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Comment by janoc | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that the guy didn't "invent" anything, more like had a farfetched idea and left all "the practical details" to others to work out. That's like saying that Meliès invented space travel - he too had the idea of flying to the Moon in a gun projectile ...

It was only non-functioning mockup, at best, because the vacuum tube electronics of the era was simply incapable of producing a wireless device with those capabilities and weighing 140 (!!!) grams.

Compare that with the first actual working HMD which was the Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles" boom-mounted display from 1968.

EDIT: It was George Meliès not Lumiere brothers who made the famous film. Thanks for correcting me.

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> That's like saying that Lumiere brothers invented space travel - they too had the idea of flying to the Moon in a gun projectile ...

Just to nitpick, it was Jules Verne's idea. The Lumieres just put it on screen.

Just to add more nitpick to the nitpicking, it's a Georges Meliès movie: A trip to the moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon

You are right, of course. I had Meliès in mind, not sure why I wrote Lumiere brothers.

That seems a little unfair to me. In many cases an original idea, regardless of ability to execute, is priceless.

I agree that execution is everything in terms of winning, though.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, anything that can be thought of eventually will be. It's no coincidence that new discoveries tend to get made by multiple people on different sides of the planet at roughly the same time once they have access to the same technological starting point to work from. Leibniz and Newton, Wright Brothers and Dumont, Bell Labs and Westinghouse, etc.

This is why patents are harmful imo (without even getting into patent trolls), all they do is restrict the commercialization to the one who was the fastest gun in the west at the patent office and hold back society from developing the technology further because the patentee has no incentive to improve the idea while they enjoy a two decade state sanctioned monopoly.

How do you reconcile a patentless world with things that require massive R&D budgets? Like it or not many industries require very complicated ideas that are extremely expensive and labor intensive to generate the idea.

For example, new pharmaceuticals (of which there are very few being discovered) take over 10 years of R&D and cost multiple billions of dollars to whittle down ~10,000 candidates into a single government approved drug.

But once that single drug has been identified from the haystack of failing options, and rigorously tested, and trialed in humans for years, recreating that molecule is quite trivial. The actual production is very cheap compared to the fact it took thousands of people billions of dollars over 10+ years to get there.

This is just one example of how ideas can be very expensive to develop, but very cheap to copy.

Frankly, I don't think such projects should be left up to the private sector to develop. If we did space travel that way we'd make the first moon landing in 2038.

This sort of live saving research is the best contender for R&D by government grants, if it's a worthy cause it can be supported for a long time (like fusion is being), and when the solution is found it can be immediately shared and sold at cost for the benefit of everyone, not hoarded by one company and sold at a ridiculous price to people that are forced to buy it or die.

It’s a funny comment because I think you could also argue that the government misappropriated a huge amount of public money to put a man on the moon in the 1960s, when it should have invested that into medical research or better transportation infrastructure in America. The fact that the private sector hasn’t developed moon travel yet is a sign that it’s just not that important to most people, not a lack of productivity.

Or maybe that the return on investment is data they can't directly commercialize. Though I guess they could auction off pieces of the moon to the highest bidder or something of the sort. But yes I think we can all agree that that money could've been better or at least far more efficiently spent, same goes for the US's colossal military budget. This is in a nutshell the whole mindset behind the EU's spending the way I see it - social programs first, science second, everything else third.

Enjoy it while it lasts. The EU countries have only been able to under spend on their militaries because of US security guarantees. That subsidy is coming to an end one way or another and they are rapidly increasing defense spending. That means austerity for social programs.

In terms of novel drugs introduced per year (not just repackaging existing drugs), the EU as a bloc is consistently behind the US. So, their scientific spending doesn't seem to be paying off in pharmaceuticals.

I think patents are better overall for society as it encourages rapid disclosure of new ideas and applications, instead of people withholding information because they are worried of being copied after they go to market.

