case of music, one could have domain expertise on audio files, compression and domain expertise about file sharing and domain expertise about younger people's listening habits. That's just having some insights into the domain, several as is the case with Napster. Music industry execs in those days probably had domain expertise on contract law, revenue sharing models, marketing and didn't have a clue about file sharing or audio compression.

Also want to mention the examples you mention seem to have not much "newness" to them to be "crazy new" in my opinion.

When I think of "crazy new" ideas, I think of things like stuff that came out of PARC in the 60's. If you go watch the Stanford 2 part series "How To Invent The Future" with Alan Kay on youtube [0] it goes into a lot of detail about them.

The challenge there with Xerox was they couldn't capitalize on every single idea that came out, just not logistically possible for a company to really do that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#74

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

activatedgeek wrote: post #18

I think the key statement to realize here is this, > Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day). I don't quite think that crazy…

> Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day).

I don't know about Erdos, but the other had ambitious ideas, not crazy ones. Evidence that they weren't crazy is that the problems they were working on are still seen as the ones to solve by most of the physics community.

In fact, on the case of Einstein, he worked on much crazier ideas on the beginning of his career. I don't think any respected physicist ever thought about solving Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect was an interesting curiosity but mostly of interest of "those inventors out there", not of researchers.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#75

Post by easton » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

weasel_words wrote: post #64

vishnugupta wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting a…

"They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on." Me playing the devils advocate... Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years (enough for them to make some good money). Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage. Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two…

That assumes that AWS/Azure/GCP won't have the same issues getting chips to run Mighty on that PC manufacturers have getting chips to sell to consumers though. If the shortage keeps up, that is not necessarily true.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#76

Post by kolinko » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #31

rsp1984 wrote: post #29

I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box. Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's…

Those are all excellent examples of the main reason why innovation can not be done in established businesses: the fear of cannibalizing the cash cow will stifle any real innovation.

Bell Labs is a counterexample to what you said. It developed the first transistor, photovoltaic cell, fiberiptic, lasers, cctv and some other things. Oh, and cellphones of course.

Ditto Xerox Parc and modern user interfaces, ethernet and and laser printers.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#77

Post by domnomnom » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

gustavo-fring wrote: post #52

blocked_again wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned as one of the people who draft read this essay.

Graham does this often. Instead of directly saying what he wants to say, he beats around the bush. When Allred was getting criticized for shady business practices, Graham wrote haters and thanked him and Musk and a bunch of other people. Not sure why he does it, it is very underhanded, as though he's afraid of actually getting in a legit argument with the person. Easier to pontificate form his essays, have them poste…

Probably terrified of outrage mobs.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#78

Post by pantulis » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19

bestinterest wrote: post #4

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done. My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw the…

I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#79

Post by samstave » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #29

I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box. Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's…

SpaceX and Tesla came 'out of' PayPal.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#80

Post by gman83 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:10 PM UTC

I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.