Are you solving a NASA problem or a LEGO problem? | Hacker News Reader

Are you solving a NASA problem or a LEGO problem?

nateberkopec.com

38 pointsnateberkopec50 comments

I don't really see the point of this article. It's not the difficulty of your solution--it's the quality of your solution and whether it resonates with customers. I've seen some very profitable startups solving "LEGO" problems in elegant and interesting ways. Meanwhile, any competitive advantage you think you built solving "NASA" problems with complex technology is fleeting at best.

Agreed. I enjoy solving lego problems, and I think I'd be content solving lego problems for the rest of my life.

I'm with you on this, and I'm currently working on an actual NASA project.

Agreed. Also anecdotally Lego makes a profit.

Isnt that the point of the article? Dont think your idea is the most complex and that no one else will be able to copy you. If you're solving a lego problem stick to the lego but try to solve it the best you can cause people will come and its gonna be easy to copy most of your solution

That was exactly the point I was trying to make. Thanks!

It always seemed to me that the prevalence of LEGO problem startups, or in other words endless companies doing endless variations of "cat picture sharing webapps", was a reason to discount the total effect a startup can have on humanity and a reason why you should go work for BigCorp. We all more or less agree that NASA problems are more beneficial to humanity than LEGO problems, but in terms of money gained, both options are equally viable. Microsoft started as a LEGO problem, Google started as a LEGO problem, Facebook started as a LEGO problem. Now they're gigantic corporations that can see and manage and fund NASA problems, or buy up and piece together enough LEGO problem startups, who individually were doing NASA problem R&D possibly without realizing it.

I don't think you can classy what Google did as a LEGO problem. At the time they started, indexing the web and comming up with pagerank was a hugely complex thing to do. And you can see how it impacted their future direction as a company that seems intent on attacking larger world problems. Microsoft did not get huge deal. Sure writing a BASIC interpreter wasn't something super complex but that isn't what made them successful in the end.

When I look at company like Dropbox, I don't really see a lego problem since building the infrastructure for what they are doing isn't easy. But it's not stopping people from competing with them as this article claims it would.

NASA has competitors. The competitive landscape is dynamic, and solving a difficult problem only gives you a head start. A head start is a great thing, it has founded incredible businesses, and it is enormous fun to be the best.

It's sad, because whatever exceeded customer expectations today (so that they think it's incredible, magic, they can't believe it, how did you do that man) won't work tomorrow, when their pesky expectations have habituated to it. "New" is intrinsically time-sensitive. What have you done lately?

Here's Joel essay Where there's muck, there's brass http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/06.html

What if it was made out of an erector set? Then after that you moved to a hand crafted duct tape garage prototype? Then to a small scale SLA prototype to model it's characteristics. Then maybe a scale replica using CNCed parts?

Burt Rutan used to build small scale models of his concept planes and mount them to the roof of his car to test their aerodynamics. Last time I checked he managed to turn that "Lego" project into a manned space vehicle.

Even if you're solving 'NASA problems', competitors will come.

It would have been better to give us some idea of WHY we need to know what scale of problems we're solving, and what kind of problems we'll have if we don't know.

In fact, if you're solving "NASA problems", being the first solver even has some potentially crippling disadvantages—nimble competitors can learn from your public mistakes and build off your public successes, all for a lot less time and money than it took you.

Solving a problem can be a lot easier the second time—what had been a tortuously long and painful process for you is often significantly easier for a competitor who had the benefit of watching.

You'll also also have this issue if you're the first to solve an easy problem, but I believe it's less exaggerated.

I totally agree. Just knowing that a problem -is- solvable is a huge advantage on a 'NASA problem.'

This is true for some things. For example, UI design can be a long and difficult process for the first mover but easy for competitors who can just lift the design. However, it's not so easy to lift, say, the design of a distributed file system from its public interface.

Competitors may come, but they'll likely have to overcome a higher barrier (to entry) than if your problem required a trivial solution.

Think medical devices vs iphone apps. Problems in the medical field are not secret. But they typically require a novel solution, five or more years and a team of experts to implement. Potential competitors may well know exactly what you're doing but they'll have to overcome barriers on multiple levels: time, funds, patents (a big one), expertise, etc.

I smell a followup post!

There are a couple of possible points in this article. One is bemoaning the quality of the problems (not the solution) attacked by startups. Is the startup curing cancer? Or enabling a more advanced form of ironic hipsterism? Of course curing cancer is more important. That doesn't mean Lolcats fails to make the world a better place.

