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“OK, but there are two rules…”
- ivey 16y agoAnd now I want bourbon. Is 1:30 too early?
- corin_ 16y agoPersonally I'd pick a nice Scottish malt, but either way: the only time during which it is "too early" for whisky is between when you woke up at 11:30am.
- rfugger 16y agoLuckily I'm always asleep between the time I woke up and 11:30 am.
- andyswan 16y ago1:30 is neither too early nor too late.
- iamwil 16y agoSometimes, the restrictions come at being underfunded, or with a lack of time, which takes less discipline to enforce than self-restriction.
- wildmXranat 16y agoAlcohol. It sells. Brand recognition helps as well.
- idheitmann 16y agoAnother great parallel is from photography: Many film cameras used to be sold with only a fixed 50mm or a 35mm lens. The restriction forced people to think about what was in or outside the field of vision. Today's cameras that have 10x zooms do not force the same consideration, and I suggest that amateur photography has suffered as a result. A friend of mine is a house-painter by trade, and has set himself the restriction to never use a brush when he paints a canvas. This forces him to consider what he really wants and how he can get there, instead of simply smearing paint around the canvas until he gets bored. We have too many choices these days. Getting rid of a few can make results much more deliberate.
- m0nastic 16y agoZoom lenses have been the predominant kit lens for cameras for the better part of twenty years. I think the migration to digital (where the cost of shooting is ridiculously low) has had a much greater impact on the worsening of amateur photography. That coupled with the ubiquity of sharing pictures on the internet has created a perfect storm of shittiness. Professional photographers love to lament about this, and while much of it is elitist posturing; there is truth to it (I say that as someone who splits my time about 50/50 as a professional photographer).
- dominostars 16y agoDigital cameras didn't make amateurs worse, they just increased the amount of amateurs. And I'm sure it increased the amount of good photographers too, so I'm not sure what the complaint is here. If old cameras took better pictures, then I implore professional photographers to use them.
- m0nastic 16y agoThe complaint was that the parent poster was postulating that amateurs have gotten worse recently, and that that could be explained by the increased usage of zoom lenses. If I accept that the first statement is true (that amateurs have gotten worse), I disagree on the cause (that it's because of zoom lenses, as zoom lenses have been the norm on SLR's since the 80's). I don't know objectively if amateur photographers are better or worse. I know that nowadays I see a lot more bad pictures than I used to (and while there is also an increase in good pictures, it hasn't increased nearly as much as the bad ones have). I am postulating that this is more likely due to the proliferation of digital and the ease at which photos can be shared (most people's crappy photos would only get viewed by their family members over the holidays when they dug out the slide projector). I'm don't think it matters if old cameras took better pictures (for the most part, they did; although the other benefits of digital tend to make up for it).
- jerf 16y agoI would be a far worse photographer than I am now if I did not have a digital camera. I do not have $5000 to blow on film and developer fees (or developing time, not to mention a lack of funds to blow on a darkroom setup) by experimentally learning about fstops or ISO settings, on a multi-day feedback loop, just for learning. I can afford batteries to take several thousand pictures, on a multi-second feedback loop, just for learning. My tools may be worse but I'm not aiming to be a pro.
- cdr 16y ago"Restrictions breed creativity" is hardly a new concept, but one worth repeating.
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agothe original sounds much better: necessity is the mother of invention. There are plenty of restrictions already I think, due to necessity, whether it is time, money, skills, why be even harder on yourself.
- bluekeybox 16y agoI guess the analogy with mobile Apple products is obvious (which I presume is why this post is on HN at all), but in hindsight I just realized that I have been following a similar strategy in my personal life all along (never let myself play video games or really watch TV except movies).
- rmc 16y agoI think this is on HN, not because of Apple, but because many people here like creating new stuff. Advise on how to create something innovative is valuable here.
- Psyonic 16y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how not playing video games or watching TV is a creative constraint. I can see it helping with time management, but I don't see how it directly helps you improvise. Also, TV is in a golden age right now. If I had to pick, I'd take the quality episodic TV shows coming out of HBO, Showtime and the like over movies anyday.
- bluekeybox 16y ago> I don't see how [not playing video games or watching TV] directly helps you improvise Let's just say it makes me less immersed in today's era when it comes to matters of visual taste/preference, which in turn lets me make creative choices that some people may find surprising (or at least that's what my self-serving bias tells me). I do understand the importance of keeping up with trends though, but I restrict my trend-seeking to people who I personally perceive as trendy (and which tend not to be on TV).
- Psyonic 16y agoI can see that to a degree, though I think some video games (especially indie ones) could be inspiring as well. But I appreciate that we all have our chosen muses.
- redthrowaway 16y agoI appreciate the message, but am I the only one for whom the "fail fast" mantra is becoming grating? It seems like it was originally a good idea: if your startup is dead, let it die. Don't cling to a failed idea. Now, however, it's almost used instead of a plan, or as an excuse not to carefully consider your options. It seems as if it appeals to our innate laziness: "Take a shot. If you miss, oh well, better luck next time." There's no hunkering down, no in-the-heat-of-the-crucible, just give up and try something else. It feels like a truism packaged for the Twitter generation.
