7 ms·

I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it.

I think people take knowledge for granted. It’s really easy to understand something. It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it.

raincole 4y ago
> Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally. Answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s
- geoduck14 4y ago
  You juts made me watch a 4 minute video on ballpoint pens. Thanks.
- pier25 4y ago
  Woah suer interesting video. Thanks for sharing.
- syntaxing 4y ago
  Definitely agree, even our modern toilet we use everyday is pretty crazy to wrap your head around
  - irrational 4y ago
    You might be using the toilet wrong.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      That was my thought when he said "wrap your head around." GMTA.
    - maximus-decimus 4y ago
      Maybe they that a Japanese toilet that washes your butthole while playing the Maccarena.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    I was hit by that thought last week whilst changing a seal in a Geberit (concealed cistern toilet). The engineering that has gone in to making a mechanism that will work under water for decades , and can be entirely disassembled and reassembled through an opening the size of the flush panel, is pretty incredible
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    And when you really get to details it is even more complex. The bowl is actually hollow in parts. And then consider correctly and effectively routing the water. And then mass producing complex 3d object and essentially perfectly glazing it.
    - mcguire 4y ago
      Oh, heck, it's made of porcelain. Check out the history of that.
- dogma1138 4y ago
  The amount of industrial engineering required to make a ballpoint pen is quite substantial the click mechanism isn’t the impressive part making balls which are dimensionally accurate to 0.1 micrometer is the challenging part. Without that level of accuracy you can’t make a ballpoint pen and without it there is no real advantage of making the click mechanism. And making these balls is very challenging even today. These are often still used as an example for manufacturing deficiencies in places like China as whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers.
  - Qem 4y ago
    > whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers. They fixed this problem by 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18/finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
    - rvba 4y ago
      I wonder if they reinvented it, bought the research or used spies. The article only says that it took some research facility 5 years.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Hmm, there are retractable fountain pens like the Namiki Vanishing Point, and even Sharpies that are retractable. I think it'd be fair to say the clicky ballpoints represent an excellent combination of cheapness and usefulness, but they don't have a monopoly on retractable points.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  And all that engineering happened after someone realized that such a thing would be useful. That classic HN comment about how Dropbox wasn't useful because rsync exists - that's more or less the standard response to innovation. "The thing you've created reduces pain points I'm so used to that I no longer see them". Certain inventions only get made because of really determined, persnickety individuals who will not accept the pain point.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    That's the point at which it takes real vision and perseverence to see it through. It's fascinating the lack of imagination people have for a certain level of innovation. They can see the benefit of small incremental changes pretty well but large disruptive changes fall off a cliff very quickly into a chasm of sceptism - "I'm sure there is something wrong with this idea but I can't think of the problems so I will make up some reasons why it won't work". I feel like this sceptical reaction itself must have an evolutionary basis as it seems highly instinctive. You can look at the current technological changes in play to day and think about them through this lens and it's quite interesting (AI, obviously, then AR/VR/metaverse etc).
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  Wow I must've spent too long playing with pens as a kid, particularly the pens that didn't actually rotate and click right.
defrost 4y ago
> But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. Unless you're Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Or Darwin and Wallace. Which suggests these ideas might be a product of their zeitgeist with a number of contempories bording on being the first to publish.
- harvey9 4y ago
  So why didn't that occur much earlier in history?
  - Haga 4y ago
    [dead]
  - anovikov 4y ago
    Because there was no way to make money on it. Before the Age of Discovery, there wasn't much money in being able to find out one's coordinates in the open sea - and Age of Discovery only started because a long, grinding war to liberate Spain and Portugal from Muslims had to finish first to provide both economic base for seafaring, and safety of sailing too. And maths mainly developed for the goal of improving navigation.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      I don't think either Newton or Leibniz was primarily motivated by money. Far from it, in fact.
      - Qem 4y ago
        IIRC the money motivation for Newton made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful if applied to calculus and physics.
        jhanschoo 4y ago