Another is that people in startups are delusional in thinking they are solving difficult problems. Maybe, but they are taking risks and it seems innocuous and may be even helpful to be slightly delusional on that point.

Finally the metaphor of a moon mission is telling. Landing on the moon, was hard, but it didn't create a sustainable business around space flight. In fact by some measures space flight went backward for some time. In the 90's I was at Draper Laboratories and remember a literal rocket scientist saying it would take more than 10 years to put a man on the moon again. (He was saying this while complaining about milspec components.)

I live in Brooklyn, so this could in fact by advanced hipsterism.

I think that a lot of folks get really caught up in competition. Big deal. Competition drives innovation. If there is a market, competitors will come regardless. I'd almost argue that competition can validate a market.

I believe that if businesses focused more on customer service and solving one or two key problems really well, then they'll have a higher likelihood of succeeding.

If you find yourself coming up with a NASA-style solution, that's a pretty good indicator something is going horribly wrong. NASA-style architectures are non-modular, highly complex, non-reusable, bureaucratic, inefficient, difficult to test, high maintenance, and high risk solutions.

> NASA-style architectures are non-modular, highly complex, non-reusable, bureaucratic, inefficient, difficult to test, high maintenance, and high risk solutions.

Source?

History.

Right, but, given the amount of incredibly useful products and discoveries that have come out of NASA's "inefficient, non-modular, non-reusable, difficult-to-test" architectures (see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-...), I think such a broad statement about the way NASA works deserves a little more qualification than a witty one-word answer, don't you?

There is no question that NASA did produce some incredible useful things and made very cool discoveries (otherwise I'd have added the lack of those to my list), but the fact remains that NASA due to the way it operates and approaches projects did a lot less than what it could have achieved and ultimately presided over the long and painful death of the US space program.

But my comment wasn't even meant to highlight NASA's historically documented failures. Instead it was meant to illustrate what kind of project properties are not appropriate for software projects. I was making a statment to the effect that it should be considered a big warning sign if projects are structured like the space shuttle program.

On a final offtopic note about commenting style: you're complaining about deserving more than a witty one-word answer, yet you have no problem with making comments that consist of a passive-aggressive one-word question, do you? Let's keep it friendly, even if we disagree.

A lot of the alleged NASA spinoffs are vastly overrated or incorrectly attributed to NASA. Overall the spinoff benefits do not justify the enormous cost of, especially, NASA manned spaceflight and thus aren't a good argument for its continued existence. Trying to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenses with hand-held vacuum cleaners and better golf balls is patently ridiculous.

The only good argument is the direct one: it's something we want to do and something we should do for its own reasons and merits. Personally I believe that to be the strongest argument and also a perfectly adequate argument.

High Risk is exactly wrong. The need for extreme caution (in the face of world-wide publicity for mis-steps in the space race) are what lead to many of their other 'sins'.

Now that the problem has been 'solved' by the pioneers, the follow-on players have it relatively easy.

The priority-based process scheduler says "Hi."

Like being able to run multiple things on your computer without having the less-important tasks block more important tasks? Thank the Apollo computers.

You misunderstood my comment. I didn't say "nothing good ever came out of NASA".

For every billion-dollar probe that comes in over budget, NASA tends to have a thousand little tidbits that end up getting reused over and over.

The topic is taking a run at the perennial arguments about monolithic vs. incremental development and ad-hoc vs. recyclable solutions - but NASA isn't really a great whipping boy for this one.

As I tried with the other responses to criticisms of my original post, I'd like to steer away from blanket judgements about NASA. While I personally believe there are a lot of systemic dead-ends, wasteful processes and general mismanagement going on and that this in combination with a widespread anti-science stance in politics is responsible for the failure of our space program (as defined against my completely arbitrary vision of what could have been achieved in this area) - I originally intended to make a statement about my much more personal experience that huge, complex (...) software projects are a recipe for failure: sure, you can still pull it off if you're Microsoft or IBM or SAP, but most of us are not.

Edit: Also offtopic, but I feel compelled to answer this:

  [..] NASA tends to have a thousand little tidbits that 
  end up getting reused over and over.

I would go even further than that and assert that we shouldn't be aligning science and space exploration with the derivation of practical applications in mind at all. It should be done regardless. I'm not one of these "let's concentrate on terrestrial problems first" Earth-isolationists. Quite the opposite: my criticism of NASA is that there has been too little actual science and exploration.

