7 ms·

You Are Not Late

268 points by mbrubeck 12y ago

designservice 12y ago
Yes! We need More brains to focus on solving real problems: clean water, education, internet access, transparency, and less "Uber for X", candycrush, Rovios, facevook, etcetera.
johnm111888 12y ago
lower barriers --> more competition
pervycreeper 12y ago
If only I had the benefit of the perspective that a "2044 greybeard" presumably will have.
- CmonDev 12y ago
  At least don't write the code in an assembly of your times :).
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting. :) What you want to avoid is writing 2014 COBOL, and that's what typical enterprise Java is. There'll be jobs maintaining that stuff for a while... But little mobility into anything more exciting.
    - CmonDev 12y ago
      > Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting. Yeah, all ~100 of them. Better normal Java than it's scripting counterpart though (the assembly of the web).
adamnemecek 12y ago
I've never heard anyone complain that they were too late to build anything cool.
nugget 12y ago
February 2004 I was a third year CS student in Boston. I remember complaining to a friend of mine that we had missed the boat - Yahoo, Amazon, etc - the web had matured without us and the window of opportunity was closed. If only we had been born 5 years earlier! As fate would have it, that was also the month I signed up for an account on a tiny site called thefacebook.com. Domains. Google. Facebook. Pinterest. Uber. Bitcoins. It's so easy to feel like you JUST missed the wave. While you look back with anxiety at the wave you missed, you increase your odds of missing the next wave headed straight towards you. And there are always more waves. I had to learn this the hard way, after many missed waves and a lot of anxiety. So now I do what the article says: try to remind myself that the web's best days are ahead of it and there is likely more opportunity now - today! - than ever before. Calm down, take a deep breath and look to the future. Whether it's true or not, who knows, I guess time will tell, but it definitely helps keep me sane.
- platz 12y ago
  And how many get stuck on "false waves", I.e. survivorship bias. Sure, there are more waves, but the ability to spot a wave is incredibly difficult. Why not just stop everything you're doing now and invest in ethereum? What would be really interesting is to calculate some kind of first derivative of a wave so as to know what the optimal risk/reward tradeoff is. Or perhaps to know what the density of false to true waves are. For example I imagine everyone knew about the potential opportunities during the gold rush. What can we say about the potential opportunities now?
- deleted 12y ago
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eps 12y ago
Hindsight is always 20/20. If you'd only knew what you should be paying attention to now.
austenallred 12y ago
The Internet is not just a technical innovation; the Internet is perhaps the greatest social innovation of all-time. For the first time in human history almost everyone on earth is instantly connected. This changes everything. Sometimes I'll just sit and think for hours about how different this makes the world we live in. We're playing by a completely new set of rules -- we're playing a completely new game, and even the most innovative people on earth are just barely starting to make sense of it all. I think we're barely even scratching the surface of what's possible and what is to come. It's not as obvious as you would think - consider any of the great companies of the past 10 or so years. If they had never been founded, it probably wouldn't be painfully obvious that we need them. It only becomes obvious in retrospect that we were actually in dire need the whole time. Or look around the room you're in. What will change under the circumstances where everyone is instantly connected to each other and simultaneously to the largest data store the world has ever none? I can imagine ways that almost everything in the room I'm in now will be different. Most won't be good startup ideas, but I would venture a guess that some would. We're all treading on very fresh ground. This is only the beginning.
- ksrm 12y ago
  "almost everyone on Earth"? Not even close: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
- smaddali 12y ago
  very true. PG articulates the "obviuosness" in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Founders tend to live in future and build the missing things. Hence these holes appear obvious to them.
Animats 12y ago
