15 ms·

How to get new ideas

356 points by elorm 4y ago

paraschopra 4y ago
Wrote about the exact same idea a few years back: https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-for-anomalies/ https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-f...
ljlolel 4y ago
ChatGPT
- jadbox 4y ago
  I've yet to find an original idea from it. It can help with the process of brainstorming.
  - themantalope 4y ago
    Agree. ChatGPT can help with taking a rough or vague idea and better articulate what you are trying to say.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    so, try feeding chatgpt random garbage? unlike humans, chatgpt wont physically go after you.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Eliza 2.0
reffle 4y ago
This essay is very short. Has he given up on writing? Maybe too much Twitter has melted his brian.
- baxtr 4y ago
  He is pretty active on Twitter, so short form content is nothing new for him. Maybe he’s trying out if he can use his blog for short form too, since Twitter is going down a new / strange? path.
- brap 4y ago
  I really liked the length of this “essay”.
  - Dave_TRS 4y ago
    Me too. Most blog posts have one pretty simple idea that it takes a ton of reading to figure out what it is. I appreciate the time he put into distilling it. If he were to make it longer some examples might be interesting to read about and drive home the message, he no doubt has examples in his mind, and his readers would no doubt be curious as to what they are
- Separo 4y ago
  “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” - Mark Twain
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    much more subject material with a joseph campbell / wierd al yankovich take on 'jason and the argonauts' aka weighted gram and the arc-a-oughts.
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      though moving away from pg rating to statistical r, might result in some twisted python stuff. especially if ast taken to the limitless turing resources extreme.
- valstu 4y ago
  Well, I asked GPT-3 to make this longer: One of the surest ways to come up with new ideas is to pay attention to what doesn't fit in. We're used to seeing things in a certain way, and often times it's the things that don't quite fit into our preconceived notions that can provide the best insights. The most obvious place to look for these anomalies is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows like a fractal; from a distance its edges may appear smooth, but when you get closer you begin to see the jagged gaps and spaces. These gaps can be surprisingly obvious; it can seem strange that no one has thought to ask a certain question or investigate a certain problem. When you explore them, you can often discover entirely new areas of knowledge that have been previously untouched. That's why it's useful to investigate these gaps in knowledge. It may feel uncomfortable at first; we don't always like to challenge our preconceptions and explore things beyond our comfort zone. But often times this can be the source of some of our best ideas. You don't even have to look far for these anomalies; they can be found in everyday life. Much of stand-up comedy is based on this, by finding the oddities and quirks about our daily lives that we normally take for granted. So don't be afraid to take a closer look at what seems strange or missing or broken. It could lead you to unexpected discovery and perhaps even uncover some of your best ideas. This may be challenging and uncomfortable, but it's often worth it.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    per 'doesnr sem to fit in': is looking outside of ones field and/or historical anacronisms reframed to current day/technology cheating when comes to idea developement/gemeration?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sargstuff 4y ago
  > ... melted his brain. wouldnt that require a 'back to the future' tie-in?
biscuits1 4y ago
The question wasn't answered. How to fill those gaps? Write.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  painting works wonders at filling the gaps. more colorful than plumber spak.
baxtr 4y ago
It’s actually so short, you can read it here. (If you’re like me you head to the the comments section before going to a page…). Here it is: How to Get New Ideas January 2023 (Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So I asked: What would I have said?) The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  > .. exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds. so, 'through the looking glass' by another name? edit: at time of writing, in wrong hemisphere for summer's day.
surprisetalk 4y ago
My algorithm for generating ideas: https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas
- Jun8 4y ago
  Using combinatorial mechanics to generate new ideas is a powerful technique, perhaps first popularized by Ramon Llull in his Ars Magna (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull). Similar techniques are also used in TRIZ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ). The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and experience to judge which generated ideas are good.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    or enough connections outside of one's area of interest to generate comments about where the idea is considered good/$$$$
  - surprisetalk 4y ago
    Wow, thank you for the amazing links. > The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and experience to judge which generated ideas are good. This comment reminds me of my grandpa. I occasionally call him when I have a "brilliant" idea, and he dismembers the idea with simple questions. It's like magic. Even if my idea sits outside his domain knowledge, he has an incredible gift for finding fatal flaws in things. This gift has proven to be lucrative over his lifetime, and I suspect it makes him deeply unhappy. I'd like to acquire this power too, one day.
andjelam990 4y ago
Ask chatGPT :D
naillo 4y ago
I couldn't really parse the header to tell if he authored this essay or if he asked chatgpt to make it up. (If the latter, pretty impressive!)
- whstl 4y ago
  That's PG. The GPT answer is in the linked tweet.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    there's a gpt arc?
r3trohack3r 4y ago
Lots of truth to this. Just start building. Build for yourself and real people, not imagined profiles of people. The more you build, the more you explore, the more you'll find low-hanging useful ideas. As you encounter them it’ll surprise you that the space is mostly empty. Patio11 tweeted about using ChatGPT to immitate social signaling by rewriting content. I thought that was fun so I started doing it. That grew into Spencer Westford: https://vc.blankenship.io https://vc.blankenship.io That grew into a product: https://persona.ink https://persona.ink That keeps snowballing. Ever since building for myself my notebook of ideas is growing faster than I can keep up.
- prmph 4y ago
  But can you build products on ChatGPT with the assurance that they will not yank their service from under you in the future, like how Twitter did?
  - exevp 4y ago
    This space is getting so much interest that OpenAI will not be the only one providing LLM as a service forever.
    - somethingreen 4y ago
      Like web search in the 90s.
      - sargstuff 4y ago
        until to much tangle, then jump ship for something with less initial entangements
- xwowsersx 4y ago
  Your careers and privacy policy page links in the footer just link to the home page.
  - 4y ago
martin-adams 4y ago
I was inspired by comparing DNA to information and used that as a formula for generating new ideas. https://meda.io/evolve-your-thinking/ https://meda.io/evolve-your-thinking/
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
I think the key is noticing, which implies being a more passive observer. Most people want to find new ideas, which is being active. I've never had success at actively finding ideas but much more successful just living life, listening and the ideas just come.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  got to get out of oen's comfort zone/familar & figure out how the wierd/strange/unknown fits/matches up with what one is comfortable/familiar with. best done on one's own terms vs. letting life exclusively dictate when the wierd/strange/unknown happens. edit:' does result in lot more blue screen issues.
  - halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
    It’s not about whose terms you’re living on, it’s about listening. Most people around us are dealing with mundane things that need fixing, just listening to people’s grievances is a great way to ideate. There are individuals who you just end up meeting through life that have great niche problems that require nothing else other than living and listening to attain them. Going out and “pursuing” ideas often leads to some confirmation bias as we’re determined to “find” an idea, rather than sitting back and letting the lightbulb go off when you’re not actively trying. To each their own though.
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      but the invariant of checking out/exploring just for the sake of being somewhere but 'here' does present one with way more opportunities to listen/hear.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Have a anomoulus brain, that recombines things that do not belong together (conspiracy theories) but have enough filter to recognize the the bad recombinations. Train said brain with rewards for recombinations, even ridculous ones. Also recongize that inventors would be excellent in story writting when asked to produce a recipe for creativity. So the step by step instructions may be nonsense. Creativity, the far reaching one, not the incremental one, is topological adjunct to insanity. Which is why the radical new things, only get funded in times of desperation. If I were a inventor, i would be heading for ukraine or russia right now.
iamflimflam1 4y ago
My problem isn't a lack of ideas. It's having the bandwidth to do them all. What I really need is the ability to clone myself.
- exevp 4y ago
  So cloning yourself is the actual idea you should pursue? ;)
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    It’s called hiring?
    - affgrff2 4y ago
      'leveraging your talent by means of labor'
      - sargstuff 4y ago
        no, that's what caused the romans/greeks to avoid making use of steam for labor -- what will the current slaves do?