        > made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful You wouldn't have known in Newton's time if alchemical transmutation into gold worked. Certainly, you knew then that some substances could be transformed into other substances, and it was such research that developed into modern high-school chemistry.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marginalia_nu 4y ago
It would be fairly easy to come up with calculus reasoning about mathematics in the way we do today, because the tools we're using to do maths is highly conducive to calculus in particular. I wouldn't be surprised if someone kid were to intuit a bunch of major conclusions from calculus by just looking at algebra and graphs of plots. If you start with pre-newtonian mathematics, arriving at calculus would indeed be quite some feat. But then, a lot of Newton and his contemporaries were reasoning about mathematics that's fairly reminiscent of Euclid (and very alien to modern readers).
lenkite 4y ago
More like Newton's knowledge and proofs survived. The folks who did before - they didn't have the printing press.
- roywiggins 4y ago
  Neither did Euclid and his stuff survived. There are early not-quite-calculus ideas in Aristotle, which lends even more weight to thinking that they didn't get all the way there- if they had, and the Aristotelian stuff survived, why didn't the fully-worked-out stuff survive?
  - lenkite 4y ago
    Yes, but the Romans respected Euclid. Invaders in the east were rarely so gentle - they usually had a habit of suppressing knowledge and burning libraries. (Done by both Islamic and Christian invaders). Colonialism was the final death knell for many works. Calculus was discovered by several mathematicians in India - unfortunately little survives of several works. https://iks.iitgn.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Development-of-Calculus-in-India-K-Ramasubramanian-MD-Srinivas-2010.pdf https://iks.iitgn.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Developme.... Militant societies successfully preserved their knowledge and kickstarted their industrial revolution. (Relatively) Non militant societies did not and their knowledge was made extinct. But if you had ten thousand copies of works floating around - it could have survived.
    - throwaway6734 4y ago
      What are some examples of non-militant societies?
      - lenkite 4y ago
        Buddhist society was quite non-violent. So were the Jains in India. (Unsure why I am being downvoted though). Both were based on strictly following Ahimsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
thro1 4y ago
I can confirm. Regarding SPA in early days (before XMLHttpRequest): no one is doing that way, we can't find another developer thinking like that to help you, are you sure?.. (and browsers bugs)
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Are you talking about iFrameHttpRequest?
  - thro1 3y ago
    if(nn4)document.layers[dst].src=url; if(ie4)frames[buf].document.location=url; .. if(ie4)document.all[dst].innerHTML=frames[buf].document.body.innerHTML I prototyped in Netscape Navigator.. had to fix it for IE. Couldn't it be <a href="part.htm" target="dst"> just from the beginning ? - but what you got is AJAX, JS addictions and no caching.
legitimayzer 4y ago
> It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. can confirm, I have been trying to do/understand something but since I ain't seen it, I cannot just tell you what it is. less stubborn people (and people with other's depending on them) would have given up already.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Newton had a problem he wanted to solve, calculus is a byproduct, consistent with almost all other knowledge we have. I think provable academics for academics sake is far more recent than Newton.
ashwagary 4y ago
>I think people take knowledge for granted. Another problem is people assume prevailing discovery narratives are truthful. It's harder to do that in the sciences because of the breadcrumbs left behind. >it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. Newton wasn't first, Calculus was known in India almost 1000 years earlier and it wouldn't be surprising if Newton was a student of work gathered from parts of the world that were illegal to credit with such discoveries at the time.
- dannyobrien 4y ago
  Illegal in what way?
  - ashwagary 4y ago
    The European Doctrine of Christian Discovery applied to all property including intellectual property that was "discovered" in the rest of the world. Non-christian origins could not be recognized by western institutions until very recently. Generally the first European christian to relay existing information from the non-christian world was credited with invention or discovery. In many cases, people still credited with discovery didn't fully understand the source material and failed at relaying it accurately.
- nearbuy 4y ago
  I think you have your dates confused, as the Kerala school was only a few hundred years before Newton, and pretending that what was discovered in India is the same as what Newton discovered is misleading. If we're crediting whoever first made theorems about infinite sums or derivatives to be the inventor of calculus, then calculus also predates Newton in Europe. A lot of people contributed theorems over the centuries that would now be considered part of calculus. Developing a mathematical framework like calculus is more of a gradual and continuous building of knowledge than a single event. There's a reason Leibniz and Newton happened to independently create calculus at the same time.