I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this. None of this generated much money. (Fortunately I also did one of Autodesk's early products, and got pre-IPO stock because they couldn't afford to pay me. I also did the first ragdoll physics engine that worked, and made money off of that.) In some ways, it's harder now, because there are so many people doing stuff in computing. In the 1980s, the number of people who knew how to make a big program work was quite small. Now everybody can do that. The few people who knew anything about AI had been to Stanford, MIT, or CMU. Now everybody serious takes machine learning class, and you can download good code for it. There's plenty of opportunity to make money out there, but much of what people are working on is, well, pretty banal. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." - Jeffery Hammerbacher, Facebook. Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads. Computing has become so cheap that you can now undercut "free with ads" on price. Think of a social network as a package like Wordpress - host it anywhere, it talks to everybody else, and it just works. The authentication and spam problems are tough - solve them. There have been a few attempts at federated social networks, such as Diaspora, but the people behind them have no clue how to make them usable or popular. "Ello" is making progress on popularity, but their UI sucks and it doesn't do much. Fix all that. If you want to do socially useful hardware, look into handheld medical devices. The medical industry tends toward big, heavy equipment designed by doctors. Dean Kamen has made a lot of money downsizing some rather clunky medical devices. Also, the UIs of systems used by doctors for medical records are awful. Doctors used to dictate medical notes. Now they have to type them, worst case on touchscreens. Make that work with voice recognition that understands not only medical terminology, but has access to the patient record for context. Another possible area - the paperless police car. Cops hate doing paperwork. There's also a movement to make cops carry cameras. Come up with a system which takes the cop's video and audio, and fills in all the info a cop needs to book somebody. Tie the collected video and audio to that for later review if necessary. It would both help to keep cops honest and let them focus on doing their job instead of their paperwork. So there are a few technically challenging things to do. Quit trying to find the next "Yo". That's like hoping to win the lottery.
javipas 12y ago
That post was published by Kevin Kelly too on Medium a few days sooner. I wonder why he published it first there :o https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142 https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142
- bojo 12y ago
  I knew I had read this article before, but couldn't remember where. Thanks.
dakrisht 12y ago
Fantastic. It's never too late to build or start something. I here a lot of this from 30+ year old entrepreneurs ("but he's 23 fresh out of school" or "am I too old?" - NO! Not even close. The 23 year old with the traction and venture money is a) extremely lucky and b) doesn't know half of what you know!) An inspiring little feel good article here for those 16 hour days when you just hit your head against the wall. Or for when you need a little inspiration. Author is right - even in 2025 so many products will have been invented today and tomorrow. Does anyone really think Snapchat will be around in 10 years? The Internet is still in its infancy. Sure, we can communicate with multimedia and watch streaming video but think of the myriad of problems and challenges facing modern day society? Endless and endless opportunity. From biotech, hardware and sensors, energy, communication, health care, VR, AI, machine learning, etc. - all very, very early problems to work on. Each of which will create dozens of profitable and dynamic technology companies. We have to work on the future and use the amazing platforms currently in place to make something that lasts and makes an impact. I remember 5 years ago what a royal pita it was to setup a physical webserver + app server. Nightmare. Now, it happens in a click. The platforms are getting better in better for entrepreneurs to build on top of them. This is exciting and should be exciting for anyone and everyone who has a passion to build something. And the future is not 20 chat apps, 20 youtube's, or 20 e-commerce sites selling subscription underwear. The future is wild ideas, things that seem strange and things that don't even seem possible today. But seemingly impossible ideas on the surface today are the ideas that leave a mark in the future. Let's get nuts.
lispm 12y ago
In the mid 80s I had shortly this impression that computer science and programming now are mostly done. It was when I had read the books (blue, green, orange and purple http://www.world.st/learn/books http://www.world.st/learn/books ) on Smalltalk 80. OOP, large class library, UI, ... All done. What would be needed more?
- tim333 12y ago
  Strong AI has a way to go.
deleted 12y ago
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huangc10 12y ago
I always try to tell myself this. At the end of the day, I still think it partly still has to do with "luck". Who knew bitcoins could explode? Just strive now to find the next big thing is all we can do...
jcagalawan 12y ago
Turing award winner John Hopcroft[1] has a similar message about the future of computer science research[1]. He talks about how a lot of early CS research was to make Computer Science useful by focusing on languages and algorithms but how the focus is and will be changing. Pretty cool topics like sparse vectors, zero-knowledge proofs and social networks with applications in biology and digital medical records. [1]http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-friday-september-27-john-hopcroft/ http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-...
