

Principles for Making New Things (2008) - dpatru
http://paulgraham.com/newthings.html

======
jacksoncarter

      Reddit is a classic example of this approach. 
      When Reddit first launched, it seemed like 
      there was nothing to it. To the graphically 
      unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design 
      seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved 
      the real problem, which was to tell people what 
      was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a 
      result it became massively successful.
    

I'm not quite sure Reddit is exactly "massively successful." They just posted
the other day about how they aren't making any money. In a capitalist sense,
it's not very successful if they aren't making any money.

So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page and
then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or something
to that effect. It seems massively broken to me.

I'm not trying to pick on pg. I'm trying to present the alternative which is
this: survivor bias. pg may have been in the right place at the right time
with viaweb. As an incubator, pg probably made money on reddit, but conde nast
has almost certainly lost money on reddit, so I'm on the fence about that.

Continuing on, I think it isn't unsurprising that putting $15k or so into 118
startups over the past 5 years would lead to one or two successes. pg has the
benefit of being the magnet, or is it magnate? All the _best_ ideas come to
him, but there have only been a small handful of "massive successes" turned
out. With his social network and contacts, quite frankly, I expect more big
successes than I've seen.

How successful _is_ pg, really? Do we know?

I suppose, really, my point is this: If there was a science to this, then it
should be repeatable. Since it doesn't appear that pg has repeated his viaweb
success in over 10 years, I wonder where is the science? Is pg just someone we
choose to listen to because it feels good? He makes hackers feel good and
important and understood? He can empathize with us, so we lend him our ear?

But are we wasting our time?

I love hn, I love listening to pg on stage talk about startups. It's like
chicken soup for the startup soul. But maybe I'm being misled. Maybe it's just
feel good, irrational stuff that isn't practical or beneficial -- and perhaps
even harmful.

How do we know we won't be listening to him and then 10 years from now, we
find out he's lost all his viaweb money. He hasn't been able to keep the
startup chuck wagon turning out profitable businesses or something like that
and we wasted all this time trying to replicate his success because... well...
he writes a lot and it feels good to read it...

~~~
bootload
_"... So how do you define success? Is Arc successful if you open a web page
and then 30 minutes later try to submit a form and get "unknown link" or
something to that effect. ..."_

I observed this in 2007FEB22 , you can see it here ~
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/398269769/> and the classic response
... _"... wouldn't have been a timeout; we probably restarted the server ..."_

Though I wouldn't call a broken piece of a webapp (hackernews) a failure of
Arc.

~~~
10ren
I agree, it's not Arc, it's the webapp. And it does seem bizarrely
unprofessional (I often consider my comments for a long time, so I almost
always get the timeout - I'm being _punished_ for _thinking!_ ). There also
had to be a substantial outcry before we got a "search" link.

Yet... HN grows and grows... it is reported widely... luminaries routinely
post here... and here are you and I.

pg has said he is careful to focus on what matters (eg. spam; ranking), not
what seems to. It appears to be working. And it exactly supports this essay's
thesis, of working on looking professional vs. what's important. Maybe it's a
bit like undergraduates handing in essays in a fancy folder?

------
vsingh
Is Arc a success on the same scale as Viaweb or Y Combinator?

In the academic sense ("was it a design that influenced others?") I think the
answer is yes. pg's essays about Arc and the language itself got a lot of
people thinking about how to improve Lisp. Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure,
was influenced to some extent by Arc.

In the practical sense ("is the community active and thriving?") I think the
answer is no, so far. #arc on freenode is dead quiet and nearly empty, and
there are only 20 new posts on arclanguage.org in the last 40 days. There's
nothing wrong with that. It's just not "on fire", that's all. Not yet, anyway.

But it's only fair to give it time. pg said:

"Number one, expect change. Arc is still fluid and future releases are
guaranteed to break all your code. It was mainly to aid the evolution of the
language that we even released it."

So it's not surprising that an active, thriving community of library creators
hasn't sprung up yet.

~~~
pg
I prefer it to Scheme or Common Lisp. But while I've spent a decent amount of
time on news.arc, I haven't spent much lately on the underlying language.

It turns out I can do a maximum of 2 things at once. I can't work on YC,
writing, and hacking. And since YC is a given, that means I have to choose
between writing and hacking. Over the last couple years I've mostly chosen
writing, but that might change.

Which reminds me, I really should do a new release of news.arc. It's
significantly better now.

