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It seems this argument is based on a misunderstanding of Paul Graham's essay. > that the biggest opportunities for revolution often sound like the craziest ide

It seems this argument is based on a misunderstanding of Paul Graham's essay. > that the biggest opportunities for revolution often sound like the craziest ideas at first. Graham points out the flawed reasoning in investors’ so often shying away from projects trying to pull off these sorts of major revolutions, but Y Combinator itself mostly gravitates toward startups making relatively small, iterative progress on existing idea spaces Graham is pointing out how frightening these startup ideas are because they are existing markets ripe for some innovation. Eg. search, universities, compilers.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago
And just how are compilers a business space in which innovation should take place? Most major compilers activity has long-since been displaced into open-source and academia.
- daeken 15y ago
  If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money at you. Edit: Also, compilers to move code from mainframes to commodity servers, recompilers to switch architectures (e.g. Rosetta by Transitive), etc are big business. Are they going to make you a billionaire? Probably not. Can you make a couple million and a great ROI? Absolutely.
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    >If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money at you. I speak with some fair knowledge of compilers, PLs, runtime systems, and OSs when I say: massive companies will also throw money at me if I can turn lead into gold. A compiler cannot transform an inherently stateful, sequential program into an inherently parallel program that can be easily parallelized-the-hell-out-of. This is why there has been actual interest in shifting over to functional programming among those who need lots and lots of concurrency. There do exist systems that will, for example, guarantee the determinism of threaded applications -- making them more predictable and debuggable. But DThreads still won't take a fold and turn it into a map.
    - rogerbinns 15y ago
      Proebsting has shown that compilers double performance about every 18 years - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/ Given enough time and memory more things are possible. Heck you could probably add speculative execution to many programs for more speedup. You are right in that the easy stuff has already been done, but that doesn't mean the hard stuff can't be done - just that it is hard. The good news is that people are prepared to pay for hard stuff.
      - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
        1) See my other post, where I list out how you would build a Sufficiently Smart Compiler for parallelizing preexisting code. 2) You've gone into the research world, which concedes my original point about it not being a viable business ;-).
        rogerbinns 15y ago
        WRT to 1) you left out profiled feedback which would help with some of the analysis choices. Something else that can be done is to compile multiple versions of things and makes choices/switch things around according to circumstances at runtime (as pretty much every modern JIT does). We also still have a "waste not" mentality which is why I mentioned speculative execution which inherently wastes CPU in order to get quicker answers. 2) Not really. You've used current thinking to define your business model. Think disruptive instead. And worst case you'd end up spending Ycombinator money and end up with a better CV. Some thoughts: It is possible now for a compiler to chew through terabytes of open source code to build up an information bank. Internal representation of code can be centrally submitted to see if anything matches and provides more compilation hints. Runtime profiling could submit back big O information. An organisation could run all the possibilities Seti-at-home style. ie rather than the compiler having to make more intelligent choices, it can just try all the choices.
        eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    OK, my second response is the following (copypasta'd out of the email I just sent to Paul Graham on the very subject of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler being a business prospect... ever): http://marmoach.blogspot.com/2012/03/this-is-why-you-cant-build-sufficiently.html http://marmoach.blogspot.com/2012/03/this-is-why-you-cant-bu...

eli_gottlieb 15y ago

And just how are compilers a business space in which innovation should take place? Most major compilers activity has long-since been displaced into open-source and academia.

daeken 15y ago
If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money at you. Edit: Also, compilers to move code from mainframes to commodity servers, recompilers to switch architectures (e.g. Rosetta by Transitive), etc are big business. Are they going to make you a billionaire? Probably not. Can you make a couple million and a great ROI? Absolutely.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  >If you develop a compiler that, say, parallelizes the hell out of code, you'll have a group of massive companies breaking down your door and throwing money at you. I speak with some fair knowledge of compilers, PLs, runtime systems, and OSs when I say: massive companies will also throw money at me if I can turn lead into gold. A compiler cannot transform an inherently stateful, sequential program into an inherently parallel program that can be easily parallelized-the-hell-out-of. This is why there has been actual interest in shifting over to functional programming among those who need lots and lots of concurrency. There do exist systems that will, for example, guarantee the determinism of threaded applications -- making them more predictable and debuggable. But DThreads still won't take a fold and turn it into a map.
  - rogerbinns 15y ago
    Proebsting has shown that compilers double performance about every 18 years - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/ Given enough time and memory more things are possible. Heck you could probably add speculative execution to many programs for more speedup. You are right in that the easy stuff has already been done, but that doesn't mean the hard stuff can't be done - just that it is hard. The good news is that people are prepared to pay for hard stuff.
    - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
      1) See my other post, where I list out how you would build a Sufficiently Smart Compiler for parallelizing preexisting code. 2) You've gone into the research world, which concedes my original point about it not being a viable business ;-).
      - rogerbinns 15y ago
        WRT to 1) you left out profiled feedback which would help with some of the analysis choices. Something else that can be done is to compile multiple versions of things and makes choices/switch things around according to circumstances at runtime (as pretty much every modern JIT does). We also still have a "waste not" mentality which is why I mentioned speculative execution which inherently wastes CPU in order to get quicker answers. 2) Not really. You've used current thinking to define your business model. Think disruptive instead. And worst case you'd end up spending Ycombinator money and end up with a better CV. Some thoughts: It is possible now for a compiler to chew through terabytes of open source code to build up an information bank. Internal representation of code can be centrally submitted to see if anything matches and provides more compilation hints. Runtime profiling could submit back big O information. An organisation could run all the possibilities Seti-at-home style. ie rather than the compiler having to make more intelligent choices, it can just try all the choices.
        eli_gottlieb 15y ago
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  OK, my second response is the following (copypasta'd out of the email I just sent to Paul Graham on the very subject of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler being a business prospect... ever): http://marmoach.blogspot.com/2012/03/this-is-why-you-cant-build-sufficiently.html http://marmoach.blogspot.com/2012/03/this-is-why-you-cant-bu...