deleted 12y ago
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lifeisstillgood 12y ago
The thing about "late" is really "I wish I had seen that". But even if I had travelled back in time and left myself a note about Facebook I still am very unlikely to have built a billion dollar company - because I don have that brain / personality of Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos or ... So I do regret many turnings I did not take, but only because of a misguided hope that a turning would have made me a different person to the one I am. I was building an email to web page maker long before twitter, but I am still working for a living. I need to learn how to build a company online by building a company online - and learn to accept my personality for itself.
wellboy 12y ago
Adding to this, for every new app, there are three new apps you can spin out of it. Take AirBnb, now there are dozens of AirBnb for X models. Uber? Dozens of Uber for Xs as well. AirBnb for boats, office spaces, parking lots. They all worked. You could start an AirBnb for X RIGHT NOW. :)
- CPLX 12y ago
  Airbnb and Uber are the same model.
  - wellboy 12y ago
    What do you mean? AirBnB is for renting out stuff that is actually yours, Uber is for getting something to you with the press of a button.
chippy 12y ago
Perspective. That's what this great article delivers to us. We are not living in the most important exciting times in our respective fields. We've only just scratched the surface. With a bit of perspective, and thought about how humans think, you will agree with me that we always think, at the time that we are living in, that the time that we are living in is the most important and exciting of all times. It's not natural to think that in 100 years time things will be more exciting and important. It's not natural to think that in the 1980s, people were thinking that they were working on the most exciting and important times. It's not natural that we don't have perspective of the past and in particular the future, with regards to how the humans will be perceiving their present. But this thinking - that right now is the most crucial time in history ever - is not objective - it's not true - it's because our brains lack perspective.
tobydownton 12y ago
This is the single best article I've read that explains why I'm writing the novel I'm writing. It's called Solarversia, and it's about a game played in Virtual Reality by 100m people in the year 2020. I'm going to publish it on the same day that Oculus Rift goes on sale to the public, and plan to make the game for real by using the profits from the book / film to form a company (the same one mentioned in the book). My entire marketing plan is based around the book and my lofty (naive / innocent / stupid) aim is to create "the" VR app, or at least one of the VR apps that everyone knows and loves. It's the first time in my life (I'm 38) that I feel like I'm ahead of the curve on something. Exciting times.
- Intermernet 12y ago
  This sounds wonderful, and I wish you the best of luck. I love the idea of a game being deliberately based on a book about that exact game. I'll buy the book, and back the game. I assume I'll also need to buy an Oculus Rift at that point...
  - tobydownton 12y ago
    Awesome, thanks for saying so. I'll dm you website details, but for anyone else reading the thread: http://solarversia.com/about/ http://solarversia.com/about/
- grub5000 12y ago
  You should read "Ready Player One" if you haven't already. The VR in the book is called Oasis. It might give you some ideas to go with yours: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0099560437/ref=sr_1_1/275-2691187-5632453?ie=UTF8&qid=1413121559&sr=8-1&keywords=ready+player+one http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/009... Best of luck, man.
  - tobydownton 12y ago
    Hey, sorry the late reply! I already read RPO as soon as someone else told me about it, and I absolutely loved it! Thanks so much for mentioning it. I'm even going to brand Solarversia as: "Hunger Games meets Ready Player One" (but someone told me it work better using Hitchhiker's Guide as more people know it.)
jorgecastillo 12y ago
I don't know, I think the past was definitely better but there is no point in thinking about it. You just have to move forward and not lose hope. "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." - Chinese Proverb
MichaelGG 12y ago
The difference now is that it's much harder. The overall competence and just general knowledge level is higher. Sorta like physics - essentially no one is going to make a discovery today just sitting around and thinking, unlike hundreds of years ago. Even comp sci: look at the algorithms that are named, coming from the 60s or 70s. You could invent them just by thinking about a problem. (I did exactly this. I spent a month designing some information retrieval code, because I've got no education, and then my friend pulls out a textbook and shows me my work, down to the same drawings.) It's a good sentiment, because there still is tons of stuff out there still waiting. And not going out there and doing things is a sure way to not get s hit. But it's certainly more crowded and expectations seem a lot higher these days.