NASA does both science and the engineering necessary to achieve the science. You can do something for its own sake and still achieve more pragmatic benefits.

Okay, I give up - this isn't remotely related to anything I said or wanted to say :-)

I've seen this posed as Twitter vs. Hoverboard, without denigrating the Twitter side.

http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2011/07/a-twitter-a-hoverboar...

Why are people so afraid of competitors ? For me this article is what make so many projects fail, they try too much. Sometimes, you just need to solve simple things to make people's life a little better.

It isn't about the competitors, it's about who come first with a viable solution.

PS: You not a scientist, you are not NASA, you will never be, you will never have the need to develop anything close to a space rocket in your life. And if you do, don't start a startup for god sake, do something more valuable to the human kind, please use you knowledge for much more important things.

False dichotomy much? There are plenty of problems that lie in between LEGO problems and NASA problems. I'll call them "Wright brothers problems" -- i.e. the kind of problems that can be solved by two guys in a garage over a period of a few years. I'd say the development of Pagerank actually falls into this category, since it was originally Larry Page's thesis topic, which he developed with Sergei Brin, then brought to fruition at a small scale at Stanford, then (finally!) at full scale with the founding and development of Google.

I agree with the message that you need something substantial to survive and prosper. Unlike 70s and prior, market and community of innovators at this age openly exchange their small yet fully specialized ideas. The result of which is the complex eco-system. I would rather compare the space exploration with current state with the internet, instead of few big firms working with their million-man hours, we have the swarm of innovators all over the world producing and exchanging their accomplishments of "LEGO" missions.

Tackling a NASA-scale problem would (most likely) require NASA-scale funding. Ping me when somebody finds an investor that is this rich/foolish.

I admire the notion, but I actually think the scale of the problem is irrelevant. There are some really "small" problems (that are hard, but could be solved by one person), throughout mathematics and computer science that could have profound impacts.

Eeeehh...I'm not so sure about that. Palantir, Dropbox, and Heroku are all examples of startups that solved massive technical issues (mostly with redundancy/stability) that keeps their competition at bay. Would you want to recode Dropbox? Would you like to take a stab at one-upping Palantir's massive effort in the next gen of financial intelligence?

Hm, I think I need to go back to the drawing board with this post. There's something good here but I didn't quite get it across.

It isn't a big deal when you are solving a LEGO problem and think you have a NASA problem. The big deal is when you are trying to solve a NASA problem, and you think it is a LEGO problem. The first leads to an inflated sense of self worth, the second leads to untold suffering and failure.

Weird, he does LEGO in capitals like the company wants, but still uses an S to make it plural.

Also, his numbers seem to be off, both for years and number of missions.

Yeah, no clue where those numbers come from. The better estimate would be about 8 years and on the order of 20 manned missions.

NASA took $1000 from every American, and paid scientists to put 12 people on the moon. If you think about it, it is as pointless as the pyramids. LEGO on the other hand stimulates the creativity and entertains kids for billions of hours. LEGO solves a real problem, NASA solves non-problems. I am all for NASA and working on hard problems just to show they can be solved, but any startup working on NASA problems is destined to be a commercial failure.

Can you provide a link for that dollar amount? At its peak in 1966, NASA was 4.4% of the federal budget. That's 5.9 billion dollars for that year. The population of the United States was 196 million at the time. This puts the cost of NASA at $30 (1966 dollars) per person. That's a lot a bang for the buck!

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/year/1966.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

A quick follow up, from those same sites you can work out that NASA costs Americans about $55/yr per person today. Not bad, maybe others would like to buy a video game instead. I however enjoy the pretty pictures from around the solar system.

Just imagine if the average American spent as much on space as they do on their car.

I was just considering the Apollo program. According to a wikipedia article, it cost $170B in 2005 dollars, or about $190B in todays dollars. The population in 1970, was right around 200M. So roughly $1000 in todays dollars.

The invention of the lego isn't what the article is talking about. It's more about building something cool in legos and comparing that to building something cool that puts people on the moon.

And I feel you are downplaying the societal impact that going to the moon had on not just the US but the world. Without forgetting the technological advancement that had to be made to make it possible.

But my paycheck comes from NASA...

If I can achieve FU money by solving a LEGO problem rather than a NASA problem, then I'll do it. There will always be NASA problems to solve later. Solve the money problem first.

I'm an algoholic, not in the SEO sense pls, gimme something NASA-big to solve then ;)

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