"To come up with something truly original, you have to ignore common sense." | Hacker News Reader

"To come up with something truly original, you have to ignore common sense."

vooza.com

108 pointsbalsam25 comments

When I come to HN I ofter scan through the top page and middle click on seemingly interesting links. That means that after 5 secs I have around 10 tabs open. If you post something which has some auto-playing stuff it will be disturbing for me because I have to search through all of the tabs and switch it off. Please refrain from this in the future. It also mixes up with the music one might listening to and ends up in a grating cacophony.

"My computer doesn't work the way I want, world please change your behaviour for me".

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/02/25/google-chrome-may-so...

Unfortunately it's a common practice. E.g. youtube does it. I'm using Flashblock add-on which activates videos on mouse click.

It's a parody, of course -- but that quote isn't necessarily bad. Tomas Jefferson is attributed with a similar one: "If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done."

A lot of the innovative companies we know did things that defied common sense. (And of course, there's a lot of companies we'll never hear of because they ignored common sense.) So, it's a case-by-case thing.

There is no record of Thomas Jefferson ever saying that.

http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/if-y...

Improperly attributed quotations are a bit of pet peeve of mine. I don't want to beat anybody up if they just read it on the web somewhere. But the problem is, anybody even slightly familiar with Jefferson would know he would never say anything like that.

Apparently Thomas Jefferson never said anything notable to popular sensibilities. I don't often encounter a quote that goes unchallenged. He seems to be a composite phantom made of misattributed quotations.

According to that Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, more than half the quotes commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson are, in fact, spurious.

Agreed; which is why I made sure to say it was attributed to him (not that he actually said it).

Sorry. I was being pedantic.

"The problem with quotes on the Internet is: You never know if they´re accurate!" - Mahatma Ghandi

I´ve actually seen this one attributed to Napolean Bonaparte and John Lennon as well...

Contrasted with a favourite from Stephen Fry: "An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."

I like that . . .

However, I think there may be some truth to it. There are plenty of good ideas that aren't in anyway new, but for some reason have been forgotten or ignored. Sometimes, it is because the technology wasn't ready, but there can be a myriad of reasons. It is often worth perusing old magazines and journals for new insights.

> that quote isn't necessarily bad

Indeed. If you're using sense that is common to everyone, then 7 billion other people will have potentially thought of it before you. Original ideas imply uncommon sense.

Original ideas imply uncommon sense.

I like that way of putting it. To me, having uncommon sense is not synonymous with ignoring common sense. Why not use both!

Exactly. It's "common" that must be negated, not "sense".

Also, you can innovate using _loads_ of common sense, uncommon loads, to the point that something evident and simple, wasn't created before by anybody.

Also, I would like to point, that it's not the same "common sense" what a developer, who is some years in a university and techie environment, specialised on a few difficult technologies, than the "common sense" of a "final user" which does not care about technology quirks, code conventions, pre-existing tools, related news feeds, etc.

Well, you innovate by ignoring common sense, but by keeping by your senses. There was a time when people believed that the human body wasn't designed to go faster than 20 miles per hour. Some crazy people disproved them. We're still on the side of those crazy people, and we're doing even crazier speeds than they proposed.

Hilarious. This video reminds me of the CollegeHumor parody of startups - http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6507690/hardly-working-sta...

I love all the bland, platitudinal aphorisms and vague "x for y" explanations. It feels like a lot of startups do this without realizing.

They covered the basic buzzword list:

* "disrupt"

* "change the way you interact/think/work"

* "like x for y"

* "pivot"

* "what if you could..."

etc...etc...etc...

Er, I may or may know somebody who has done some work under a name inspired by one of their company names. It's one of those things that seemed a hell of a lot funnier at the time, until you're trying to pitch work with a straight face.

Pivotal disrupts different by adding G to the names of competitors' products when naming their own clones: GRooby, GRails.

I'll be honest -- when I read the title and the domain I was worried someone submitted a Vooza video out of earnestness.

These videos are hilarious but also useful. Whenever you try out a new pitch (and "pitch" in this sense isn't necessarily related to VC/startupland -- think of it as an answer to "how do you spend your time?") consider these clips.

approaching Poe's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

It has been at least a year since I've seen that video, and I still have to smile when they explain "StumbleMonkey"

This should be a channel on YouTube if its not already. Great job!

A Youtube video would allow downloading and watching it offline or in a secure manner.

They should at least tell what 3rd party JS domains are required to watch the video. Allowing vooza + wistia still shows a black window instead of a video.

The other 3rd party domains, are evil facebook, google analytics, twitter and optimizely, and do not sound as if they are required for watching the video.

It looks as an other example of JS done wrong.

And yes - i've tried it in my only browser where I allow flash.

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