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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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