    - exevp 4y ago
      Psssst, if you put it this way it won't attract VC $$$
      - sargstuff 4y ago
        > ... wont attract VC $$$ because of clone cache coherencey issues?
- cableshaft 4y ago
  Yep. Or somehow focus more, that would help knock a few more ideas out as well. My backlog of games/puzzles/stories I'd eventually like to get out there might be >100 at this point. Focusing mostly on a bit more of an ambitious game right now, and it's probably still 6 months before I get it into Steam early access (coding in my spare time and energy, which is sparse lately), so everything else is just waiting at this point. But sometimes I get an idea that I need to at least get some playable prototype with index cards, pen, paper, and tokens, at least. Just had another concept pop into my head a couple days ago for a roll-and-write I should at least make a board and write up some rules for before I forget. Waiting for the day when something like ChatGPT can code up a basic but working game based on my description of its mechanisms. Even if it can only handle abstract games on a sqauare or hex grid, that'd still be useful for me.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Real progress in any field or endeavor comes down to about 5% new ideas and creativity, 95% hard work putting those new ideas into practice or building something functional out of them. That 5% is pretty critical however, as without it you're just continuing to redo what's already been done.
- valgor 4y ago
  This is very true. Ideas are pretty cheap to come by. Implementing, building, teasing them out into a practical scenario is hard.
  - gizmo 4y ago
    I don't think it's easy at all. Try to come up with an original plot for a hollywood big budget time travel movie. Take the plot of Edge of Tomorrow. I could never come up with that. Ideas are easy when it's just "Grand theft auto in space", but actual originality? Extremely difficult.
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      guess why producers such as spielber and lucas draw from literature -- starwars from joseph campell 'warrior myth' & japanse 'magnificant 7'
    - corobo 4y ago
      On the other hand I ditch a handful of film/TV ideas each week. Many because they'd be crap of course, but the rest because there's no way in this lifetime I'll have the resources to bother thinking about them, never mind have the time to actually write them out. Gotta do regular people work till I die. So glad I was dragged out of the universal energy just to pay rent for 60 years haha. Fuck I wish I could afford to do something arty farty instead. Such is life. I passed my GCSE English literature (end of high school exam in UK) writing a time travel story, haha.
      - sargstuff 4y ago
josht 4y ago
Simply beautiful.
papito 4y ago
When I was in my 20s, I could code for days on straight. I had so much energy and the perception of the bottomless capital of time. Now that I am forty, the cost-benefit analysis is getting tougher. Can I have my big break and retire early? Sure, but the chances of that happening are not that great. Many serial entrepreneurs fail multiple times with nothing to show for it. All I think about now is - when I am on my deathbed, and I look back at my life, will I regret not living it, or that I didn't spend enough time writing code in front of my computer on an off-chance that my idea works out?
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  Sounds like burnout. The reason you can spend days on end coding is because you're excited about the thing you're working on. If you're coding something that you don't find exciting or that is just a pipe dream, you'll have thoughts about your deathbed. That's pretty natural.
  - sarkhan 4y ago
    Burnout from doing same thing over and over.
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      well, didnt go from cooking meat to oven by not toasting / charing things over & over.
    - papito 4y ago
      Pretty much. Every project I start, it's the same kind of yak-shaving. Database schema, logging, authentication, display of errors, build tools, CI/CD, backend, front-end. Full-time is not even enough for this for one person. There is a ton of CRUD and mind-numbing tasks you have to churn through to get to the interesting parts, and I have been doing the boring parts for 20 years. The goals barely changed, but how we implement things has. New ways to build, new way to deploy, new languages, new frameworks. Just keeping up with it is a struggle. I think my next project, I am just going to go Rails. It's my way of giving up :)
3dsnano 4y ago
i think new ideas come from being naive and possessing the "no-mind" or a childlike sense of wonder. the older i get, the less plastic my brain is and the more depression and other issues start to seep in, get in the way, overcomplicate shit. to be completely free, uninhibited, released from guilt and predjudice. to just think, play, laugh, fart, and yawn. boring days spent looking out the window wondering how crows fart, or what makes zebras sassy. the only limit is our own adult psychosis. we are prisoners of our own minds, locked and shackled by constructs of our own design. too focused on the failures of the past and anxieties of the present to take a moment and b-r-e-a-t-h-e. like who fucking cares about businesses and startups and shit. saas my ass. when you actually stop trying, give up, and stop caring, and truly let go (like in the movie frozen) you can actually go in and through and back out the other side. just learn to get out the way of yourself. that's what im working on, but it's really hard. you think you're supposed to be there and generate brilliance 24/7 but it's not possible. go outside and find a patch of earth where things are growing. get really close to the ground and start looking at it real hard. there's honestly so much stuff there, it's wild. like who knew? wow thats nuts. acorns, rocks and shit. touch the dirt and rub it on your face. mushrooms are literally everywhere. the water in my body was once in a bowl of rice that your great grandma ate at becky's 27th birthday party. just give up just give up stop caring be free
- sargstuff 4y ago
  or be around long enough that have time/resources to find a soluion to what have wanted a soluion to which noone else seems to want to provide. edit: needs of the many refinements out weight the needs of the few refinements
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs pure functionality.
gizmo 4y ago
Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become today's good ideas. For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental improvements in li-ion batteries, and suddenly electric cars are "unlocked".
- jasmer 4y ago
  'almost all ideas are bad' This is not the way to look at it. 'Ideas' are too early to be judged as good or bad. Ideas are fodder, they are there to be moulded into things that are good or bad. Often ideas are just foils to help you think. They are so contextual as well: 'full screen smartphone' was maybe only possible by Jobs, with that much direct and coercive power over engineers. Motorola CEO was not going to pull it off. But Apple did work with motorola to make a 'music phone' as an experiment. I think your note about 'yesterday's ideas' is bang on.
- JackFr 4y ago
  "With a big enough engine even a brick will fly." - famous quote about the F-4, which captures that much of early airplane development was engine development rather than aeronautics. It's no coincidence that Glenn Curtiss got his start in motorcycles before moving onto aircraft. I think to some extent we are seeing the same thing with the latest AI models, where if you just throw enough parameters and GPU's at a problem, you can get pretty good results. In a way, I see some parallels to aircraft, in that it was important to study birds as the best example of heavier than air flyers early on, but understanding the nuances of the biomechanics of flapping wasn't necessary to surpass them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - htrp 4y ago
    You can get improve the low hanging fruit through brute force ... but there is a lot of low hanging fruit. Model architecture cleverness will eventually outpace more GPU time, but for now the roi on GPU time is higher than clever design.
thenerdhead 4y ago
A willingness to change one’s mind and the cliche Socrates idea that one knows they know nothing always helps too.
sidcool 4y ago
Question. How does one feed content to ChatGPT and get such output?
- swyx 4y ago
  not an expert, but i think usually one of two ways - either use openai’s finetune api (the right way) or embed all the docs, retrieve them using embedding of the questions, and add just enough of them to the prompt to generate a response (gpt-index or langchain help automate some of this). downside of former is lack of sources, downside of latter is context constraint
  - firasd 4y ago
    I'm not sure fine tuning helps with this kinda thing. Because the fine tuning mechanism involves sending the API a bunch of data like {"prompt": "<prompt text>", "completion": "<ideal generated text>"} So I'm not sure how you would feed it PG's essays in this mechanism
- sargstuff 4y ago
  chatgp isnt limited to spoonfuls, so guessing internet setup / tty typing speed. would tying infinate google search feeds to chatgp crash the internet or just reduce down to 42?
swyx 4y ago
i am genuinely surprised that pg is writing such a short response to a question that seems right down his alley, seemingly very core to his subject matter. how has he not written an authoritative “how to get ideas” post until now?
- goshx 4y ago
  http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://paulgraham.com/organic.html http://paulgraham.com/organic.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
- starkd 4y ago
  True. Not sure what he was trying to convey. It was just a paragraph. Not even an essay. So vague it makes you wonder if it was an AI response.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    or attempt to get everyone else to fill in the blanks.
seydor 4y ago
"ChatGPT, gimme 10 startup ideas" TBH, at this point, if there is a problem that hasn't been solved, its because some people tried and failed and found that the problem is not solvable currently. It may be more fruitful to start with something promisingly popular, and improve upon it (e.g. tiktok)
- cableshaft 4y ago
