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Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new? The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speak

Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new? The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers). The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes) The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board. Gliders already existed - you just couldn't go anywhere with them! You can't just jump off a cliff and glide to China. Google? A more advanced MITS algorithm + inktomi's commodity cluster map-reduce architecture + inktomi's PPC. Indeed, had inktomi doubled down on search instead of their CDN, we might well be talking about inktomi and not Google. General and Special Relativity? Nope - http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-Einstein-had-never-existed-at-all-in-the-world-would-relativity-theory-have-been-found-and-proposed-by-others-by-now http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-Einstein-had-never-existed-at.... There are no really new ideas out there - merely combinations old ones that "hang in the air". There are no new ideas - merely old ones combined in unique ways. Everything is a remix (https://vimeo.com/14912890 https://vimeo.com/14912890).

Retric 14y ago
The first battery is in no way a simple composition of existing ideas. Inventing a useful and novel idea is both hard and rare. The most extreme example might just be the fact Australia had 'modern' humans for 40,000 years without inventing the bow and arrow even though they had spears. And the rest of the world spent those 40,000 years without inventing the returning boomerang even though 'hunting' sticks where found in Europe well over 10,000 years ago.
- Dn_Ab 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery suggests that basic knowledge and early experimentation with the known concept of electricity and a disagreement about whether a dead frog's leg can generate electricity inspired the battery. Volta notes those whose work he relied on.
  - Retric 14y ago
    Your confusing the origin of the term and the reinvention of the battery with the actual first battery ever produced in Mesopotamia if not earlier.
- confluence 14y ago
  As much as it pains me to say this, you are wrong :( If you read the battery's history carefully you'll realize that it's the combination of previous findings in chemistry and electronics. See the other comment with the history link. Just because you cannot conceive the exact intermediaries between single cells and a human being does not mean they didn't exist or that human's appeared from thin air. I repeat: Everything is a remix.
  - Retric 14y ago
    There where battery's in 200BCE making that line of argument moot.
    - confluence 14y ago
      Perhaps but my point still stands.
      - Retric 14y ago
        ? You can say everything is just a pattern using a relatively small set of elementary particles. And that's more or less true, but once you start moving back eventually you will find two hydrogen atoms that where cold enough to stick together for the first time, and guess what that had no prior precedence. So to the line that separates a true multicellular organism from a colony of related cells that assist each other is not completely obvious, but when that colony starts to have specialization that's a 'new' thing. As is the line that separates a smart phone from a normal one. Perhaps you move back the smart phone to include the first phone with an app store, but there is still a line you can draw even if where you draw it comes down the the specific definition you use. PS: Fuzzy definitions does not mean you can't draw the line, just that different people will use a slightly different definitions to draw a slightly different line.
        confluence 14y ago
        Ah but you see my friend that first collision was due to the combination of the four fundamental forces acting on the products of quantum physics. Indeed the only truly original "idea" is the big bang. However there are indications that it too is neither unique nor special and may very well itself be a simulation or a small part of an infinite multiverse.
Confusion 14y ago
Upvoted, but I disagree. I think you are spot on with suggesting actual progress does not happen by inventing anything 'new' from scratch. But I do not agree nothing new is ever invented. Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created. This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology. Of the countless intermediate forms, you cannot point to a single one as a 'completely new' species. However, 1000 generations after an earthquake, the species on both sides of the created ravine have diverged so much they can no longer interbreed. There are now two species where there was one, so a new one must have come into existence, right? Andreessen is completely right in suggesting you don't want to aim to invent something 'completely new' on the spot. Nevertheless, if you can see where something could be going, you could aim for something new say 10 years down the road.
- confluence 14y ago
  Wait long enough and things will appear new and magical. My point is merely that any invention is still the gradual accumulation and unique combination of previous ideas (and so forth). Even if you lack the knowledge about how something came to be it does not change the fact that: Everything is a remix. > Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. > if you can see where something could be going This is kind of a punctuated intellectual evolution. The idea is to "go where the puck is going to be" - which is perfectly reasonable as intelligence is not constrained by natural evolutionary mechanisms. YouTube's Jawed Karim said this exactly when he stated that their success was a "confluence" (see what I did there) of Dot-com bust dark fibre lighting back up, the introduction of cheap DSL broadband, the integration of computers in all American households, the domination of Adobe Flash and the rapidly decreasing cost of storage/computation. He also stated that YouTube was nothing new. It was merely a combination of other technologies which arrived at the right time to be held up by a rich society and progressive technology to become one of the biggest internet properties the world has ever seen. A confluence of events if you will.
  - 14y ago
BadassFractal 14y ago
Sounds very analogous to Steven Johnson's "Adjacent Possible" from his book "Where Good Ideas Come From".
LukeStebbing 14y ago
Special Relativity was in the air in 1906. General Relativity wasn't. The comments on that Quora post make a similar point. Edit: Whoops! It was obviously in the air in 1906, since Einstein published in 1905. :)
- confluence 14y ago
  Perhaps. Perhaps not. Counter factuals are mere speculations. But if I had to make a choice between Einstein being special or the time being special I'd pick the time any day. People are replaceable - situations aren't - no exceptions.
  - crusso 14y ago
    But if I had to make a choice between Einstein being special or the time being special I'd pick the time any day. So if you're hiring someone to fill a role at your organization, I guess you don't need to interview them? Just put a warm body in the chair and the magic will happen? Alternatively, why do you post to HN? The situation is here without you. Why do you consider your thoughts and opinions to be special enough to share in any way?
    - confluence 14y ago
      Just because I said that people weren't special - it does not follow that all people for all jobs are equivalent. If you look at the development of any theory or invention you'll notice that there are multiple origins that converge to a single feature (just like - wait for it - EVOLUTION!). Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place.
      - crusso 14y ago
        Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place. If that were the case, then history would be one steady series of progressions that would look the same from isolated geographic region to isolated geographic region and from culture to culture. The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans. The Australian Aborigines would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Chinese. The Incans would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the British. They didn't. We have records that tell us about the individuals and groups who had ideas that significantly affected the course of history. Your argument is completely contradicted by even a cursory examination of the historical record.
Someone 14y ago
But weren't these things new precisely because the only way to describe them was using already existing words? If the telephone wasn't a new thing, why didn't we have a word for it yet? Also, I think you are undervaluing the worth of that discovering a use for some combination of things that have existed for ages. I think that even can be true if that combination, in hindsight, looks like a simple continuation of existing developments. A cride analogy: in hindsight, many problems appear to be in P, while they actually are NP-complete.
- confluence 14y ago
  Perhaps. However any new idea always has multiple origins. The combination may be novel but there are always others iterating on the same problem at the same time (remember Leibniz and Newton? Or Marconi and Tesla? Or everyone else?). The only reason you think they are unique is because of success bias. You only remember the winners. But just because someone won - it does not follow that they were unique or the best. It just means they just happened to win.
crusso 14y ago
I think you're playing a game of semantics while also disregarding the extraordinary value of ideas that drive arrangement and purpose which thus define created/evolved things as "new". Semantically, who expects that something "new" has to be made from some exotic arrangement of Higgs Bosons doing something in extra dimensions that we had never thought possible? New is whatever people tend to agree on is different enough to call it that. In terms of your disregard of arrangement and purpose, think of it this way: The atoms that make up a human being and give him all the range of thought and emotion that he has can be copied chemically and put in a big jar. That jar of chemicals is cheap and practically valueless. The particular arrangement that makes up a human being is something completely new and different from the sum of its parts. A cynic would say, "But a living human is just a rearrangement of pre-existing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and some other common chemicals."