~~~
brlewis
I'll be interested to see if having a child increases your capacity for
simultaneous serious projects. It had that effect on me. I think it does that
because you're forced to do lots of context switching, and eventually get
better at it.

~~~
pg
So far that hasn't happened.

------
carbocation
> I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that
> actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible,
> (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

By happy coincidence, I believe pg has coined a new term: _fiterating_ :
iterating until you find product-market fit.

------
kiba
People say my idea about combing RPG with the focus on self-improvement is a
great idea.

I don't know what to think but I am building it.

EDIT: RPG is role playing game, not Rocket Propelled Grenade.

~~~
kirubakaran
It is a great idea. Build it.

~~~
kiba
Well, PG's ideas were considered bad by early opponents. Mine is just
considered, well, _good_.

So I don't have _adversaries_ , just encouragement to build it.

~~~
kirubakaran
It seemed to me that many of Arc's early critics were actually pg's fans, not
adversaries. They seemed to have expected too much.

------
Jun8
"I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first.
I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more
to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this
strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average
person."

For me, this was the most important point. True entrepreneurial genius is
being able to differentiate between ideas that seem wrong/impossible to the
masses but are right and those that are plain wrong in the business sense.

------
unboxed-value
_People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such
things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the
current that they reversed it_

I totally understand the difficulties reddit faced (chicken&egg) but I don't
understand "pushing hard against the current" part. What current? People love
wasting time online and keep looking for new ways of doing it. Yes, getting
their attention (or even noticing you) may be hard, but pushing against the
current?

~~~
nostrademons
A lot of people look at Reddit now and think "What current?", but it wasn't
like that in 2005. The notion that cyberspace was some place you went to waste
time was just getting started - Reddit didn't invent it, but they caught the
early phases of the wave, and it wasn't at all obvious to everyone. There were
no such things as FaceBook apps in 2005. FaceBook itself was limited to
college students (or it had _just_ expanded to high school students). There
was no Twitter, and no Zynga, and YouTube was _just_ getting started. Most
people hadn't heard of Digg, and sites like StackOverflow or Hacker News were
far off in the future. Casual games were around, but they didn't make
headlines the way they do today.

Yes, there were people who wasted time online, but they were usually people in
niche subcultures like fandom or gaming. Many of the early Web 2.0 successes
still had a significant productivity bent to them, eg. del.icio.us was seen as
a way to organize your bookmarks online, Flickr grew a large community of
professional or semi-professional photographers, and blogs were often viewed
as a way to increase your professional reputation.

People love wasting time online _now_ , but that was not a mainstream view
when Reddit started, and they are perhaps responsible for some of it. That's
what PG means by pushing against the current.

~~~
_delirium
I don't think that's really true. By 2005, online time-wasting was _huge_ ,
mainstream big-business. MySpace was sold for $580 million in 2005. I mean,
when even Rupert Murdoch thinks social media is the next big thing, it's not
exactly a secret.

------
pinkode
_Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems
(c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as
possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating
rapidly._

Ughh, easier to say than find! :) There are thousands of very, very, very
smart people running around looking for "simple solutions to overlooked
problems". I like to ask entrepreneurs what are their thoughts on this intense
cutthroat competition. The best answer/advice I've got so far was "Watch those
who almost succeeded and learn from them".

Now I need to learn to distinguish between "failed" and "almost succeeded". :)

Also, can this be related to "idea vs execution" question? Finding an
overlooked problem is an idea (very hard) and coming up with a _simple_
solution is "execution". Both are overwhelmingly hard to crack.

~~~
dpatru
> _There are thousands of very, very, very smart people running around looking
> for "simple solutions to overlooked problems"._

I don't think you have reason to be so pessimistic. Sal Khan, maker of Khan
Academy, mentioned in an interview that while a lot of people were predicting
that efforts like Khan Academy would spring up, in fact, there are very few of
them that had. Sal is just one guy, who up until recently was working part-
time and unfunded, who now has the largest private tutoring service in the
world. This during a time when thousands of "smart" people funded by billions
of dollars were ostensibly trying to do something similar. The number of
people who actually start working on solutions is orders of magnitude smaller
than people who are merely "looking for" solutions.

------
Vicarious
pg's modus operandi seems to be almost exactly opposite to the prevalent style
in academia.

    
    
      I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked   
      problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d)    
      deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a   
      very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

------
watmough
For me, the main corollary of this essay is that individuals in small groups
have much more power and leverage than people might think.

You really do just need a good idea.

~~~
gosub
and perseverance.

~~~
watmough
Yeah, that definitely shouldn't be underestimated. Even launching a simple
web-site demands a fair amount of time in support and promotion and
maintenance, which you just can't blow off.