  This can work. I've done this for some of my game designs. "ChatGPT, I have a game design with this theme and these mechanics. What are some ideas for some new special tiles / cards I can add to the game?" And it'll give me 5-10 ideas, some junk, but a few that are worth exploring and I might not have thought of on my own.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  > ... problem not solvable currently ... pre or post order traversal of copyright/trademark? perhaps switch heap stacks?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I'm finding the whole AI thing discouraging. Nothing like earlier tech gold-rushes. Every single idea I have starts with "have, or acquire, an absolute shitload of capital"—because you need huge, tagged datasets to move forward with any of them. That means capital, and lots of it. And if you find a way around that you're still burning non-trivial amounts of money on every little experiment (for compute time) all in search of an outcome that may not materialize, i.e. you may never even have anything that you could attempt to sell or raise money with. Seems impossibly expensive to engage in just to fail several times, unless you've got a large pile of capital.
  - seydor 4y ago
    It s not like google invented the web, or that they wrote any web pages. Yet they made all the money
marban 4y ago
As someone who worked with Bill Gross* for almost two decades, I'd suggest watching this playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeabOFsFccYCkD9ZUsoI0OC951HNZ0e90 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeabOFsFccYCkD9ZUsoI0... * Overture, Picasa and many more OGs.
- orangutanemoji 4y ago
  hi, thank you for sharing this! #13 is especially relevant for right now lol
bamazizi 4y ago
One of the oldest saying in entrepreneurship is "need is the mother of invention" It starts with finding the right problem/need and before jumping into to solutioning, the smart person would validate and pitch the problem to as many relevant target customers as possible. Once the problem is validated and tangible root cause is flushed out then it's time to explore the solution and pitching it to the same customer research group for validation before going into building mode. Finding ideas is not hard, but the process is gruelling, frustrating and potentially rewarding. Good luck!
- sargstuff 4y ago
  yeah, 'news'/documentation/commentary one way to find 'problems' with possible unmet solutions.
interleave 4y ago
I love this. Short and concise, this combines two of my most favorite mindshares. 1. "Hackers and Painters" – I stumbled across in late 2004 at the Technical University of Vienna's (excellent) bookstore. Reading it changed my life. 2. "Ideas are the Enemy of Observations (2012)" – Just Three months ago yamrzou shared this gem of a text. For me, it has become the most meaningful post ever shared on HN. "How to get new ideas" seems to fit snuggly right in the middle :) [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355094
- borroka 4y ago
  I read the essay and found it reasonably entertaining, but not exactly in a good way. What exactly is the writer trying to accomplish? I didn't get it, but maybe it's about having an "unbiased" look at the world, probably/maybe in the context of inferring causality, not just for lolz. The essay writer's main problem is that they are attempting to infer causality from observation or to find an explanation of the data that justifies or supports their worldview. After all, "why?", "how curious", "I wonder how that happens" are powerful questions and statement that have led to countless inventions, investigations, novels, and pleasurable, although at times frustrating, time. I would recommend something more scientific: observe the world (data/observations), develop a hypothesis that is hard in Platt's sense (meaning it should be discriminating) and test the hypothesis on new data and observations, where new means not used to develop the hypothesis to be tested. And they will see that they should not only collect observations that describe the world, but develop and test hypotheses that can test the mechanisms that lead to those observed facts. Sometimes this is possible, sometimes it is not. But it is always entertaining.
hristov 4y ago
HN should have a [chat GPT] tag for stuff generated by chat GPT. So that I can ignore it. I do not mind reading what paul graham said about how to get new ideas. I do not care what chat GPT said. What chat GPT said may or may not be a good summary of paul grahams thoughts, it may be wrong in an important aspect, etc. If Paul Graham wants to say something, he should say it directly and not hide behind a chat gpt layer.
- guptaneil 4y ago
  This is PG saying something... he linked to a chatGPT generated response and said he didn't like the response so he wrote his own.
  - hristov 4y ago
    PG was a little ambiguous about this. He said "So I asked: What would I have said?" It is not clear whether he asked himself or ChatGPT.
    - mediaman 4y ago
      It appears pretty clear that PG wrote what he actually thought in response to ChatGPT's render of his potential thoughts.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    The thing is, I have to trust that PG wrote the words saying he wrote his own response. What stops ChatGPT from saying those same words? I'm wondering what ways/technologies we'll create to tell if someone actually generates text themselves. Right now, I can feel a rising desire to avoid text-based communication with people, almost a fear of getting catfished by text.
- rileymat2 4y ago
  That is an interesting concept in itself, if the idea is sound, why does the originator matter?
ignoramous 4y ago
Https mirror: https://archive.is/1YOzz https://archive.is/1YOzz
Existenceblinks 4y ago
His take on non-natural lang for AI (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1612510768674795523 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1612510768674795523) sounds right (bias: because it's also what I was thinking) So I'm not hyped about ChatGPT at all > much of standup comedy is based on this (anomalies) I think it's more about capitalize popular rants though. Not sure most of them are even feasible things to fix. It's an ok essay .. though nothing sparks new idea of thinking about new idea.
sargstuff 4y ago
wonder what the typical painting brush stroke count is between posted writings. edit: perhaps a stippling[1] to stipulation [2] ratio tuppled with relevant/appropriate pruning technique(s) [1] stipplism vs pointillism : https://www.davidaccurso.com/the-art [2] document of concurrence : https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/stipulation
robg 4y ago
Neuroscientist here. Closer I got to the physiology of mental health - sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition - realized it was another fractal for personal and population health. Problem remains navigating regulatory or reimbursement hurdles from wellness into professional care.
- Schroedingers2c 4y ago
  Would you mind giving a high-level summary of the physiology of mental health (like one paragraph or two, however much you like)? Just the main things that are currently known/believed.
  - robg 4y ago
    The autonomic nervous system and the glymphatic nervous system are both things I never really learned about in schools. ANS is taught as a textbook fact of homeostasis, not the constant fight-or-flight reflex that’s on every second of every day and the impacts that causes on health. The glymphatic system has only been discovered in the last 10 years but helps explain why sleep deficits explain cognitive performance decrements, mental health concerns, and age-related declines. And still so much we don’t know like gut-brain health and neuroelectronics as for implants!
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      robg wrote: "... And still so much we don’t know like gut-brain health and neuroelectronics as for implants!" 'What do sonnomes modify when added to olgosaccaride chains ?' answer provided by [1] seems to back that up. [1] https://ask-paulg.up.railway.app/ https://ask-paulg.up.railway.app/
- aleks5678 4y ago
  100%. Start projects, bet small, grow
goertzen 4y ago
It might not be good at generating original posts, but it’s really good at generating HN comments. Try it! Generate typical HN comments to this PG post [ … ]. - Include both positive and negative comments. - add replies that focus on annoying details that draw attention to the commenter - include fan boy defence of original post - point out obvious exceptions
- sargstuff 4y ago
  sounds like enumeration of 1st order logic concepts
adversaryIdiot 4y ago
Hi, Idiot here. How can I reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge"? Especially in fields I'm not savvy in?
- js8 4y ago
  Walk (study and be curious) in a single direction, eventually you'll reach the frontier.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    walking the engineering lattice allows for way more vector intersection considerations.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  > ... reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge" ... currently, search engines/chatgpt seem to fill that roll vs more historical library/university. aka search term "frontiers of knowledge" <replace with subject area field(s) unfamiliar with> compared with traditional library/university book writer/teaching assistant note: sed & awk not required to do text replacement, but good editor certainly helps But if patient enough to wait, will eventually show up on internet as a video(s) way before the random monkeys typing away at a type writer get to it [1] [1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
steele 4y ago
1) have capital 2) bet capital on people with ideas 3) exploit their labor 4) declare yourself their muse
- sargstuff 4y ago
  wonder if that's what einstein was thinking when came up with e = m (c squared). 1) aka two see m is to b without [need for financial] backing. 2) sed e/two/to/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' sed e/m/money/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' sed e/b/be/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' 3) crap -- type face doesnt do this justice --- gotta go re-invent tex for ycombinator 4) ha ha ACME; errr.. sed e/ol/al/ sed g/ol$/lol/ sed g/al$/ai/ sed g/capit/car(cdr(ulate)) / ^Gli movie ref[1] ^G ed ^D [1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigli https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigli
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    so, must vi 4/attention
olalonde 4y ago
I think that's why a lot of innovation comes from "outsiders" rather than industry veterans. You are more likely to notice the anomalies with fresh eyes and stop noticing them through time.
- david927 4y ago
  I agree. Things fall into existing grooves. Your band comes up with a new sound and people say, "That's kind of like Mazzy Star," and now you point it more that way. It falls into that nearby groove instead of continuing on its own. A lot of great sounds came out of the 1960s because there were so few grooves. No one knew what the rules were. Plus, a lot of low hanging fruit stays there because no one looks at it. Everyone is looking at x, y, and z, and there are a thousand variations of those, and they ignore a, b, and c because no one brought it up.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  Conversely, I have seen that some of the most boring startups that you never hear of, but are killing it, are built by domain experts who know the task they're trying to solve inside and out. Two examples from my own country, Spain: - A man who built a SaaS for local administrations and has about a ~50% share of the market. He spent 30 years working for the Spanish IRS in different positions. I don't know the insider story, but looking at the website he just made a SaaS solution with good UX in a space where UX tends to be atrocious. - RatedPower's CTO. RatedPower makes a software that automates the design of renewable power plants. This guy had been drawing the plans by hand as a renewables engineer, realized a computer would be perfectly equipped to do it, and the competition in the space had grown complacent and barely innovated in years, so he did it. The older I grow the more I get excited by boring ideas. People pitch ideas to me frequently and most of the time I literally end up thinking "not boring enough"!
bryanmgreen 4y ago
Of PG advice/tips/guidance, "Do things that don't scale" I think is still a great starting point and a piece of advice that is a bit less abstract. When you start from that, only the ideas that most people would never consider float to the top. It's worked for me and my business.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
So PG has been automated?
- threeseed 4y ago
  Some of his more recent political takes have been disappointing to say the least. So would be nice to have a PG bot without all of that.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
    What takes?
jarrenae 4y ago
I feel I can speak to this pretty well, over the past year I've launched 130+ projects as part of https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks and I've come up with ~250+ ideas. Similar to "look for anomalies" my general rule of thumb is to solve some sort of problem, even if it's rather small. So for example: 1. I pick a topic/product. Let's say: Gmail 2. I look for things that I'd like to be able to do, wish I could do, or consider frustrations I've experienced in the past. - I want to review how many emails I get a day on average, where are my "inbox metrics"? - I want to see threaded messages more clearly, why is the design so opposite a normal chat message? - I want to create emails faster, why do I have such an elaborate editor and format for something that I typically want to use informally? 3. I consider ways to solve said problems - Where are my "inbox metrics"? - Chrome extension to show average emails per day, and graph on a timeline which types of emails I get on certain days. Huge personal data opportunity here. - I want to see threaded messages more clearly - An app that connects to my gmail that intelligently restructures my emails to make them appear like chat messages. It handles all the noise, I just message as I would in any instant messenger. - I want to create emails faster - predictive text templates, quick starters, GPT powered replies, change the "bulky editor" out for a simple text box + clever replies. 4. I then research if there are existing solutions to said problems, and if there are, I either ignore and move on, or consider ways that I could quickly one up their product to make mine the better product in the marketplace. For my specific use-case, I'm trying to build a product per day, so I'll look for speedy ways to solve the problem that I've selected in a novel and agency increasing way. But I think this is a great structure for anyone looking to build a startup or a small side hustle.
- hooande 4y ago
  250 ideas is incredible. if only 1% of them grow to have ~$1MM in value (or anything close), you should have two or three real winners by now. If only by pure chance. I'm really curious about how that's going. I can't quite suss out what your biggest successes are on your website.
  - jarrenae 4y ago
    That's definitely one of the goals that I'm tracking for, though I want to stress that profitability per project isn't the main goal, so some of these projects have no immediate monetization strategy. Additionally, the projects are of a pretty strict scope (6-24 hours of work) for MVP, so we're mostly trying to improve the overall structure. In a year I hope to have 2-6 that are decently profitable, and ideally more that are valued in the open source community. I think a few of the most successful ones so far are: https://ghostlystock.com/ https://ghostlystock.com/ https://www.barbellformac.com/ https://www.barbellformac.com/ https://www.heftysearch.com/ https://www.heftysearch.com/ https://www.oldestsearch.com/ https://www.oldestsearch.com/ combined web traffic is around 5-10k views per month (across the pages you see on the main site) Side note: I'm improving that page to make finding popular ones easier. Some aren't worth more than a quick laugh/glance, while others are really worth using.
samsquire 4y ago
I think that finding gaps as Paul Graham says is a good approach to finding ideas. My approach to finding ideas is to think, write and use words I like to explore creatively and join arbitrary ideas together. Writing and talking IS thinking itself! I even journal all my ideas in the open on GitHub! I share all my ideas with everyone, including startup ideas. Links are on my profile. I LOVE SHARING IDEAS. I enjoy reading people's problems to encounter inspiration for problem solving. I would read Slashdot when growing up to learn about computer issues people were solving. Some words I enjoy are "mesh", "parallel", "multiplex", "multi", "schedule", "marketplace", "tree", "additive", "auto", "query", "traversal", "graph".
ok_dad 4y ago
I don't need ideas! I need some sort of "basic income" that allows me to pursue the ideas I have today while providing for a family.
- corobo 4y ago
  Right! I think we might be the only two on this site who have more ideas than money haha. How to get new ideas? How do I stop them coming?! My method is to scribble them on a piece of card and chuck that into a tub to get them out the way for now. I know that tub is being emptied with nothing in there seeing the light of day. Simple fact is if I work on my own stuff I don't get to pay rent or eat this month. One day. In the next lifetime if not this.
- meowtastic 4y ago
  You can already achieve that by taking VC funding, no?
  - ok_dad 4y ago
    No, my ideas are not compatible with VC funding, unfortunately, because my ideas only help humanity overcome our energy crisis rather than enrich some select few.
    - angelbar 4y ago
      Use ChatGPT to create online courses... editorialize them and make them online then. Get sufficient income to dedicate to your personal goals
nickdothutton 4y ago
Most of the truly new innovation that happens is between established disciplines. Biology <-> Chemistry, Biochemistry. Statistics <-> [insert field].
specialist 4y ago
And I'm over here trying turn off my endless torrent of new ideas, to better focus on the work in front of me. During the apocalyse, it got really bad. Probably due to isolation and so I didn't have my usual inhibitors. ("Being polite company" turn upkeep.) -- The one strategy I have "to let it go" for my idea factory is to journal. Write however much of the notion down in notebooks that emotionally allows me to mentally stop chewing on it. Sometimes just a one liner. Sometimes long white papers.
topherPedersen 4y ago
I thought GPT wrote what Paul posted! I guess I cannot tell the difference anymore between who's saying what. I actually thought what Paul wrote sounded like a poor imitation of Paul Graham... spooky!
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wbharding 4y ago
The "gaps that seem obvious"-notion describes exactly how I feel about pull request tooling these days. The status quo for PR review has very obvious-seeming improvements that have not been pursued (ex: de-emphasizing moved code vs. deleted code, making AI predict what comment will be left before dev starts typing, auto-reviewing trivial changes). If I'm correct that PR review is currently much less efficient than it will be soon, it won't be because I'm smart or this is a new idea. It would just be because our company has spent last five years building code review tools, right place right time. Eventually there was enough infrastructure accumulated (and ambient events unfolding, ie OpenAI) that it became a small step to pass the edge of what PR review meant circa 2022.
kensai 4y ago
Well, actually the ChatGPT essays-fed answer (https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222536344764416/photo/1 https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222536344764416/photo/1) is pretty close to what Paul Graham himself said, although he would not admit it. Real Paul talked about anomalies, and that's eerily close to "accidents and mistakes" in my opinion. :)
paulorlando 4y ago
Love the comments here. I try to get ideas for what is becoming possible (not what's a good or bad idea) by visualizing how drivers of timing work. I wrote a bit about it here: https://startupsunplugged.com/why-now/timing-drivers-visualized/ https://startupsunplugged.com/why-now/timing-drivers-visuali...
Octokiddie 4y ago
> Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So I asked: What would I have said? It's not entirely clear whether or not the essay was written by GPT because it's not clear who PG asked. Himself or GPT? I'm leaning toward the former, but can't rule out the latter. Maybe that's the point.