raincole 4y ago

> Take Calculus for example. It’s easy to understand and learn the basics of it (a ton of people do in HS, even earlier in some countries). But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. My personal favorite example is clip pens. It's such a simple tool. There is no electricity, steam power or even gears in it. But I think very few people can come up with how it works internally. Answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhVw-MHGv4s

geoduck14 4y ago
You juts made me watch a 4 minute video on ballpoint pens. Thanks.
pier25 4y ago
Woah suer interesting video. Thanks for sharing.
syntaxing 4y ago
Definitely agree, even our modern toilet we use everyday is pretty crazy to wrap your head around
- irrational 4y ago
  You might be using the toilet wrong.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    That was my thought when he said "wrap your head around." GMTA.
  - maximus-decimus 4y ago
    Maybe they that a Japanese toilet that washes your butthole while playing the Maccarena.
- namdnay 4y ago
  I was hit by that thought last week whilst changing a seal in a Geberit (concealed cistern toilet). The engineering that has gone in to making a mechanism that will work under water for decades , and can be entirely disassembled and reassembled through an opening the size of the flush panel, is pretty incredible
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And when you really get to details it is even more complex. The bowl is actually hollow in parts. And then consider correctly and effectively routing the water. And then mass producing complex 3d object and essentially perfectly glazing it.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    Oh, heck, it's made of porcelain. Check out the history of that.
dogma1138 4y ago
The amount of industrial engineering required to make a ballpoint pen is quite substantial the click mechanism isn’t the impressive part making balls which are dimensionally accurate to 0.1 micrometer is the challenging part. Without that level of accuracy you can’t make a ballpoint pen and without it there is no real advantage of making the click mechanism. And making these balls is very challenging even today. These are often still used as an example for manufacturing deficiencies in places like China as whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers.
- Qem 4y ago
  > whilst they tend to make the bulk of the ballpoint pens they still have to buy the balls form German and Swiss manufacturers. They fixed this problem by 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18/finally-china-manufactures-a-ballpoint-pen-all-by-itself/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...
  - rvba 4y ago
    I wonder if they reinvented it, bought the research or used spies. The article only says that it took some research facility 5 years.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Hmm, there are retractable fountain pens like the Namiki Vanishing Point, and even Sharpies that are retractable. I think it'd be fair to say the clicky ballpoints represent an excellent combination of cheapness and usefulness, but they don't have a monopoly on retractable points.
kevinmchugh 4y ago
And all that engineering happened after someone realized that such a thing would be useful. That classic HN comment about how Dropbox wasn't useful because rsync exists - that's more or less the standard response to innovation. "The thing you've created reduces pain points I'm so used to that I no longer see them". Certain inventions only get made because of really determined, persnickety individuals who will not accept the pain point.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  That's the point at which it takes real vision and perseverence to see it through. It's fascinating the lack of imagination people have for a certain level of innovation. They can see the benefit of small incremental changes pretty well but large disruptive changes fall off a cliff very quickly into a chasm of sceptism - "I'm sure there is something wrong with this idea but I can't think of the problems so I will make up some reasons why it won't work". I feel like this sceptical reaction itself must have an evolutionary basis as it seems highly instinctive. You can look at the current technological changes in play to day and think about them through this lens and it's quite interesting (AI, obviously, then AR/VR/metaverse etc).
nyanpasu64 4y ago
Wow I must've spent too long playing with pens as a kid, particularly the pens that didn't actually rotate and click right.

defrost 4y ago

> But it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. Unless you're Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Or Darwin and Wallace. Which suggests these ideas might be a product of their zeitgeist with a number of contempories bording on being the first to publish.

harvey9 4y ago
So why didn't that occur much earlier in history?
- Haga 4y ago
  [dead]
- anovikov 4y ago
  Because there was no way to make money on it. Before the Age of Discovery, there wasn't much money in being able to find out one's coordinates in the open sea - and Age of Discovery only started because a long, grinding war to liberate Spain and Portugal from Muslims had to finish first to provide both economic base for seafaring, and safety of sailing too. And maths mainly developed for the goal of improving navigation.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    I don't think either Newton or Leibniz was primarily motivated by money. Far from it, in fact.
    - Qem 4y ago
      IIRC the money motivation for Newton made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful if applied to calculus and physics.
      - jhanschoo 4y ago
        > made him pursue alchemy, that didn't lead anywhere and just wasted time that would be more fruitful You wouldn't have known in Newton's time if alchemical transmutation into gold worked. Certainly, you knew then that some substances could be transformed into other substances, and it was such research that developed into modern high-school chemistry.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marginalia_nu 4y ago