Retric 14y ago

The first battery is in no way a simple composition of existing ideas. Inventing a useful and novel idea is both hard and rare. The most extreme example might just be the fact Australia had 'modern' humans for 40,000 years without inventing the bow and arrow even though they had spears. And the rest of the world spent those 40,000 years without inventing the returning boomerang even though 'hunting' sticks where found in Europe well over 10,000 years ago.

Dn_Ab 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_battery suggests that basic knowledge and early experimentation with the known concept of electricity and a disagreement about whether a dead frog's leg can generate electricity inspired the battery. Volta notes those whose work he relied on.
- Retric 14y ago
  Your confusing the origin of the term and the reinvention of the battery with the actual first battery ever produced in Mesopotamia if not earlier.
confluence 14y ago
As much as it pains me to say this, you are wrong :( If you read the battery's history carefully you'll realize that it's the combination of previous findings in chemistry and electronics. See the other comment with the history link. Just because you cannot conceive the exact intermediaries between single cells and a human being does not mean they didn't exist or that human's appeared from thin air. I repeat: Everything is a remix.
- Retric 14y ago
  There where battery's in 200BCE making that line of argument moot.
  - confluence 14y ago
    Perhaps but my point still stands.
    - Retric 14y ago
      ? You can say everything is just a pattern using a relatively small set of elementary particles. And that's more or less true, but once you start moving back eventually you will find two hydrogen atoms that where cold enough to stick together for the first time, and guess what that had no prior precedence. So to the line that separates a true multicellular organism from a colony of related cells that assist each other is not completely obvious, but when that colony starts to have specialization that's a 'new' thing. As is the line that separates a smart phone from a normal one. Perhaps you move back the smart phone to include the first phone with an app store, but there is still a line you can draw even if where you draw it comes down the the specific definition you use. PS: Fuzzy definitions does not mean you can't draw the line, just that different people will use a slightly different definitions to draw a slightly different line.
      - confluence 14y ago
        Ah but you see my friend that first collision was due to the combination of the four fundamental forces acting on the products of quantum physics. Indeed the only truly original "idea" is the big bang. However there are indications that it too is neither unique nor special and may very well itself be a simulation or a small part of an infinite multiverse.