356 points by elorm 4y ago

Wrote about the exact same idea a few years back: https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-for-anomalies/ https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-f...

ljlolel 4y ago

ChatGPT

jadbox 4y ago
I've yet to find an original idea from it. It can help with the process of brainstorming.
- themantalope 4y ago
  Agree. ChatGPT can help with taking a rough or vague idea and better articulate what you are trying to say.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  so, try feeding chatgpt random garbage? unlike humans, chatgpt wont physically go after you.
dboreham 4y ago
Eliza 2.0

reffle 4y ago

This essay is very short. Has he given up on writing? Maybe too much Twitter has melted his brian.

baxtr 4y ago
He is pretty active on Twitter, so short form content is nothing new for him. Maybe he’s trying out if he can use his blog for short form too, since Twitter is going down a new / strange? path.
brap 4y ago
I really liked the length of this “essay”.
- Dave_TRS 4y ago
  Me too. Most blog posts have one pretty simple idea that it takes a ton of reading to figure out what it is. I appreciate the time he put into distilling it. If he were to make it longer some examples might be interesting to read about and drive home the message, he no doubt has examples in his mind, and his readers would no doubt be curious as to what they are
Separo 4y ago
“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” - Mark Twain
- sargstuff 4y ago
  much more subject material with a joseph campbell / wierd al yankovich take on 'jason and the argonauts' aka weighted gram and the arc-a-oughts.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    though moving away from pg rating to statistical r, might result in some twisted python stuff. especially if ast taken to the limitless turing resources extreme.
valstu 4y ago
Well, I asked GPT-3 to make this longer: One of the surest ways to come up with new ideas is to pay attention to what doesn't fit in. We're used to seeing things in a certain way, and often times it's the things that don't quite fit into our preconceived notions that can provide the best insights. The most obvious place to look for these anomalies is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows like a fractal; from a distance its edges may appear smooth, but when you get closer you begin to see the jagged gaps and spaces. These gaps can be surprisingly obvious; it can seem strange that no one has thought to ask a certain question or investigate a certain problem. When you explore them, you can often discover entirely new areas of knowledge that have been previously untouched. That's why it's useful to investigate these gaps in knowledge. It may feel uncomfortable at first; we don't always like to challenge our preconceptions and explore things beyond our comfort zone. But often times this can be the source of some of our best ideas. You don't even have to look far for these anomalies; they can be found in everyday life. Much of stand-up comedy is based on this, by finding the oddities and quirks about our daily lives that we normally take for granted. So don't be afraid to take a closer look at what seems strange or missing or broken. It could lead you to unexpected discovery and perhaps even uncover some of your best ideas. This may be challenging and uncomfortable, but it's often worth it.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  per 'doesnr sem to fit in': is looking outside of ones field and/or historical anacronisms reframed to current day/technology cheating when comes to idea developement/gemeration?
deleted 4y ago
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sargstuff 4y ago
> ... melted his brain. wouldnt that require a 'back to the future' tie-in?

biscuits1 4y ago

The question wasn't answered. How to fill those gaps? Write.

sargstuff 4y ago
painting works wonders at filling the gaps. more colorful than plumber spak.

baxtr 4y ago

It’s actually so short, you can read it here. (If you’re like me you head to the the comments section before going to a page…). Here it is: How to Get New Ideas January 2023 (Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So I asked: What would I have said?) The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds.

sargstuff 4y ago
> .. exploring such gaps yields whole new fractal buds. so, 'through the looking glass' by another name? edit: at time of writing, in wrong hemisphere for summer's day.

surprisetalk 4y ago

My algorithm for generating ideas: https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas

Jun8 4y ago
Using combinatorial mechanics to generate new ideas is a powerful technique, perhaps first popularized by Ramon Llull in his Ars Magna (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramon_Llull). Similar techniques are also used in TRIZ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ). The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and experience to judge which generated ideas are good.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  or enough connections outside of one's area of interest to generate comments about where the idea is considered good/$$$$
- surprisetalk 4y ago
  Wow, thank you for the amazing links. > The bottleneck here is to have the domain knowledge and experience to judge which generated ideas are good. This comment reminds me of my grandpa. I occasionally call him when I have a "brilliant" idea, and he dismembers the idea with simple questions. It's like magic. Even if my idea sits outside his domain knowledge, he has an incredible gift for finding fatal flaws in things. This gift has proven to be lucrative over his lifetime, and I suspect it makes him deeply unhappy. I'd like to acquire this power too, one day.

andjelam990 4y ago

Ask chatGPT :D

naillo 4y ago

I couldn't really parse the header to tell if he authored this essay or if he asked chatgpt to make it up. (If the latter, pretty impressive!)

whstl 4y ago
That's PG. The GPT answer is in the linked tweet.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  there's a gpt arc?

r3trohack3r 4y ago

Lots of truth to this. Just start building. Build for yourself and real people, not imagined profiles of people. The more you build, the more you explore, the more you'll find low-hanging useful ideas. As you encounter them it’ll surprise you that the space is mostly empty. Patio11 tweeted about using ChatGPT to immitate social signaling by rewriting content. I thought that was fun so I started doing it. That grew into Spencer Westford: https://vc.blankenship.io https://vc.blankenship.io That grew into a product: https://persona.ink https://persona.ink That keeps snowballing. Ever since building for myself my notebook of ideas is growing faster than I can keep up.

prmph 4y ago
But can you build products on ChatGPT with the assurance that they will not yank their service from under you in the future, like how Twitter did?
- exevp 4y ago
  This space is getting so much interest that OpenAI will not be the only one providing LLM as a service forever.
  - somethingreen 4y ago
    Like web search in the 90s.
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      until to much tangle, then jump ship for something with less initial entangements
xwowsersx 4y ago
Your careers and privacy policy page links in the footer just link to the home page.
- 4y ago

martin-adams 4y ago

I was inspired by comparing DNA to information and used that as a formula for generating new ideas. https://meda.io/evolve-your-thinking/ https://meda.io/evolve-your-thinking/

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

I think the key is noticing, which implies being a more passive observer. Most people want to find new ideas, which is being active. I've never had success at actively finding ideas but much more successful just living life, listening and the ideas just come.

sargstuff 4y ago
got to get out of oen's comfort zone/familar & figure out how the wierd/strange/unknown fits/matches up with what one is comfortable/familiar with. best done on one's own terms vs. letting life exclusively dictate when the wierd/strange/unknown happens. edit:' does result in lot more blue screen issues.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  It’s not about whose terms you’re living on, it’s about listening. Most people around us are dealing with mundane things that need fixing, just listening to people’s grievances is a great way to ideate. There are individuals who you just end up meeting through life that have great niche problems that require nothing else other than living and listening to attain them. Going out and “pursuing” ideas often leads to some confirmation bias as we’re determined to “find” an idea, rather than sitting back and letting the lightbulb go off when you’re not actively trying. To each their own though.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    but the invariant of checking out/exploring just for the sake of being somewhere but 'here' does present one with way more opportunities to listen/hear.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Have a anomoulus brain, that recombines things that do not belong together (conspiracy theories) but have enough filter to recognize the the bad recombinations. Train said brain with rewards for recombinations, even ridculous ones. Also recongize that inventors would be excellent in story writting when asked to produce a recipe for creativity. So the step by step instructions may be nonsense. Creativity, the far reaching one, not the incremental one, is topological adjunct to insanity. Which is why the radical new things, only get funded in times of desperation. If I were a inventor, i would be heading for ukraine or russia right now.

iamflimflam1 4y ago

My problem isn't a lack of ideas. It's having the bandwidth to do them all. What I really need is the ability to clone myself.

exevp 4y ago
So cloning yourself is the actual idea you should pursue? ;)
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  It’s called hiring?
  - affgrff2 4y ago
    'leveraging your talent by means of labor'
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      no, that's what caused the romans/greeks to avoid making use of steam for labor -- what will the current slaves do?
  - exevp 4y ago
    Psssst, if you put it this way it won't attract VC $$$
    - sargstuff 4y ago
      > ... wont attract VC $$$ because of clone cache coherencey issues?
cableshaft 4y ago
Yep. Or somehow focus more, that would help knock a few more ideas out as well. My backlog of games/puzzles/stories I'd eventually like to get out there might be >100 at this point. Focusing mostly on a bit more of an ambitious game right now, and it's probably still 6 months before I get it into Steam early access (coding in my spare time and energy, which is sparse lately), so everything else is just waiting at this point. But sometimes I get an idea that I need to at least get some playable prototype with index cards, pen, paper, and tokens, at least. Just had another concept pop into my head a couple days ago for a roll-and-write I should at least make a board and write up some rules for before I forget. Waiting for the day when something like ChatGPT can code up a basic but working game based on my description of its mechanisms. Even if it can only handle abstract games on a sqauare or hex grid, that'd still be useful for me.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Real progress in any field or endeavor comes down to about 5% new ideas and creativity, 95% hard work putting those new ideas into practice or building something functional out of them. That 5% is pretty critical however, as without it you're just continuing to redo what's already been done.