It would be fairly easy to come up with calculus reasoning about mathematics in the way we do today, because the tools we're using to do maths is highly conducive to calculus in particular. I wouldn't be surprised if someone kid were to intuit a bunch of major conclusions from calculus by just looking at algebra and graphs of plots. If you start with pre-newtonian mathematics, arriving at calculus would indeed be quite some feat. But then, a lot of Newton and his contemporaries were reasoning about mathematics that's fairly reminiscent of Euclid (and very alien to modern readers).

lenkite 4y ago

More like Newton's knowledge and proofs survived. The folks who did before - they didn't have the printing press.

roywiggins 4y ago
Neither did Euclid and his stuff survived. There are early not-quite-calculus ideas in Aristotle, which lends even more weight to thinking that they didn't get all the way there- if they had, and the Aristotelian stuff survived, why didn't the fully-worked-out stuff survive?
- lenkite 4y ago
  Yes, but the Romans respected Euclid. Invaders in the east were rarely so gentle - they usually had a habit of suppressing knowledge and burning libraries. (Done by both Islamic and Christian invaders). Colonialism was the final death knell for many works. Calculus was discovered by several mathematicians in India - unfortunately little survives of several works. https://iks.iitgn.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Development-of-Calculus-in-India-K-Ramasubramanian-MD-Srinivas-2010.pdf https://iks.iitgn.ac.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Developme.... Militant societies successfully preserved their knowledge and kickstarted their industrial revolution. (Relatively) Non militant societies did not and their knowledge was made extinct. But if you had ten thousand copies of works floating around - it could have survived.
  - throwaway6734 4y ago
    What are some examples of non-militant societies?
    - lenkite 4y ago
      Buddhist society was quite non-violent. So were the Jains in India. (Unsure why I am being downvoted though). Both were based on strictly following Ahimsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa

thro1 4y ago

I can confirm. Regarding SPA in early days (before XMLHttpRequest): no one is doing that way, we can't find another developer thinking like that to help you, are you sure?.. (and browsers bugs)

Aeolun 4y ago
Are you talking about iFrameHttpRequest?
- thro1 3y ago
  if(nn4)document.layers[dst].src=url; if(ie4)frames[buf].document.location=url; .. if(ie4)document.all[dst].innerHTML=frames[buf].document.body.innerHTML I prototyped in Netscape Navigator.. had to fix it for IE. Couldn't it be <a href="part.htm" target="dst"> just from the beginning ? - but what you got is AJAX, JS addictions and no caching.

legitimayzer 4y ago

> It’s really hard to be the first person to think of something and prove it. can confirm, I have been trying to do/understand something but since I ain't seen it, I cannot just tell you what it is. less stubborn people (and people with other's depending on them) would have given up already.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Newton had a problem he wanted to solve, calculus is a byproduct, consistent with almost all other knowledge we have. I think provable academics for academics sake is far more recent than Newton.

ashwagary 4y ago

>I think people take knowledge for granted. Another problem is people assume prevailing discovery narratives are truthful. It's harder to do that in the sciences because of the breadcrumbs left behind. >it is extremely hard to be Newton and think about it first and prove it. Newton wasn't first, Calculus was known in India almost 1000 years earlier and it wouldn't be surprising if Newton was a student of work gathered from parts of the world that were illegal to credit with such discoveries at the time.

dannyobrien 4y ago
Illegal in what way?
- ashwagary 4y ago
  The European Doctrine of Christian Discovery applied to all property including intellectual property that was "discovered" in the rest of the world. Non-christian origins could not be recognized by western institutions until very recently. Generally the first European christian to relay existing information from the non-christian world was credited with invention or discovery. In many cases, people still credited with discovery didn't fully understand the source material and failed at relaying it accurately.
nearbuy 4y ago
I think you have your dates confused, as the Kerala school was only a few hundred years before Newton, and pretending that what was discovered in India is the same as what Newton discovered is misleading. If we're crediting whoever first made theorems about infinite sums or derivatives to be the inventor of calculus, then calculus also predates Newton in Europe. A lot of people contributed theorems over the centuries that would now be considered part of calculus. Developing a mathematical framework like calculus is more of a gradual and continuous building of knowledge than a single event. There's a reason Leibniz and Newton happened to independently create calculus at the same time.