Confusion 14y ago

Upvoted, but I disagree. I think you are spot on with suggesting actual progress does not happen by inventing anything 'new' from scratch. But I do not agree nothing new is ever invented. Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created. This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology. Of the countless intermediate forms, you cannot point to a single one as a 'completely new' species. However, 1000 generations after an earthquake, the species on both sides of the created ravine have diverged so much they can no longer interbreed. There are now two species where there was one, so a new one must have come into existence, right? Andreessen is completely right in suggesting you don't want to aim to invent something 'completely new' on the spot. Nevertheless, if you can see where something could be going, you could aim for something new say 10 years down the road.

confluence 14y ago
Wait long enough and things will appear new and magical. My point is merely that any invention is still the gradual accumulation and unique combination of previous ideas (and so forth). Even if you lack the knowledge about how something came to be it does not change the fact that: Everything is a remix. > Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. > if you can see where something could be going This is kind of a punctuated intellectual evolution. The idea is to "go where the puck is going to be" - which is perfectly reasonable as intelligence is not constrained by natural evolutionary mechanisms. YouTube's Jawed Karim said this exactly when he stated that their success was a "confluence" (see what I did there) of Dot-com bust dark fibre lighting back up, the introduction of cheap DSL broadband, the integration of computers in all American households, the domination of Adobe Flash and the rapidly decreasing cost of storage/computation. He also stated that YouTube was nothing new. It was merely a combination of other technologies which arrived at the right time to be held up by a rich society and progressive technology to become one of the biggest internet properties the world has ever seen. A confluence of events if you will.
- 14y ago

BadassFractal 14y ago

Sounds very analogous to Steven Johnson's "Adjacent Possible" from his book "Where Good Ideas Come From".

LukeStebbing 14y ago

Special Relativity was in the air in 1906. General Relativity wasn't. The comments on that Quora post make a similar point. Edit: Whoops! It was obviously in the air in 1906, since Einstein published in 1905. :)

confluence 14y ago
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Counter factuals are mere speculations. But if I had to make a choice between Einstein being special or the time being special I'd pick the time any day. People are replaceable - situations aren't - no exceptions.
- crusso 14y ago
  But if I had to make a choice between Einstein being special or the time being special I'd pick the time any day. So if you're hiring someone to fill a role at your organization, I guess you don't need to interview them? Just put a warm body in the chair and the magic will happen? Alternatively, why do you post to HN? The situation is here without you. Why do you consider your thoughts and opinions to be special enough to share in any way?
  - confluence 14y ago
    Just because I said that people weren't special - it does not follow that all people for all jobs are equivalent. If you look at the development of any theory or invention you'll notice that there are multiple origins that converge to a single feature (just like - wait for it - EVOLUTION!). Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place.
    - crusso 14y ago
      Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place. If that were the case, then history would be one steady series of progressions that would look the same from isolated geographic region to isolated geographic region and from culture to culture. The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans. The Australian Aborigines would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Chinese. The Incans would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the British. They didn't. We have records that tell us about the individuals and groups who had ideas that significantly affected the course of history. Your argument is completely contradicted by even a cursory examination of the historical record.

Someone 14y ago

But weren't these things new precisely because the only way to describe them was using already existing words? If the telephone wasn't a new thing, why didn't we have a word for it yet? Also, I think you are undervaluing the worth of that discovering a use for some combination of things that have existed for ages. I think that even can be true if that combination, in hindsight, looks like a simple continuation of existing developments. A cride analogy: in hindsight, many problems appear to be in P, while they actually are NP-complete.

confluence 14y ago
Perhaps. However any new idea always has multiple origins. The combination may be novel but there are always others iterating on the same problem at the same time (remember Leibniz and Newton? Or Marconi and Tesla? Or everyone else?). The only reason you think they are unique is because of success bias. You only remember the winners. But just because someone won - it does not follow that they were unique or the best. It just means they just happened to win.

crusso 14y ago

I think you're playing a game of semantics while also disregarding the extraordinary value of ideas that drive arrangement and purpose which thus define created/evolved things as "new". Semantically, who expects that something "new" has to be made from some exotic arrangement of Higgs Bosons doing something in extra dimensions that we had never thought possible? New is whatever people tend to agree on is different enough to call it that. In terms of your disregard of arrangement and purpose, think of it this way: The atoms that make up a human being and give him all the range of thought and emotion that he has can be copied chemically and put in a big jar. That jar of chemicals is cheap and practically valueless. The particular arrangement that makes up a human being is something completely new and different from the sum of its parts. A cynic would say, "But a living human is just a rearrangement of pre-existing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and some other common chemicals."