valgor 4y ago
This is very true. Ideas are pretty cheap to come by. Implementing, building, teasing them out into a practical scenario is hard.
- gizmo 4y ago
  I don't think it's easy at all. Try to come up with an original plot for a hollywood big budget time travel movie. Take the plot of Edge of Tomorrow. I could never come up with that. Ideas are easy when it's just "Grand theft auto in space", but actual originality? Extremely difficult.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    guess why producers such as spielber and lucas draw from literature -- starwars from joseph campell 'warrior myth' & japanse 'magnificant 7'
  - corobo 4y ago
    On the other hand I ditch a handful of film/TV ideas each week. Many because they'd be crap of course, but the rest because there's no way in this lifetime I'll have the resources to bother thinking about them, never mind have the time to actually write them out. Gotta do regular people work till I die. So glad I was dragged out of the universal energy just to pay rent for 60 years haha. Fuck I wish I could afford to do something arty farty instead. Such is life. I passed my GCSE English literature (end of high school exam in UK) writing a time travel story, haha.
    - sargstuff 4y ago

josht 4y ago

Simply beautiful.

papito 4y ago

When I was in my 20s, I could code for days on straight. I had so much energy and the perception of the bottomless capital of time. Now that I am forty, the cost-benefit analysis is getting tougher. Can I have my big break and retire early? Sure, but the chances of that happening are not that great. Many serial entrepreneurs fail multiple times with nothing to show for it. All I think about now is - when I am on my deathbed, and I look back at my life, will I regret not living it, or that I didn't spend enough time writing code in front of my computer on an off-chance that my idea works out?

TaupeRanger 4y ago
Sounds like burnout. The reason you can spend days on end coding is because you're excited about the thing you're working on. If you're coding something that you don't find exciting or that is just a pipe dream, you'll have thoughts about your deathbed. That's pretty natural.
- sarkhan 4y ago
  Burnout from doing same thing over and over.
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    well, didnt go from cooking meat to oven by not toasting / charing things over & over.
  - papito 4y ago
    Pretty much. Every project I start, it's the same kind of yak-shaving. Database schema, logging, authentication, display of errors, build tools, CI/CD, backend, front-end. Full-time is not even enough for this for one person. There is a ton of CRUD and mind-numbing tasks you have to churn through to get to the interesting parts, and I have been doing the boring parts for 20 years. The goals barely changed, but how we implement things has. New ways to build, new way to deploy, new languages, new frameworks. Just keeping up with it is a struggle. I think my next project, I am just going to go Rails. It's my way of giving up :)

3dsnano 4y ago

i think new ideas come from being naive and possessing the "no-mind" or a childlike sense of wonder. the older i get, the less plastic my brain is and the more depression and other issues start to seep in, get in the way, overcomplicate shit. to be completely free, uninhibited, released from guilt and predjudice. to just think, play, laugh, fart, and yawn. boring days spent looking out the window wondering how crows fart, or what makes zebras sassy. the only limit is our own adult psychosis. we are prisoners of our own minds, locked and shackled by constructs of our own design. too focused on the failures of the past and anxieties of the present to take a moment and b-r-e-a-t-h-e. like who fucking cares about businesses and startups and shit. saas my ass. when you actually stop trying, give up, and stop caring, and truly let go (like in the movie frozen) you can actually go in and through and back out the other side. just learn to get out the way of yourself. that's what im working on, but it's really hard. you think you're supposed to be there and generate brilliance 24/7 but it's not possible. go outside and find a patch of earth where things are growing. get really close to the ground and start looking at it real hard. there's honestly so much stuff there, it's wild. like who knew? wow thats nuts. acorns, rocks and shit. touch the dirt and rub it on your face. mushrooms are literally everywhere. the water in my body was once in a bowl of rice that your great grandma ate at becky's 27th birthday party. just give up just give up stop caring be free

sargstuff 4y ago
or be around long enough that have time/resources to find a soluion to what have wanted a soluion to which noone else seems to want to provide. edit: needs of the many refinements out weight the needs of the few refinements
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Existenceblinks 4y ago
I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs pure functionality.

gizmo 4y ago

Most things are strange, missing, broken for mundane reasons that you can't do much about. The space of new ideas is huge, but almost all new ideas are bad. One strategy I really like is to think of technologies you couldn't build 5 years ago but are just barely possible today. That's where yesterday's bad ideas become today's good ideas. For example, laptops and phones produced 20 years of incremental improvements in li-ion batteries, and suddenly electric cars are "unlocked".

jasmer 4y ago
'almost all ideas are bad' This is not the way to look at it. 'Ideas' are too early to be judged as good or bad. Ideas are fodder, they are there to be moulded into things that are good or bad. Often ideas are just foils to help you think. They are so contextual as well: 'full screen smartphone' was maybe only possible by Jobs, with that much direct and coercive power over engineers. Motorola CEO was not going to pull it off. But Apple did work with motorola to make a 'music phone' as an experiment. I think your note about 'yesterday's ideas' is bang on.
JackFr 4y ago
"With a big enough engine even a brick will fly." - famous quote about the F-4, which captures that much of early airplane development was engine development rather than aeronautics. It's no coincidence that Glenn Curtiss got his start in motorcycles before moving onto aircraft. I think to some extent we are seeing the same thing with the latest AI models, where if you just throw enough parameters and GPU's at a problem, you can get pretty good results. In a way, I see some parallels to aircraft, in that it was important to study birds as the best example of heavier than air flyers early on, but understanding the nuances of the biomechanics of flapping wasn't necessary to surpass them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- htrp 4y ago
  You can get improve the low hanging fruit through brute force ... but there is a lot of low hanging fruit. Model architecture cleverness will eventually outpace more GPU time, but for now the roi on GPU time is higher than clever design.

thenerdhead 4y ago

A willingness to change one’s mind and the cliche Socrates idea that one knows they know nothing always helps too.

sidcool 4y ago

Question. How does one feed content to ChatGPT and get such output?

swyx 4y ago
not an expert, but i think usually one of two ways - either use openai’s finetune api (the right way) or embed all the docs, retrieve them using embedding of the questions, and add just enough of them to the prompt to generate a response (gpt-index or langchain help automate some of this). downside of former is lack of sources, downside of latter is context constraint
- firasd 4y ago
  I'm not sure fine tuning helps with this kinda thing. Because the fine tuning mechanism involves sending the API a bunch of data like {"prompt": "<prompt text>", "completion": "<ideal generated text>"} So I'm not sure how you would feed it PG's essays in this mechanism
sargstuff 4y ago
chatgp isnt limited to spoonfuls, so guessing internet setup / tty typing speed. would tying infinate google search feeds to chatgp crash the internet or just reduce down to 42?

swyx 4y ago

i am genuinely surprised that pg is writing such a short response to a question that seems right down his alley, seemingly very core to his subject matter. how has he not written an authoritative “how to get ideas” post until now?

goshx 4y ago
http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://paulgraham.com/organic.html http://paulgraham.com/organic.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
starkd 4y ago
True. Not sure what he was trying to convey. It was just a paragraph. Not even an essay. So vague it makes you wonder if it was an AI response.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  or attempt to get everyone else to fill in the blanks.