- tg3 12y ago
  Sure, in some areas it is much harder - but those aren't the areas where you're going to succeed. Look at Pebble - when they first started in 2008, no one was doing wearables. The founder hacked a Nokia screen with an Arduino - that was the first prototype. You just have to find the areas that are still new enough that an amateur can be an expert. Nate Silver refers to this as finding "where the water level is low".
- jamesisaac 12y ago
  That's only really the case in mature fields (e.g. compsci), but the article pointed out several newly emerged fields, where yes, you could well create a significant discovery just by sitting and thinking about it (providing you have a decently broad background knowledge).
  - semiel 12y ago
    This finally has really hit home for me while getting neck-deep in the crypto-currency world, and in particular the realms of "smart contracts" and "DACs". In that world, even the most straightforward things have yet to actually be built. We haven't even solved the easy problems yet, much less the hard ones. I'm honestly more worried about being too early than too late. The problem is that most people haven't even heard of these fields, and the ones that have generally aren't that interested. And they very well may be right to not care. In retrospect, it's obvious that the internet was a huge deal, but in the 80s it was entirely possible to be skeptical of whether the average person had much use for accessing other people's computers. My recommendation is therefore to research the various things happening at the fringe of modern technology, and see what catches your eye. There are great strides to be made in a variety of fields, and one or more of them might turn out to be important. At the very least, it'll be fun.
michaelochurch 12y ago
What I learned in my 20s is that I'm not an island. I may be a +4 or +5 sigma "visionary" (not to say that I am one) but if I refuse to learn the people-hacking skills necessary to make people like and trust me (and for a long time I thought that game was "dishonest", which was defensive rejection) then it doesn't matter. Strong teams beat brilliant individuals, so if you're the latter you still have to understand the needs of the former (including how to build great teams in the first place). The problem is that I see tons of opportunity. OP is right. Anyone who thinks the important problems are all solved has no creativity and no clue. That said, I'm not a 50x people-hacker, nor am I a 125x money-haver. The confluence of excellent people-hacking, resources, and visionary creativity almost never happens. So we have people like me trying to make people click ads, and an startup industry founded around the sale of techie cantrips to creatively crippled conglomerates.
- jeffreyrogers 12y ago
  Your first point here is critical. I've been lucky enough to get to know several extremely successful people (outside of tech), and while all of them are bright, they're probably about average for most of the people I went to high school and college with. The thing they have in common though is that they're all very good with people and got their starts through favors others did for them.
jordanpg 12y ago
Charming, feel-good piece for all the devs in the room, I'm sure. But here are some other things to think about. The availability of this cheap, ubiquitous networking technology is intimately linked to the availability of extraordinarily cheap energy from carbon-based fuels as well as cheap manufacturing in various emerging markets. How many more years of that do we have? Let's not forget too that the planet keeps warming up in spite of us. Next, there are plenty of folks out there who seem keen on changing this giant network into a tiered shopping-plex. All of this optimism about the future is implicitly dependent on a neutral network. Is there anyone on this forum who isn't gravely concerned about the damage that will be done to free enterprise if network neutrality (in the most generic sense) is lost? Finally, there is a solution space to consider here. All of the incredible dev that has been possibly in the last few years has been made possible because the barriers to entry have been brought down by things like online tutorials, IDEs, high-level languages, and object-oriented frameworks. It might be the case that there are is a limiting number of interesting problems that can be solved without the need for more complex technical work, which might proceed at a far slower pace than we've becoming accustomed to.
imanaccount247 12y ago
I think there's a real argument to be made that the attempts by corporate america to stifle and limit the internet could prevent the amazing future internet of 2044 from looking much different than what we have now. Latency, bandwidth, reliability, data transfer caps have all been problems for decades, and ISPs are actively fighting to keep them as problems or even to make them worse (pay us extra to access netflix).

