Ask HN: Are the pioneers dead? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are the pioneers dead?

5 pointsitsmefaz8 comments

Having been in the industry for the past 5 years, I have come to this very crude observation that the computing industry is out of breathtaking ideas. I believe this has to do with the lack of true entrepreneurship.

True entrepreneurship, is when one goes on a journey to finding truly great ideas. Great ideas take a very long time to generate and an equally long time to be properly executed.

I have also come to the conclusion that the entrepreneurs and business people around got into starting the business as they were not skilled enough for the competing job market. And this is the escape route they choose to stay relevant. I believe this lack of required skills and true entrepreneurship is the reason there are too many not-so-skilled entrepreneurs.

So, the question I was trying to ask myself and the community is that where are all the pioneers, the true entrepreneurs, the engineers? And have you ever come across such individuals?

You're not alone. Alan Kay asks if there's been any new ideas in computer science in the past 50 years:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-i...

He'd previously named spreadsheets and all the stuff from PARC:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/357813/remembering-a-quo...

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We're probably in a commercialization/application phase of ideas. For example, lisp ideas are still being applied in other languages.

Perhaps all the low-hanging fruit has been gotten?

Or perhaps it's a bit like DNA and RNA transfer: the most ancient part of all livings things. It's probably not optimal, but you make faster progress by building atop it rather than starting over. Similar for cell structure, multicellular organization, neurons (worms have 'em), vertebrate anatomy, mammal design etc.

Industry has a habit of reinventing the same ideas every decade or so, in a different language, operating system etc.

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There are new ideas, though mostly a combination of existing ideas at this point. The last example I noticed, several years ago, was jq, which applies unix streams and haskell to json processing. (Though its author wasn't an entrepreneur.)

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I suspect there are golden ideas just one or two steps off the beaten track. But how much work they'd be to productize (and whether the market would adopt them) is another question...

If no one else is doing it, it's an opportunity - for you.

Thanks for a very good summary. I especially like your correlation with regards to our evolution. That made very good sense.

Apart from Alan Kay are there any other influencers that I might find interesting?

Not that I know of, he's the big critic of compsci progress.

Peter Norvig's argument with Noam Chomsky on AI as a science is interesting, to do with knowing what we're doing.

More generally and optimistically on progress, you might consider Buckminster Fuller (and Ray Kurzweil).

Thanks

Are you sure you're not playing a game of 'No true Scotsman' here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Thanks for reminding me this. I see the similarity with me going through a similar phase. However, I always try to coarse correct my arguments and ideologies along the way to reach a proper objective.

Having said that ... I sort of believe the next massive technological revolution will occur when we work out a way to manipulate energies one or more orders of magnitude more dense than we presently can.

Presently we have approximately 2kW electric outlets, approximately 100kW engines in our cars.

Imagine being able to manipulate 2MW at the home outlet, or 1GW in our vehicles.

I don’t know what it would look like to be able to dissipate that much heat, we’d have to improve conversion efficiency to limit the waste heat.

I’m just thinking if we could work out how to handle that much power it would be truly revolutionary off-the-planet sort of business.

Thanks.. I didn't think of this problem.

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