seydor 4y ago

"ChatGPT, gimme 10 startup ideas" TBH, at this point, if there is a problem that hasn't been solved, its because some people tried and failed and found that the problem is not solvable currently. It may be more fruitful to start with something promisingly popular, and improve upon it (e.g. tiktok)

cableshaft 4y ago
This can work. I've done this for some of my game designs. "ChatGPT, I have a game design with this theme and these mechanics. What are some ideas for some new special tiles / cards I can add to the game?" And it'll give me 5-10 ideas, some junk, but a few that are worth exploring and I might not have thought of on my own.
sargstuff 4y ago
> ... problem not solvable currently ... pre or post order traversal of copyright/trademark? perhaps switch heap stacks?
yamtaddle 4y ago
I'm finding the whole AI thing discouraging. Nothing like earlier tech gold-rushes. Every single idea I have starts with "have, or acquire, an absolute shitload of capital"—because you need huge, tagged datasets to move forward with any of them. That means capital, and lots of it. And if you find a way around that you're still burning non-trivial amounts of money on every little experiment (for compute time) all in search of an outcome that may not materialize, i.e. you may never even have anything that you could attempt to sell or raise money with. Seems impossibly expensive to engage in just to fail several times, unless you've got a large pile of capital.
- seydor 4y ago
  It s not like google invented the web, or that they wrote any web pages. Yet they made all the money

marban 4y ago

As someone who worked with Bill Gross* for almost two decades, I'd suggest watching this playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeabOFsFccYCkD9ZUsoI0OC951HNZ0e90 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeabOFsFccYCkD9ZUsoI0... * Overture, Picasa and many more OGs.

orangutanemoji 4y ago
hi, thank you for sharing this! #13 is especially relevant for right now lol

bamazizi 4y ago

One of the oldest saying in entrepreneurship is "need is the mother of invention" It starts with finding the right problem/need and before jumping into to solutioning, the smart person would validate and pitch the problem to as many relevant target customers as possible. Once the problem is validated and tangible root cause is flushed out then it's time to explore the solution and pitching it to the same customer research group for validation before going into building mode. Finding ideas is not hard, but the process is gruelling, frustrating and potentially rewarding. Good luck!

sargstuff 4y ago
yeah, 'news'/documentation/commentary one way to find 'problems' with possible unmet solutions.

interleave 4y ago

I love this. Short and concise, this combines two of my most favorite mindshares. 1. "Hackers and Painters" – I stumbled across in late 2004 at the Technical University of Vienna's (excellent) bookstore. Reading it changed my life. 2. "Ideas are the Enemy of Observations (2012)" – Just Three months ago yamrzou shared this gem of a text. For me, it has become the most meaningful post ever shared on HN. "How to get new ideas" seems to fit snuggly right in the middle :) [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355094

borroka 4y ago
I read the essay and found it reasonably entertaining, but not exactly in a good way. What exactly is the writer trying to accomplish? I didn't get it, but maybe it's about having an "unbiased" look at the world, probably/maybe in the context of inferring causality, not just for lolz. The essay writer's main problem is that they are attempting to infer causality from observation or to find an explanation of the data that justifies or supports their worldview. After all, "why?", "how curious", "I wonder how that happens" are powerful questions and statement that have led to countless inventions, investigations, novels, and pleasurable, although at times frustrating, time. I would recommend something more scientific: observe the world (data/observations), develop a hypothesis that is hard in Platt's sense (meaning it should be discriminating) and test the hypothesis on new data and observations, where new means not used to develop the hypothesis to be tested. And they will see that they should not only collect observations that describe the world, but develop and test hypotheses that can test the mechanisms that lead to those observed facts. Sometimes this is possible, sometimes it is not. But it is always entertaining.

hristov 4y ago

HN should have a [chat GPT] tag for stuff generated by chat GPT. So that I can ignore it. I do not mind reading what paul graham said about how to get new ideas. I do not care what chat GPT said. What chat GPT said may or may not be a good summary of paul grahams thoughts, it may be wrong in an important aspect, etc. If Paul Graham wants to say something, he should say it directly and not hide behind a chat gpt layer.

guptaneil 4y ago
This is PG saying something... he linked to a chatGPT generated response and said he didn't like the response so he wrote his own.
- hristov 4y ago
  PG was a little ambiguous about this. He said "So I asked: What would I have said?" It is not clear whether he asked himself or ChatGPT.
  - mediaman 4y ago
    It appears pretty clear that PG wrote what he actually thought in response to ChatGPT's render of his potential thoughts.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  The thing is, I have to trust that PG wrote the words saying he wrote his own response. What stops ChatGPT from saying those same words? I'm wondering what ways/technologies we'll create to tell if someone actually generates text themselves. Right now, I can feel a rising desire to avoid text-based communication with people, almost a fear of getting catfished by text.
rileymat2 4y ago
That is an interesting concept in itself, if the idea is sound, why does the originator matter?

ignoramous 4y ago

Https mirror: https://archive.is/1YOzz https://archive.is/1YOzz

Existenceblinks 4y ago

His take on non-natural lang for AI (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1612510768674795523 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1612510768674795523) sounds right (bias: because it's also what I was thinking) So I'm not hyped about ChatGPT at all > much of standup comedy is based on this (anomalies) I think it's more about capitalize popular rants though. Not sure most of them are even feasible things to fix. It's an ok essay .. though nothing sparks new idea of thinking about new idea.

sargstuff 4y ago

wonder what the typical painting brush stroke count is between posted writings. edit: perhaps a stippling[1] to stipulation [2] ratio tuppled with relevant/appropriate pruning technique(s) [1] stipplism vs pointillism : https://www.davidaccurso.com/the-art [2] document of concurrence : https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/stipulation

robg 4y ago

Neuroscientist here. Closer I got to the physiology of mental health - sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition - realized it was another fractal for personal and population health. Problem remains navigating regulatory or reimbursement hurdles from wellness into professional care.

Schroedingers2c 4y ago
Would you mind giving a high-level summary of the physiology of mental health (like one paragraph or two, however much you like)? Just the main things that are currently known/believed.
- robg 4y ago
  The autonomic nervous system and the glymphatic nervous system are both things I never really learned about in schools. ANS is taught as a textbook fact of homeostasis, not the constant fight-or-flight reflex that’s on every second of every day and the impacts that causes on health. The glymphatic system has only been discovered in the last 10 years but helps explain why sleep deficits explain cognitive performance decrements, mental health concerns, and age-related declines. And still so much we don’t know like gut-brain health and neuroelectronics as for implants!
  - sargstuff 4y ago
    robg wrote: "... And still so much we don’t know like gut-brain health and neuroelectronics as for implants!" 'What do sonnomes modify when added to olgosaccaride chains ?' answer provided by [1] seems to back that up. [1] https://ask-paulg.up.railway.app/ https://ask-paulg.up.railway.app/
aleks5678 4y ago
100%. Start projects, bet small, grow

goertzen 4y ago

It might not be good at generating original posts, but it’s really good at generating HN comments. Try it! Generate typical HN comments to this PG post [ … ]. - Include both positive and negative comments. - add replies that focus on annoying details that draw attention to the commenter - include fan boy defence of original post - point out obvious exceptions

sargstuff 4y ago
sounds like enumeration of 1st order logic concepts

adversaryIdiot 4y ago

Hi, Idiot here. How can I reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge"? Especially in fields I'm not savvy in?

js8 4y ago
Walk (study and be curious) in a single direction, eventually you'll reach the frontier.
- sargstuff 4y ago
  walking the engineering lattice allows for way more vector intersection considerations.
sargstuff 4y ago
> ... reliably find "Frontiers of Knowledge" ... currently, search engines/chatgpt seem to fill that roll vs more historical library/university. aka search term "frontiers of knowledge" <replace with subject area field(s) unfamiliar with> compared with traditional library/university book writer/teaching assistant note: sed & awk not required to do text replacement, but good editor certainly helps But if patient enough to wait, will eventually show up on internet as a video(s) way before the random monkeys typing away at a type writer get to it [1] [1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

steele 4y ago

1) have capital 2) bet capital on people with ideas 3) exploit their labor 4) declare yourself their muse

sargstuff 4y ago
wonder if that's what einstein was thinking when came up with e = m (c squared). 1) aka two see m is to b without [need for financial] backing. 2) sed e/two/to/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' sed e/m/money/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' sed e/b/be/ | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]' 3) crap -- type face doesnt do this justice --- gotta go re-invent tex for ycombinator 4) ha ha ACME; errr.. sed e/ol/al/ sed g/ol$/lol/ sed g/al$/ai/ sed g/capit/car(cdr(ulate)) / ^Gli movie ref[1] ^G ed ^D [1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigli https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigli
- sargstuff 4y ago
  so, must vi 4/attention

olalonde 4y ago

I think that's why a lot of innovation comes from "outsiders" rather than industry veterans. You are more likely to notice the anomalies with fresh eyes and stop noticing them through time.

