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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

If so, it is definitely mind-bending. Makes me wonder what people mean about not being over-ambitious, "avoiding NIH", "worse is better", "minimizing technical risk", etc. Somehow one is made to feel (by no particular person, but by the composite emergent vibe) that there are a hundred and one reasons to be more conservative. I wonder how many people have the audacity to re-imagine their software ground-up, and the technical chops to actually implement it. The verve is refreshing. Kudos to the author, and also thanks.

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The Soul of a New Machine has an amazing passage on a software developer from Data General being too inexperienced to realize that what he was doing couldn't be done, and finishing it in record time.

It's safe to say that people who aren't aware of or ignore limits put out better work on average than people who don't.

Not sure if it's the same story but there is also the Ivan Sutherland one reported by Alan Kay.

> When asked, “How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?” Ivan replied: “Well, I didn’t know it was hard.”

That seems decidedly unsafe to say, but even if you’re right, the second paragraph doesn’t follow from the first. “Everyone generalizes from one example! At least, I do.”

It's been shown repeatedly. Arthur Whitney is another example. In fact, basically every major technological innovation of the past two centuries has been because of people doing this.

The first was just to share an example. The second paragraph is common knowledge.

We do depend in a profound way on people trying the impossible for our civilization to progress. But at the same time most attempts to do the impossible do end in failure and I think it would be mistake to say that people trying do the impossible do better on average than those who don't. Rather, we should encourage play, tilting at windmills, etc knowing full well that we're accepting the danger of failure now but making an investment in the future.

Indeed, reminds me of : One day In 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of “unsolved” statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them. (The equations Dantzig tackled are more accurately described not as unsolvable problems, but rather as unproven statistical theorems for which he worked out proofs.)

Six weeks later, Dantzig’s statistic professor notified him that he had prepared one of his two “homework” proofs for publication, and Dantzig was given co-author credit on another paper several years later when another mathematician independently worked out the same solution to the second problem.

Sounds like the movie Good Will Hunting.

It's survivorship bias - you never hear about prople who ignore limits or don't know them and fail. Some limits earn you trouble or penalty by law when broken, so you might get to know them in a less pleasant context.

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