268 points by mbrubeck 12y ago

Yes! We need More brains to focus on solving real problems: clean water, education, internet access, transparency, and less "Uber for X", candycrush, Rovios, facevook, etcetera.

johnm111888 12y ago

lower barriers --> more competition

pervycreeper 12y ago

If only I had the benefit of the perspective that a "2044 greybeard" presumably will have.

CmonDev 12y ago
At least don't write the code in an assembly of your times :).
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting. :) What you want to avoid is writing 2014 COBOL, and that's what typical enterprise Java is. There'll be jobs maintaining that stuff for a while... But little mobility into anything more exciting.
  - CmonDev 12y ago
    > Yeah, those assembly-writing badasses making $500k at HFT funds are really hurting. Yeah, all ~100 of them. Better normal Java than it's scripting counterpart though (the assembly of the web).

adamnemecek 12y ago

I've never heard anyone complain that they were too late to build anything cool.

nugget 12y ago

February 2004 I was a third year CS student in Boston. I remember complaining to a friend of mine that we had missed the boat - Yahoo, Amazon, etc - the web had matured without us and the window of opportunity was closed. If only we had been born 5 years earlier! As fate would have it, that was also the month I signed up for an account on a tiny site called thefacebook.com. Domains. Google. Facebook. Pinterest. Uber. Bitcoins. It's so easy to feel like you JUST missed the wave. While you look back with anxiety at the wave you missed, you increase your odds of missing the next wave headed straight towards you. And there are always more waves. I had to learn this the hard way, after many missed waves and a lot of anxiety. So now I do what the article says: try to remind myself that the web's best days are ahead of it and there is likely more opportunity now - today! - than ever before. Calm down, take a deep breath and look to the future. Whether it's true or not, who knows, I guess time will tell, but it definitely helps keep me sane.

platz 12y ago
And how many get stuck on "false waves", I.e. survivorship bias. Sure, there are more waves, but the ability to spot a wave is incredibly difficult. Why not just stop everything you're doing now and invest in ethereum? What would be really interesting is to calculate some kind of first derivative of a wave so as to know what the optimal risk/reward tradeoff is. Or perhaps to know what the density of false to true waves are. For example I imagine everyone knew about the potential opportunities during the gold rush. What can we say about the potential opportunities now?
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eps 12y ago

Hindsight is always 20/20. If you'd only knew what you should be paying attention to now.

austenallred 12y ago

The Internet is not just a technical innovation; the Internet is perhaps the greatest social innovation of all-time. For the first time in human history almost everyone on earth is instantly connected. This changes everything. Sometimes I'll just sit and think for hours about how different this makes the world we live in. We're playing by a completely new set of rules -- we're playing a completely new game, and even the most innovative people on earth are just barely starting to make sense of it all. I think we're barely even scratching the surface of what's possible and what is to come. It's not as obvious as you would think - consider any of the great companies of the past 10 or so years. If they had never been founded, it probably wouldn't be painfully obvious that we need them. It only becomes obvious in retrospect that we were actually in dire need the whole time. Or look around the room you're in. What will change under the circumstances where everyone is instantly connected to each other and simultaneously to the largest data store the world has ever none? I can imagine ways that almost everything in the room I'm in now will be different. Most won't be good startup ideas, but I would venture a guess that some would. We're all treading on very fresh ground. This is only the beginning.

ksrm 12y ago
"almost everyone on Earth"? Not even close: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
smaddali 12y ago
very true. PG articulates the "obviuosness" in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html Founders tend to live in future and build the missing things. Hence these holes appear obvious to them.

