Marc Andreessen “tried really hard not to invent anything new”
horsesaysinternet.com
horsesaysinternet.com
The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers).
The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes)
The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board. Gliders already existed - you just couldn't go anywhere with them! You can't just jump off a cliff and glide to China.
Google? A more advanced MITS algorithm + inktomi's commodity cluster map-reduce architecture + inktomi's PPC. Indeed, had inktomi doubled down on search instead of their CDN, we might well be talking about inktomi and not Google.
General and Special Relativity? Nope - http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-Einstein-had-never-existed-at....
There are no really new ideas out there - merely combinations old ones that "hang in the air". There are no new ideas - merely old ones combined in unique ways.
Everything is a remix (https://vimeo.com/14912890).
Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created.
This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology. Of the countless intermediate forms, you cannot point to a single one as a 'completely new' species. However, 1000 generations after an earthquake, the species on both sides of the created ravine have diverged so much they can no longer interbreed. There are now two species where there was one, so a new one must have come into existence, right?
Andreessen is completely right in suggesting you don't want to aim to invent something 'completely new' on the spot. Nevertheless, if you can see where something could be going, you could aim for something new say 10 years down the road.
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
> if you can see where something could be going
This is kind of a punctuated intellectual evolution. The idea is to "go where the puck is going to be" - which is perfectly reasonable as intelligence is not constrained by natural evolutionary mechanisms.
YouTube's Jawed Karim said this exactly when he stated that their success was a "confluence" (see what I did there) of Dot-com bust dark fibre lighting back up, the introduction of cheap DSL broadband, the integration of computers in all American households, the domination of Adobe Flash and the rapidly decreasing cost of storage/computation.
He also stated that YouTube was nothing new. It was merely a combination of other technologies which arrived at the right time to be held up by a rich society and progressive technology to become one of the biggest internet properties the world has ever seen.
A confluence of events if you will.
No one disagrees that all inventions build upon older ideas and inventions.
Your attempt to redefine what the word "new" means in the realm of inventions doesn't logically prove anything. It's just kind of a semantically-induced logical dead-end.
A confluence of events if you will.
This reminds me of arguing with a Creationist about the statistical likelihood that DNA would have assembled randomly from the primordial ooze. They claim that man must have been "created" because of the statistical unlikelihood that base chemicals would just randomly assemble into a living creature. Their arguments always ignore the electro-chemical and evolutionary forces that drive the "confluence" and turn it from a random coincidence to a statistical likelihood. Likewise, you appear to ignore the drive of the individual inventor in assembling and delivering pre-existing technologies.
Were the technologies unavailable to make YouTube before it was made? No. What was new was the assembly of those technologies at the proper time when they could be supported by the environment. As individual technologies, nothing was "new". As a whole, it was definitely new.
Once again, I perceive your argument as an exercise in semantics to denigrate the new by redefining "new" in order to make some larger argument about the incremental contribution of inventions made by inventors. In order to reach your same conclusions, one would have to pretend that there was no novelty in the way that pre-existing things were assembled.
There are negligibly few atoms on the Earth that weren't here 4 billion years ago, yet I doubt you'd argue that nothing new has appeared on the Earth since then.
[Edit: Clarified the Creationist point]
Whoever said that DNA was the only thing to have been created from randomness. There were probably many self-reproducing molecules created by randomness. It does not follow that DNA was special or that any one strand was - there were always analogues ready to take its place. What was special was the environment these molecules evolved in.
Completely contradictory to my personal experience as well as to my observations in society.
In my personal life, I've known a few special people who are smart enough to be visionaries with acceptably unique visions in their fields. They inspired and drove others around them and produced successful enterprises while our competitors floundered. Without them, we would have been mediocre like our competitors.
If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple, Apple would not have become dominant and might just have gone out of business. I was there. We had Sculley, Amelio, etc. They put the lie to your "no one is special" theory. They failed and almost drove the company out of business. Jobs came along and completely turned the company around. He made it look easy.
there are always analogues ready to take its place.
Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life, please. We know of none. Any analogues that may have developed to prevent or replace DNA's rise may well have never advanced beyond simple single cells. I'd say it's a ridiculous notion that an analogue to DNA would have filled the vacuum if DNA hadn't come to pass.
Irrelevant. These observations are coloured by selection bias.
> successful enterprises while our competitors floundered
What about all the visionaries that failed? What about the non-visionaries that succeeded?
> Without them, we would have been mediocre like our competitors.
Presumption that competitors would not have done what you had done given enough time. Presumption also that your success makes you not mediocre - when in fact it merely indicates success.
> If Steve Jobs had not returned to Apple
Some other company would've released a mp3 player, a tablet and a smart phone. Your not that special - it is foolish to be arrogant enough to think that you deserve what you get and that because your sole reason for success is your own work. This is a fundamental attribution error.
> They failed and almost drove the company out of business
Jobs came back in 1997 correct? After Windows reached its dominance correct? So the cash stops bleeding just after Windows has dominated and there is really nothing left to do but join up with them.
> He made it look easy.
Maybe because it was.
> Citation for successful analogues to DNA driving multi-cellular life
Well how do you know DNA was unique and special? Because it succeeded? That does not follow. What if the environment changed - such that it favoured DNA molecules over another just through randomness - well then the other molecules get wiped out.
It is foolhardy to assume that DNA could be the only useful substrate for multi-cellular life. But we can't rerun the damn test because - wait for it - EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE.
I end this conversation.
I guess it shouldn't really matter since someone else equivalent to both of us will step in to continue it. I mean, if Albert Einstein is easily replaceable as you said, you and I can't be important for the continuation of anything.