- quanticle 16y agoAgreed. While the "fail-fast/fail-often" method does work, that doesn't mean the older model of carefully planning and considering your market is bad or ineffective. I mean look at Apple. Every product they've got right now has had years of very careful thought given to industrial design, user-interface, and marketing. Apple doesn't release a product unless they're at least 90% certain it can capture the market.
- redthrowaway 16y agoApple also isn't looking to get bought out by Google for $60M. They're in it for the long haul, and they're looking to be big players. Most of the small startups I see these days, unfortunately including YC startups, seem to be launching with the idea of doing one cool thing, having no idea how to make money in so doing, and hoping to get bought out in a talent acquisition by Google or Facebook before they run out of money. In many cases, it seems to be less about entrepreneurship and more about putting together a really cool portfolio so you'll get a massive signing bonus when you get hired. Now, that's certainly a legitimate way to make money, and it makes sense for the angels and founders participating in YC and the like. But it's not entrepreneurship. How many of the angel-backed startups these days are really looking to be long-term players? How many are looking to IPO in 10 years, vs get acquired in 2-3? How many founders envision themselves as the CEO of their company in 20 years? The fail fast mentality seems, on the surface, to be a reflection on an underlying current in the founder mindset: that entrepreneurship is a way to make enough money that you won't have to get a "real job". Just slug it out fo a few years, then become an angel yourself.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hnal943 16y agoMr. Swan misses the point here. The success of the new bourbon was not because random restrictions were applied (e.g. Open a pizza place with NO CHAIRS), but because a high standard was enforced.
- andyswan 16y agoI don't know....a "makers mark single barrel" would have had pretty high standards and a really "me too" feel. I'll stick by my argument that self-imposed restrictions can really help people get innovative and avoid the me-too traps of entrepreneurship.
- varikin 16y agoI would agree with this. High standards result in great products, but not necessarily innovative products. Restrictions can and do lead to restrictions. Think of all the limited resources in a computer 20 years ago and all the tricks played with memory and registers and bit-shifting and such to push the limits of what the hardware could do.
- ctdonath 16y agohttp://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-single-barrel-reserve/ http://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-single-...
- TheSOB88 16y agoThink a bit harder - don't you know at least one pizza chain with no chairs? Perhaps one that excels at delivering value?
- phamilton 16y agoI remember taking an English class my freshman year of college. We had to write a research paper, and the professor proposed that we make a rule that we can't use the internet. The class shot it down hard. While not a policy, he recommended that we give it a shot if we are up to it. I gave it a shot and it was actually quite a good experience. Libraries are not obsolete, and I was very able to write about new and contemporary issues. The restrictions made it a better experience for me. Though that was for school, where the point is often to create things that are neither novel nor profitable.
- thrdOriginal 16y agoI took the tour at Makers Mark distillery a few months ago (highly recommended), and they told a mostly similar story about Makers 46 (named after the number of attempts it took to get it right), but spun it as Bill Samuels, Jr. desire to "leave his mark." Although it is fun to find business lessons in everything (especially bourbon), I came away with a slightly more concrete example in brand loyalty after being introduced at the distillery to Marker's Mark's Ambassador program. It is pretty interesting: essentially it allows you to place your name on a barrel and recieve updates about its progress. When its finally ready, you have now earned the right to purchase your "own" bottle.
- andyswan 16y agoFrom what I understand the "46" is a shout-out to their supplier, because it is the product number of the wood staves used in the finishing process....
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- teyc 16y agoJobs: Make it work with one button
- bergie 16y agoBuild a CMS, no forms allowed.
- spokey 16y agoArguably Posterous fits this criterion.
- littleidea 16y agoMeh. Be dismissive without rolling your eyes... Ready? Go!
- nostrademons 16y agoI would respond to your comment, but really, there's nothing worth responding to there..
- brianpan 16y agoI think it's worth mentioning that in this case, the restrictions weren't arbitrary. There was insight in the two rules- designed perhaps to stay true to Makers (the "best bourbon") and still create something truly innovate and distinct. Arbitrary restrictions can also inspire creativity and create focus (timeboxing, learning to say no), but creating restrictions can be an opportunity to frame the problem in a purposeful way.
- Umalu 16y agoEnhancing creativity through artificial restriction is an old idea. The "Oulipo" movement in literature tried things like removing random letters from writing (try writing a story without using "e"), or transposing random words. When you put in restrictions like this, you get a much higher variance in outcome, with the bad being truly awful and gimmicky but the good occasionally being sublime.
- GFischer 16y agoMark Rosewater, the lead developer of the card game Magic:The Gathering constantly talks about how restriction breeds creativity. "The explanation he gives is simple: when someone is building a house, the more tools they have, the better off they are. But when someone is looking for something, the more space they have to explore, the worse off they are" from: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ir/narrow_your_answer_space/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ir/narrow_your_answer_space/ and the original article (on Magic:The Gathering design, but with useful information - scroll down to the "Design Tool #1: Restrictions" header where he discusses this point): http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/92 http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...