david927 4y ago
I agree. Things fall into existing grooves. Your band comes up with a new sound and people say, "That's kind of like Mazzy Star," and now you point it more that way. It falls into that nearby groove instead of continuing on its own. A lot of great sounds came out of the 1960s because there were so few grooves. No one knew what the rules were. Plus, a lot of low hanging fruit stays there because no one looks at it. Everyone is looking at x, y, and z, and there are a thousand variations of those, and they ignore a, b, and c because no one brought it up.
arcturus17 4y ago
Conversely, I have seen that some of the most boring startups that you never hear of, but are killing it, are built by domain experts who know the task they're trying to solve inside and out. Two examples from my own country, Spain: - A man who built a SaaS for local administrations and has about a ~50% share of the market. He spent 30 years working for the Spanish IRS in different positions. I don't know the insider story, but looking at the website he just made a SaaS solution with good UX in a space where UX tends to be atrocious. - RatedPower's CTO. RatedPower makes a software that automates the design of renewable power plants. This guy had been drawing the plans by hand as a renewables engineer, realized a computer would be perfectly equipped to do it, and the competition in the space had grown complacent and barely innovated in years, so he did it. The older I grow the more I get excited by boring ideas. People pitch ideas to me frequently and most of the time I literally end up thinking "not boring enough"!

bryanmgreen 4y ago

Of PG advice/tips/guidance, "Do things that don't scale" I think is still a great starting point and a piece of advice that is a bit less abstract. When you start from that, only the ideas that most people would never consider float to the top. It's worked for me and my business.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

So PG has been automated?

threeseed 4y ago
Some of his more recent political takes have been disappointing to say the least. So would be nice to have a PG bot without all of that.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  What takes?

jarrenae 4y ago

I feel I can speak to this pretty well, over the past year I've launched 130+ projects as part of https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks https://ae.studio/same-day-skunkworks and I've come up with ~250+ ideas. Similar to "look for anomalies" my general rule of thumb is to solve some sort of problem, even if it's rather small. So for example: 1. I pick a topic/product. Let's say: Gmail 2. I look for things that I'd like to be able to do, wish I could do, or consider frustrations I've experienced in the past. - I want to review how many emails I get a day on average, where are my "inbox metrics"? - I want to see threaded messages more clearly, why is the design so opposite a normal chat message? - I want to create emails faster, why do I have such an elaborate editor and format for something that I typically want to use informally? 3. I consider ways to solve said problems - Where are my "inbox metrics"? - Chrome extension to show average emails per day, and graph on a timeline which types of emails I get on certain days. Huge personal data opportunity here. - I want to see threaded messages more clearly - An app that connects to my gmail that intelligently restructures my emails to make them appear like chat messages. It handles all the noise, I just message as I would in any instant messenger. - I want to create emails faster - predictive text templates, quick starters, GPT powered replies, change the "bulky editor" out for a simple text box + clever replies. 4. I then research if there are existing solutions to said problems, and if there are, I either ignore and move on, or consider ways that I could quickly one up their product to make mine the better product in the marketplace. For my specific use-case, I'm trying to build a product per day, so I'll look for speedy ways to solve the problem that I've selected in a novel and agency increasing way. But I think this is a great structure for anyone looking to build a startup or a small side hustle.

hooande 4y ago
250 ideas is incredible. if only 1% of them grow to have ~$1MM in value (or anything close), you should have two or three real winners by now. If only by pure chance. I'm really curious about how that's going. I can't quite suss out what your biggest successes are on your website.
- jarrenae 4y ago
  That's definitely one of the goals that I'm tracking for, though I want to stress that profitability per project isn't the main goal, so some of these projects have no immediate monetization strategy. Additionally, the projects are of a pretty strict scope (6-24 hours of work) for MVP, so we're mostly trying to improve the overall structure. In a year I hope to have 2-6 that are decently profitable, and ideally more that are valued in the open source community. I think a few of the most successful ones so far are: https://ghostlystock.com/ https://ghostlystock.com/ https://www.barbellformac.com/ https://www.barbellformac.com/ https://www.heftysearch.com/ https://www.heftysearch.com/ https://www.oldestsearch.com/ https://www.oldestsearch.com/ combined web traffic is around 5-10k views per month (across the pages you see on the main site) Side note: I'm improving that page to make finding popular ones easier. Some aren't worth more than a quick laugh/glance, while others are really worth using.

samsquire 4y ago

I think that finding gaps as Paul Graham says is a good approach to finding ideas. My approach to finding ideas is to think, write and use words I like to explore creatively and join arbitrary ideas together. Writing and talking IS thinking itself! I even journal all my ideas in the open on GitHub! I share all my ideas with everyone, including startup ideas. Links are on my profile. I LOVE SHARING IDEAS. I enjoy reading people's problems to encounter inspiration for problem solving. I would read Slashdot when growing up to learn about computer issues people were solving. Some words I enjoy are "mesh", "parallel", "multiplex", "multi", "schedule", "marketplace", "tree", "additive", "auto", "query", "traversal", "graph".

ok_dad 4y ago

I don't need ideas! I need some sort of "basic income" that allows me to pursue the ideas I have today while providing for a family.

corobo 4y ago
Right! I think we might be the only two on this site who have more ideas than money haha. How to get new ideas? How do I stop them coming?! My method is to scribble them on a piece of card and chuck that into a tub to get them out the way for now. I know that tub is being emptied with nothing in there seeing the light of day. Simple fact is if I work on my own stuff I don't get to pay rent or eat this month. One day. In the next lifetime if not this.
meowtastic 4y ago
You can already achieve that by taking VC funding, no?
- ok_dad 4y ago
  No, my ideas are not compatible with VC funding, unfortunately, because my ideas only help humanity overcome our energy crisis rather than enrich some select few.
  - angelbar 4y ago
    Use ChatGPT to create online courses... editorialize them and make them online then. Get sufficient income to dedicate to your personal goals

nickdothutton 4y ago

Most of the truly new innovation that happens is between established disciplines. Biology <-> Chemistry, Biochemistry. Statistics <-> [insert field].

specialist 4y ago

And I'm over here trying turn off my endless torrent of new ideas, to better focus on the work in front of me. During the apocalyse, it got really bad. Probably due to isolation and so I didn't have my usual inhibitors. ("Being polite company" turn upkeep.) -- The one strategy I have "to let it go" for my idea factory is to journal. Write however much of the notion down in notebooks that emotionally allows me to mentally stop chewing on it. Sometimes just a one liner. Sometimes long white papers.

topherPedersen 4y ago

I thought GPT wrote what Paul posted! I guess I cannot tell the difference anymore between who's saying what. I actually thought what Paul wrote sounded like a poor imitation of Paul Graham... spooky!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wbharding 4y ago

The "gaps that seem obvious"-notion describes exactly how I feel about pull request tooling these days. The status quo for PR review has very obvious-seeming improvements that have not been pursued (ex: de-emphasizing moved code vs. deleted code, making AI predict what comment will be left before dev starts typing, auto-reviewing trivial changes). If I'm correct that PR review is currently much less efficient than it will be soon, it won't be because I'm smart or this is a new idea. It would just be because our company has spent last five years building code review tools, right place right time. Eventually there was enough infrastructure accumulated (and ambient events unfolding, ie OpenAI) that it became a small step to pass the edge of what PR review meant circa 2022.

kensai 4y ago

Well, actually the ChatGPT essays-fed answer (https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222536344764416/photo/1 https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222536344764416/photo/1) is pretty close to what Paul Graham himself said, although he would not admit it. Real Paul talked about anomalies, and that's eerily close to "accidents and mistakes" in my opinion. :)

paulorlando 4y ago

Love the comments here. I try to get ideas for what is becoming possible (not what's a good or bad idea) by visualizing how drivers of timing work. I wrote a bit about it here: https://startupsunplugged.com/why-now/timing-drivers-visualized/ https://startupsunplugged.com/why-now/timing-drivers-visuali...

Octokiddie 4y ago

> Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. So I asked: What would I have said? It's not entirely clear whether or not the essay was written by GPT because it's not clear who PG asked. Himself or GPT? I'm leaning toward the former, but can't rule out the latter. Maybe that's the point.