Animats 12y ago

I've been too early a few times. I was working on secure operating systems in the late 1970s. Proof of correctness in the early 1980s. My major work on the Internet was in the early 1980s. I was working on robotics in the 1980s, and legged robots in the 1990s. I was working on automatic driving in 2003-2005. I figured out how to stop search spam in the 2000s. I have issued patents and published papers on most of this. None of this generated much money. (Fortunately I also did one of Autodesk's early products, and got pre-IPO stock because they couldn't afford to pay me. I also did the first ragdoll physics engine that worked, and made money off of that.) In some ways, it's harder now, because there are so many people doing stuff in computing. In the 1980s, the number of people who knew how to make a big program work was quite small. Now everybody can do that. The few people who knew anything about AI had been to Stanford, MIT, or CMU. Now everybody serious takes machine learning class, and you can download good code for it. There's plenty of opportunity to make money out there, but much of what people are working on is, well, pretty banal. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click on ads. This sucks." - Jeffery Hammerbacher, Facebook. Here's an opportunity to think about. Replace Facebook, and all the various messaging services and streaming video services, with a pay service that costs about $1 a month, with no ads. Computing has become so cheap that you can now undercut "free with ads" on price. Think of a social network as a package like Wordpress - host it anywhere, it talks to everybody else, and it just works. The authentication and spam problems are tough - solve them. There have been a few attempts at federated social networks, such as Diaspora, but the people behind them have no clue how to make them usable or popular. "Ello" is making progress on popularity, but their UI sucks and it doesn't do much. Fix all that. If you want to do socially useful hardware, look into handheld medical devices. The medical industry tends toward big, heavy equipment designed by doctors. Dean Kamen has made a lot of money downsizing some rather clunky medical devices. Also, the UIs of systems used by doctors for medical records are awful. Doctors used to dictate medical notes. Now they have to type them, worst case on touchscreens. Make that work with voice recognition that understands not only medical terminology, but has access to the patient record for context. Another possible area - the paperless police car. Cops hate doing paperwork. There's also a movement to make cops carry cameras. Come up with a system which takes the cop's video and audio, and fills in all the info a cop needs to book somebody. Tie the collected video and audio to that for later review if necessary. It would both help to keep cops honest and let them focus on doing their job instead of their paperwork. So there are a few technically challenging things to do. Quit trying to find the next "Yo". That's like hoping to win the lottery.

javipas 12y ago

That post was published by Kevin Kelly too on Medium a few days sooner. I wonder why he published it first there :o https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142 https://medium.com/message/you-are-not-late-b3d76f963142

bojo 12y ago
I knew I had read this article before, but couldn't remember where. Thanks.

dakrisht 12y ago

Fantastic. It's never too late to build or start something. I here a lot of this from 30+ year old entrepreneurs ("but he's 23 fresh out of school" or "am I too old?" - NO! Not even close. The 23 year old with the traction and venture money is a) extremely lucky and b) doesn't know half of what you know!) An inspiring little feel good article here for those 16 hour days when you just hit your head against the wall. Or for when you need a little inspiration. Author is right - even in 2025 so many products will have been invented today and tomorrow. Does anyone really think Snapchat will be around in 10 years? The Internet is still in its infancy. Sure, we can communicate with multimedia and watch streaming video but think of the myriad of problems and challenges facing modern day society? Endless and endless opportunity. From biotech, hardware and sensors, energy, communication, health care, VR, AI, machine learning, etc. - all very, very early problems to work on. Each of which will create dozens of profitable and dynamic technology companies. We have to work on the future and use the amazing platforms currently in place to make something that lasts and makes an impact. I remember 5 years ago what a royal pita it was to setup a physical webserver + app server. Nightmare. Now, it happens in a click. The platforms are getting better in better for entrepreneurs to build on top of them. This is exciting and should be exciting for anyone and everyone who has a passion to build something. And the future is not 20 chat apps, 20 youtube's, or 20 e-commerce sites selling subscription underwear. The future is wild ideas, things that seem strange and things that don't even seem possible today. But seemingly impossible ideas on the surface today are the ideas that leave a mark in the future. Let's get nuts.

lispm 12y ago

In the mid 80s I had shortly this impression that computer science and programming now are mostly done. It was when I had read the books (blue, green, orange and purple http://www.world.st/learn/books http://www.world.st/learn/books ) on Smalltalk 80. OOP, large class library, UI, ... All done. What would be needed more?

tim333 12y ago
Strong AI has a way to go.

deleted 12y ago

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huangc10 12y ago

I always try to tell myself this. At the end of the day, I still think it partly still has to do with "luck". Who knew bitcoins could explode? Just strive now to find the next big thing is all we can do...