As an aside, there are plenty of inventions that were developed or rediscovered long after they were technologically feasible. The whole Middle Ages occurred because we forgot how to do things they knew how to do in ancient times and never documented, like how to use concrete. Other things were just never thought of until much later, like the analog phonograph could have been created in ancient times but no one tried running a pin over a grooved surface.

Record players aren't as useful without record carvers. Without electricity, recording and playing records is not easy or sounding good.

A player piano is a better example.

Antiquity probably had many inventions thta died out when the local village did. Life was expensive, and capital hard to come by. If a patron wasn't interested and aware, development stalls.

Yeah true, but a player piano requires inventing the piano ;)

It’s definitely possible to make a recording without electricity, it just requires steady source of rotation for engraving, so maybe a spring or motor was a necessary precursor to make it useful.

I think the disclosure part used to be more important in the past when progress was slow, but today the twenty years given in return is an eternity to block other development for, as technology just keeps compounding on itself. FDM 3D printers which are arguably an indispensable tool for all kinds of research were blocked this way from 1988 to 2008. Maybe Stratasys would've hoarded the design and kept it secret until they could perfect it, maybe the processing power wasn't there yet... or maybe we could've had low cost 3D printers in the fucking 90s and actual flying cars or something by now with how much progress that would've enabled. But I digress...

I think it depends on the nature of the idea. Some are so original that just the idea independent of the execution are worthy of note (famous conjectures in mathematics come to mind).

Some seem so obvious that it seems likely that many people dreamt of them at the same time. Hard to tell in this case.

I just don’t see value in original ideas. IMO ideas are statistical outcomes that are bound to cowme to muktiple people, typically with ever-increasing audiences and likelihood as the world advances.

So there may some some first mover advantage in being lucky enough to be (among) the first to have an idea, but first mover itself is of debatable advantage.

Help me see why you think an original idea can be priceless?

No, ideas are worthless, anybody can come up an unlimited number of these ideas, if they were valuable you've got infinite value and that's ludicrous.

Several other things really are valuable, one thing that surprises people is that Advertising is actually valuable, if nobody knows you made this thing/ service/ whatever then they can't benefit from it. Now obviously there's a big gap between "Have you heard about bicycles? I was dubious at first but it was surprisingly easy to learn how to use it" and the pop-up insisting that maybe you've got Restless Leg Syndrome and should ask your doctor - but fundamentally advertising delivers some value for our society.

Just because you can come up with an unlimited number of ideas, does not imply that all ideas are of the same value. I can think of an unlimited number of numbers with > 10,000 digits, but almost certainly, none that I think of will be special(lets say, prime). But, those special numbers (or ideas) are out there, lurking.

I think your line of thinking discounts how absolutely novel and groundbreaking even the idea was. It's an example of someone seeing something about reality that basically the rest of the population of the world managed to miss. I think that's pretty special - even if there was no realistic plan to implement the idea.

> No, ideas are worthless, anybody can come up an unlimited number of these ideas

If you're trying to create a commercial device, the idea is such tiny part of what it takes to deliver a successful product that it is close to worthless on its own.

But the context here is science fiction, where good ideas are a major part of it. (The other major parts are good characters and storytelling, but it's the ideas that distinguish science fiction from other kinds of fiction.)

So give the guy his due.

He looked ahead and tried to envision where technology was going, and, in this case anyway, pretty much nailed it 50 years out.

Frederik Pohl wrote, "Somebody once said that a good science-fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam. We agree."

Welcome to our patent system.

great lets see what you've invented

I wonder how is that pertinent to the argument I am making?

Or calling out click-bait and hype now requires filed patents and other "inventor" credentials?

FYI, I have 20+ years research and commercial experience developing virtual reality solutions, including published papers in scientific journals. Unlike patents and far-fetched ideas left for others to sort out, journal papers actually require results to be demonstrated and undergo peer review.

Does that qualify, Mr throwaway account?

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