- vilya 16y agoUnfortunately the comment "Running a real estate website? OK... you’re not allowed to show the asking price or address of any home. Go." describes some of the most annoying real estate websites I've come across. While restrictions can encourage innovation, sometimes they really do just get in the way.
- Vivtek 16y agoThat was my reaction too! Every real estate ad in Puerto Rico does this; it's to make sure you're tethered to the broker, who is the only way you gain access to the market. Maddening. (Well: I say "every", but it's changing even in Puerto Rico.)
- davidmathers 16y agoI learned this concept from George Lucas when I was a child. Star Wars Budget: $13M Return of the Jedi Budget: $32M I'm not joking when I say that juxtaposition influenced the way I think about life. Now the idea almost seems like a trivial commonplace to me. Everyone from John Paul Sartre to David Heinemeier Hansson has written about it.
- jonburs 16y agoAre those figures adjusted for inflation?
- NickPollard 16y agoI doubt that 6 years (1977 - 1983) is long enough for inflation to have altered the ratio much.
- jonburs 16y agoInflation during that time period was one of the highest on record for the US -- see ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt. CPI June 1977: 60.7 $13 million CPI June 1983: 99.5 $21.3 million
- deadmansshoes 16y agoBut the best film of the trilogy was Empire Strikes Back - at $25M.
- davidmathers 16y agoNo, $18M according to imdb.
- blahblahblah 16y agoIt's not too hard to see why this works if you think about it as a mathematical optimization. You have a very bumpy fitness function in parameter space. When you apply arbitrary constraints on the parameters you are selecting a subspace to examine for local maxima of the fitness function. This is an easier problem to solve than the original global maximization problem.
- andrew1 16y agoAlthough you then have to solve two problems; optimizing the constraints, and then optimizing within the constraints. If I applied the arbitrary constraint that x must be an odd multiple of pi, then I'm not going to get a very good answer to trying to maximise cos(x)...
- blahblahblah 16y agoThe example you gave is a degenerate case that isn't really representative of the real world situation. Making x to be an odd multiple of pi in your example is an excessive constraint on the problem. Real world problems requiring creativity exist in highly multidimensional spaces and their fitness functions often exhibit fractal behavior. For example, let P be the set of all English-language poems of N lines, where each line is a semantically and syntactically valid expression in English and N>0. P is an incredibly huge set. We want to find solutions of high aesthetic fitness on the set P. Applying a few arbitrary constraints reduces the size of the search space but has little effect on our ability to find solutions with high aesthetic fitness. For example, we could arbitrarily restrict our search to the space of English poems with N=14, 10 syllables per line, an alternating pattern of an unstressed and stressed syllables in each line (iambic pentameter), and a rhyme pattern a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g in the terminal words of each lines. We've now drastically reduced the size of the search space such that we are now searching only the space of valid Shakespearean sonnets. However, even with our arbitrary constraints in place, we're still solving a highly unconstrained optimization problem and the arbitrary constraints we applied don't prevent us from finding solutions of high fitness. We could say that the bumpiness of the fitness function is fractal -- the shape of the fitness function on an arbitrary subspace resembles the shape of the fitness function taken over the whole space, providing that the subspace is itself "large" in some sense. The point is that there's nothing special about the arbitrary constraints we imposed. We could instead choose to work in the space where N=16, the number of words per line is between 4 and 7, the first four lines are all questions, and the last line is constructed in the form of a direct object followed by a subject and a verb and a repetition of the direct object (e.g. "Yoda, you seek Yoda"). There are still many aesthetic and unaesthetic solutions in this space, perhaps there are even some solutions with greater fitness than any of the 154 solutions that Shakespeare discovered with his set of arbitrary constraints.
- Eliezer 16y ago"Originality isn't easy, but it is simple. Just don't do stuff that's already been done."
- ambirex 16y agoActually the runkeeper idea without any inputs sounds like a pretty interesting problem.
- mcantor 16y agoDesign is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left. - Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
- gfodor 16y agoThere are restrictions that foster creativity as well as those that inhibit it. The trouble is you don't know which is which until you actually try building something within them. Additionally, you only see the success stories where these constraints resulted in something special, you don't see the failures that would have been successes if only the creators were given a bit more intellectual freedom. I'm struggling with this right now. When building web applications, there are some constraints that are interesting and useful ("the user should be able to do everything without logging in") that might result in great stuff being built, and others ("it has to use this particular technology stack or this particular algorithm") that are less obviously beneficial to the creative process.
- bitwize 16y agoI eat at a no-tables-and-chairs pizza place sometimes: Sal's in Boston. Real popular with the Suffolk U kids. You order your pizza and to eat it, you stand at one of the high counters running alongside the plate-glass windows.
- ctdonath 16y agoFYI: Knob Creek just announced their "Single Barrel Reserve". http://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-single-barrel-reserve/ http://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-single-...