jcagalawan 12y ago

Turing award winner John Hopcroft[1] has a similar message about the future of computer science research[1]. He talks about how a lot of early CS research was to make Computer Science useful by focusing on languages and algorithms but how the focus is and will be changing. Pretty cool topics like sparse vectors, zero-knowledge proofs and social networks with applications in biology and digital medical records. [1]http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-friday-september-27-john-hopcroft/ http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-...

deleted 12y ago

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lifeisstillgood 12y ago

The thing about "late" is really "I wish I had seen that". But even if I had travelled back in time and left myself a note about Facebook I still am very unlikely to have built a billion dollar company - because I don have that brain / personality of Zuckerberg or Musk or Bezos or ... So I do regret many turnings I did not take, but only because of a misguided hope that a turning would have made me a different person to the one I am. I was building an email to web page maker long before twitter, but I am still working for a living. I need to learn how to build a company online by building a company online - and learn to accept my personality for itself.

wellboy 12y ago

Adding to this, for every new app, there are three new apps you can spin out of it. Take AirBnb, now there are dozens of AirBnb for X models. Uber? Dozens of Uber for Xs as well. AirBnb for boats, office spaces, parking lots. They all worked. You could start an AirBnb for X RIGHT NOW. :)

CPLX 12y ago
Airbnb and Uber are the same model.
- wellboy 12y ago
  What do you mean? AirBnB is for renting out stuff that is actually yours, Uber is for getting something to you with the press of a button.

chippy 12y ago

Perspective. That's what this great article delivers to us. We are not living in the most important exciting times in our respective fields. We've only just scratched the surface. With a bit of perspective, and thought about how humans think, you will agree with me that we always think, at the time that we are living in, that the time that we are living in is the most important and exciting of all times. It's not natural to think that in 100 years time things will be more exciting and important. It's not natural to think that in the 1980s, people were thinking that they were working on the most exciting and important times. It's not natural that we don't have perspective of the past and in particular the future, with regards to how the humans will be perceiving their present. But this thinking - that right now is the most crucial time in history ever - is not objective - it's not true - it's because our brains lack perspective.

tobydownton 12y ago

This is the single best article I've read that explains why I'm writing the novel I'm writing. It's called Solarversia, and it's about a game played in Virtual Reality by 100m people in the year 2020. I'm going to publish it on the same day that Oculus Rift goes on sale to the public, and plan to make the game for real by using the profits from the book / film to form a company (the same one mentioned in the book). My entire marketing plan is based around the book and my lofty (naive / innocent / stupid) aim is to create "the" VR app, or at least one of the VR apps that everyone knows and loves. It's the first time in my life (I'm 38) that I feel like I'm ahead of the curve on something. Exciting times.

Intermernet 12y ago
This sounds wonderful, and I wish you the best of luck. I love the idea of a game being deliberately based on a book about that exact game. I'll buy the book, and back the game. I assume I'll also need to buy an Oculus Rift at that point...
- tobydownton 12y ago
  Awesome, thanks for saying so. I'll dm you website details, but for anyone else reading the thread: http://solarversia.com/about/ http://solarversia.com/about/
grub5000 12y ago
You should read "Ready Player One" if you haven't already. The VR in the book is called Oasis. It might give you some ideas to go with yours: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0099560437/ref=sr_1_1/275-2691187-5632453?ie=UTF8&qid=1413121559&sr=8-1&keywords=ready+player+one http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/009... Best of luck, man.
- tobydownton 12y ago
  Hey, sorry the late reply! I already read RPO as soon as someone else told me about it, and I absolutely loved it! Thanks so much for mentioning it. I'm even going to brand Solarversia as: "Hunger Games meets Ready Player One" (but someone told me it work better using Hitchhiker's Guide as more people know it.)

jorgecastillo 12y ago

I don't know, I think the past was definitely better but there is no point in thinking about it. You just have to move forward and not lose hope. "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." - Chinese Proverb

MichaelGG 12y ago

The difference now is that it's much harder. The overall competence and just general knowledge level is higher. Sorta like physics - essentially no one is going to make a discovery today just sitting around and thinking, unlike hundreds of years ago. Even comp sci: look at the algorithms that are named, coming from the 60s or 70s. You could invent them just by thinking about a problem. (I did exactly this. I spent a month designing some information retrieval code, because I've got no education, and then my friend pulls out a textbook and shows me my work, down to the same drawings.) It's a good sentiment, because there still is tons of stuff out there still waiting. And not going out there and doing things is a sure way to not get s hit. But it's certainly more crowded and expectations seem a lot higher these days.

