Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

I want to address the common demonstration of "it took you N * X hours to make something, but I replicated in N hours".

We see this statement very often. When Pinterest got popular, how long until we saw replicas? When Medium and Svbtle were introduced, wasn't it just a matter of hours to me-too replicas came along? There was one fellow who's name escapes me that came up with the hidden-left interface menu that you swipe into view from the top that's now commonly used in the Facebook app and many, many mobile sites.

None of this is new, and there's nothing wrong with it. Copying is the biggest form of flattery as is often said, and its a validation of your idea.

What happens very often is that we see great ideas in their finished, polished form. Someone's showed us the path.

When you show me how to build a bridge, I don't have to invent a bridge. In many cases, I see your awesome bridge and figure out even better ways to build it. But coming up with that first bridge, doing the engineering and testing and iterations on it, that's hard.

That's really hard.

So yeah, you can recreate what someone else made in a lot shorter time than it took them to invent it. But invent something new and you'll see it takes you a long time too.

I think you missed the authors point. When he wrote:

It took them six months and a powerful multi-person dev team to hand-code it [...] this is why we’ve spent the past year creating a tool that opens the ability to produce these stories

He doesn't seem to be making a, "meh, StackOverflow - I could write that in a weekend" kind of comment. Instead he's saying they made a tool that helps automate the process.

Not at all. I was simply using an aspect of what happened to the author to expound on something we see often but disregard.

I'm branching off from the original discussion to talk about something tangentially related but often overlooked.

It's distracting in a thread about the story.

As a counter-point I'd just like to say that I wasn't distracted or confused about where you went with your comment and I enjoyed it. Not to pass judgement on whether or not it "belongs"; just saying.

Just to belabor the point, Snowfall required original reporting, researching, diagramming, interviewing, designing, and writing that Cody & Kate didn't have to do.

Is an hour fast for making a replica? I don't know, probably. But i'm not sure what amount of time i would expect someone to be able to replicate Snowfall. An afternoon i suppose?

The point that majority of the work goes to figuring out how to execute well, and only a tiny amout towards the execution itself can be generalized to more than just copying website ideas. It applies to formulating hypotheses when solving problems. Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it. It was nicely described on LessWrong:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jn/how_much_evidence_does_it_take/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jo/einsteins_arrogance/

Relevant quotes from the second post:

(...) you need an amount of evidence roughly equivalent to the complexity of the hypothesis just to locate the hypothesis in theory-space. It's not a question of justifying anything to anyone. If there's a hundred million alternatives, you need at least 27 bits of evidence just to focus your attention uniquely on the correct answer.

At the time of first formulating the hypothesis - the very first time the equations popped into his head - Einstein must have had, already in his possession, sufficient observational evidence to single out the complex equations of General Relativity for his unique attention. Or he couldn't have gotten them right.

Fascinating links. Thanks for sharing!

> Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it.

These arguments are always a form of "Whole > Sum of Parts".

There is no such thing as private ideas.

It's always unwarrented-self-importance and greed that asserts otherwise.

>Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it.

That sounds like operative part of the Feynman Algorithm:

1. Write down the problem.

2. Think real hard.

3. Write down the solution.

Where the harder part is in actually defining the problem which you're trying to solve, then writing that down.

I dont like this as the top comment because its a tangent and doesn't address the topic of the article at all - The New York Times being crazy about what they consider copyright.

Completely OT, but when the hell did the asterisk-asterisk denoter for italics become multi-line?

geuis: you should be able to fix it by adding spaces around the first asterisk, if you're so moved.

Thanks Sara. Glad I checked back in time to catch that.

Pro internet tip: use the name people have given you. In this case, either the username "saraid216", or the name given in the person's profile.

And now that I've started on this topic, I'll also note that people make a lot of wrong guesses about gender, too.

To answer your question in the dead thread about the cold fusion scam: Ni-64 (n,g) Ni-65 (e-,) Cu-65 is physical, and Cu-65 has a greater binding energy than Ni-64:

http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/reCenter.jsp?z=28&n=36

(look at Δ(MeV), the mass excess)

The binding energy per nucleon is lower, as the other guy points out, but that's the wrong metric because Cu-65 has one more nucleon. The free neutron coming in has zero binding energy.

> Completely OT, but when the hell did the asterisk-asterisk denoter for italics become multi-line?

I'd say since forever. I don't remember it working differently, and I've been around for some time now (old account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pygy)

This is pretty crazy - I've been on here almost as much as you!

I dislike that as well.

It's a multifaceted coin with many things to discuss, but let's take an easy one to start.

"It took me 3 minutes to run a mile."

Neglecting history, it took you three minutes to run a mile. What about all the running you've done before? What about all the healthy decisions you've made to bring your time down, all the discipline it took to stay on task and the motivation to accomplish that 3 minute mile.

It took you X years (age) to run a mile in 3 minutes. Every single decision that you made in your life influenced (positively, negatively, or neutrally) your ability to run a mile in 3 minutes. That's a lot of information to hold, but it's not just the output that is important - it's the progression from input -> output that's the important and time consuming process.

The difference between creating Snow Fall in 6 months and replicating Snow Fall in 1 hour is the difference in the questions asked (the input->output that brings you there). With Snow Fall, there wasn't an 'end' to know when you're done, you can't get to singletons, you have to build forward and decide when you're done. When you replicate, you start with a singleton, and you recreate that system. You have an end point, and you have the lightning bolt of all decisions, contemplations, and ponderings that created Snow Fall.

What if to recreate Snow Fall, you first had to learn to use a computer. Then you had to learn to code. Then you had to learn how to browse the web. Then you had to find Snow Fall. Then you had to decide you want to recreate Snow Fall. Then you recreate Snow Fall. That might take a little bit longer than an hour. Relative to you it's an hour, relative to someone who was just born, that's years apart, and this particular problem probably won't matter in their lives.

It's easy to follow the path down the mountain. It's much harder to be the first to climb the mountain.

You're missing the point, they spent a year to create a toolkit so that you could create something like Snow Fall in about an hour.

"The initial implementation took X people Y months to complete. We've labored hard to create a tool that will let you do the same thing in Z hour(s)."

Sometimes things can't be made until other things are made first. These subtle iterations are the root of why some inventions or discoveries are made at the same time in different areas by different groups. This is called "adjacent possible".

The second step is always easier than the first. It's just that even the first step is always the second step to someone else's first (and second) steps.

This is similar to the Egg of Columbus - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_of_Columbus

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