Everything is a remix. And there is always someone ready to take your place.
This is like measuring the slope of a line across a very large span, and saying that because the change in Y value is so large, there must be a discontinuity.
This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology....
I don't think biology is the best place to look for guidance when creating an epistemology or taxonomy of technology. The concept of species is important in biology, because it's a strong signal as to which organisms can successfully interbreed. In technology, nearly any two (or more) ideas can be combined.
If you read the battery's history carefully you'll realize that it's the combination of previous findings in chemistry and electronics. See the other comment with the history link.
Just because you cannot conceive the exact intermediaries between single cells and a human being does not mean they didn't exist or that human's appeared from thin air.
I repeat: Everything is a remix.
So to the line that separates a true multicellular organism from a colony of related cells that assist each other is not completely obvious, but when that colony starts to have specialization that's a 'new' thing.
As is the line that separates a smart phone from a normal one. Perhaps you move back the smart phone to include the first phone with an app store, but there is still a line you can draw even if where you draw it comes down the the specific definition you use.
PS: Fuzzy definitions does not mean you can't draw the line, just that different people will use a slightly different definitions to draw a slightly different line.
However there are indications that it too is neither unique nor special and may very well itself be a simulation or a small part of an infinite multiverse.
Reality to you - assuming this is all real - are a series of electrical signals feed into a neural network that is your brain. Even if it is consistent - it is nothing more than information.
Edit: Whoops! It was obviously in the air in 1906, since Einstein published in 1905. :)
So if you're hiring someone to fill a role at your organization, I guess you don't need to interview them? Just put a warm body in the chair and the magic will happen?
Alternatively, why do you post to HN? The situation is here without you. Why do you consider your thoughts and opinions to be special enough to share in any way?
If you look at the development of any theory or invention you'll notice that there are multiple origins that converge to a single feature (just like - wait for it - EVOLUTION!).
Any one individual is not special as there always others who could've taken their place.
If that were the case, then history would be one steady series of progressions that would look the same from isolated geographic region to isolated geographic region and from culture to culture.
The American Indians would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Europeans. The Australian Aborigines would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the Chinese. The Incans would have developed in a similar manner and pace as the British.
They didn't. We have records that tell us about the individuals and groups who had ideas that significantly affected the course of history. Your argument is completely contradicted by even a cursory examination of the historical record.
Wrong.
Just because I indicated that others may take there place - it does not follow that anyone - anywhere could. For Einstein - another European physicist could've taken his place. For the Romans - barbarians could've taken their place (and did - remember the Mongols?). For America - the Spanish could've taken their place (too bad they lost the Spanish Armada thanks to a war started by trying to build an empire using the wealth of silver mined in South America which weakened their North American position and give Louisiana to the French who themselves were weakened by war and sold it to the Americans).
Do you know why? EXTREME PATH DEPENDENCE since all things are the accumulation of local ideas/effects - as per causality/evolution.
Also, I think you are undervaluing the worth of that discovering a use for some combination of things that have existed for ages.
I think that even can be true if that combination, in hindsight, looks like a simple continuation of existing developments. A cride analogy: in hindsight, many problems appear to be in P, while they actually are NP-complete.
However any new idea always has multiple origins. The combination may be novel but there are always others iterating on the same problem at the same time (remember Leibniz and Newton? Or Marconi and Tesla? Or everyone else?).
The only reason you think they are unique is because of success bias. You only remember the winners. But just because someone won - it does not follow that they were unique or the best. It just means they just happened to win.
Semantically, who expects that something "new" has to be made from some exotic arrangement of Higgs Bosons doing something in extra dimensions that we had never thought possible? New is whatever people tend to agree on is different enough to call it that.
In terms of your disregard of arrangement and purpose, think of it this way: The atoms that make up a human being and give him all the range of thought and emotion that he has can be copied chemically and put in a big jar. That jar of chemicals is cheap and practically valueless. The particular arrangement that makes up a human being is something completely new and different from the sum of its parts. A cynic would say, "But a living human is just a rearrangement of pre-existing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and some other common chemicals."
Zip2, Elon's first company, didn't invent anything new or solve any hard problems either (it started out as an online yellow pages). But it was really important that Elon learned from that process. And I know that he enjoyed it, I remember meeting with him when they were 10 guys in one room. And Zip2 was worth $300M to Altavista, which is how Elon paid for the Maclaren mentioned in the recent video.
I'm also glad that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and others have started to create social pressure for us to think about how to do big things that really benefit society. And maybe we only need to feel that pressure after we've done one or two successful things. As individuals it's also ok to ignore it and say hey I really enjoy building companies and don't need to change the world in a huge way.
At least that's what I've read (it's also probably the reason he started all over again with X.com which eventually morphed into PayPal).
It's a classic university commercialization effort:take ip from university for some important problem, integrate it together and give it a commercial appeal, and sell.
But it's not as easy as writing some crud site.
(So alpha-geek pissing matches are clearly a waste. Everything should be focused towards furthering your company's goals while avoiding bugs and making refactoring easier.)
(Even better, an Alpha Geek better damned well harness it for her/his own enlightened self interest, or I won't work with them.)
(Or, did you just want me to say that Alpha Geeks are all just like saints? They often wish they were kensei.)
Is there a really a debate or am I missing something? This is honestly the first thing I have seen supporting not solving a problem.
Really I think there is a place for both. He mentions avoiding the problem of search, which happened to be the foundation of a particularly successful company.
There is, but the sense is that things have shifted out of proportion.
1994, simpler times.