tg3 12y ago
Sure, in some areas it is much harder - but those aren't the areas where you're going to succeed. Look at Pebble - when they first started in 2008, no one was doing wearables. The founder hacked a Nokia screen with an Arduino - that was the first prototype. You just have to find the areas that are still new enough that an amateur can be an expert. Nate Silver refers to this as finding "where the water level is low".
jamesisaac 12y ago
That's only really the case in mature fields (e.g. compsci), but the article pointed out several newly emerged fields, where yes, you could well create a significant discovery just by sitting and thinking about it (providing you have a decently broad background knowledge).
- semiel 12y ago
  This finally has really hit home for me while getting neck-deep in the crypto-currency world, and in particular the realms of "smart contracts" and "DACs". In that world, even the most straightforward things have yet to actually be built. We haven't even solved the easy problems yet, much less the hard ones. I'm honestly more worried about being too early than too late. The problem is that most people haven't even heard of these fields, and the ones that have generally aren't that interested. And they very well may be right to not care. In retrospect, it's obvious that the internet was a huge deal, but in the 80s it was entirely possible to be skeptical of whether the average person had much use for accessing other people's computers. My recommendation is therefore to research the various things happening at the fringe of modern technology, and see what catches your eye. There are great strides to be made in a variety of fields, and one or more of them might turn out to be important. At the very least, it'll be fun.

michaelochurch 12y ago

What I learned in my 20s is that I'm not an island. I may be a +4 or +5 sigma "visionary" (not to say that I am one) but if I refuse to learn the people-hacking skills necessary to make people like and trust me (and for a long time I thought that game was "dishonest", which was defensive rejection) then it doesn't matter. Strong teams beat brilliant individuals, so if you're the latter you still have to understand the needs of the former (including how to build great teams in the first place). The problem is that I see tons of opportunity. OP is right. Anyone who thinks the important problems are all solved has no creativity and no clue. That said, I'm not a 50x people-hacker, nor am I a 125x money-haver. The confluence of excellent people-hacking, resources, and visionary creativity almost never happens. So we have people like me trying to make people click ads, and an startup industry founded around the sale of techie cantrips to creatively crippled conglomerates.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago
Your first point here is critical. I've been lucky enough to get to know several extremely successful people (outside of tech), and while all of them are bright, they're probably about average for most of the people I went to high school and college with. The thing they have in common though is that they're all very good with people and got their starts through favors others did for them.

jordanpg 12y ago

Charming, feel-good piece for all the devs in the room, I'm sure. But here are some other things to think about. The availability of this cheap, ubiquitous networking technology is intimately linked to the availability of extraordinarily cheap energy from carbon-based fuels as well as cheap manufacturing in various emerging markets. How many more years of that do we have? Let's not forget too that the planet keeps warming up in spite of us. Next, there are plenty of folks out there who seem keen on changing this giant network into a tiered shopping-plex. All of this optimism about the future is implicitly dependent on a neutral network. Is there anyone on this forum who isn't gravely concerned about the damage that will be done to free enterprise if network neutrality (in the most generic sense) is lost? Finally, there is a solution space to consider here. All of the incredible dev that has been possibly in the last few years has been made possible because the barriers to entry have been brought down by things like online tutorials, IDEs, high-level languages, and object-oriented frameworks. It might be the case that there are is a limiting number of interesting problems that can be solved without the need for more complex technical work, which might proceed at a far slower pace than we've becoming accustomed to.

imanaccount247 12y ago

I think there's a real argument to be made that the attempts by corporate america to stifle and limit the internet could prevent the amazing future internet of 2044 from looking much different than what we have now. Latency, bandwidth, reliability, data transfer caps have all been problems for decades, and ISPs are actively fighting to keep them as problems or even to make them worse (pay us extra to access netflix).