

Infinite monkeys and infinite repos - koomerang
http://robertheaton.com/2013/04/09/infinite-monkeys-and-infinite-repos/

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praptak
This looks good from the perspective of a customer. This also looks good from
the perspective of the rare successful monkey team (survivor bias.)

But for an average monkey before the startup experiment this looks rather bad.
Unfortunately this is just the monkey you are.

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davedx
>Creating something transcendentally awesome requires doing stuff that at the
time looks completely random, and it’s the ability and willingness to do this
that will make you incredible.

>Have the courage to try things that look like they could only have been
conceived by an inexhaustible supply of apes. It’s not necessarily a terrible
thing to be an Infinite Monkey Startup.

No thanks, I'm going to spend my valuable time trying to build things that fit
a market and satisfy genuine customer problems.

I don't get this, it starts off talking about human startups being bad at
customer development and feedback loops, but then says "just do something
random, lol". I know it's supposed to be light hearted, but I've read more
interesting articles on TechCrunch. (Zing).

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k__
Some people want to hit the world with something new and some people just want
to get rich :)

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kybernetyk
And then there are people who want to create great products and get paid to
support themselves and further development. Neither selling snake-oil nor
starving are an option to them.

Please don't make it sound like not making "free/libre open source" would
equal being a greedy capitalist who only cares for profits.

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mesozoic
You seem to forget about the infinite number of photo sharing apps and social
media aggregators you would also have. And the infinite amount of monkey
groups that invented monkeycrunch and the infinite amount of monkey startups
that read monkeycrunch religiously.

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breadbox
Indeed. The central point of this post seems to be that "an infinite number of
startups" would be "arguably more diverse". Well, okay.

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davidw
I thought this was going to be about the insane proliferation of "forks" of
any given popular github repository.

Some advice: just forking something and hacking on it is just the start. If
you'd like to give something back to the open source community, be sure you
communicate with the other people involved in the project about your changes.
That may be a pull request, but for more complex things, might well also
involve writing something to the mailing list.

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wambotron
I thought the exact same thing.

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tenpoundhammer
I like the idea of the article, but it falls apart in the real world, on the
individual level. Each human has a finite amount of resources, time, and
energy. Therefore we tend to invest in those projects that we feel will reward
us in the way we need to be rewarded. For most people that is monetary, as
people we like to eat, more than bananas.

If we had a social system that had a softer cushion for failure or a start-up
incubator that rewarded ideas that were creative we may see a larger group of
people taking risks and interesting ideas.

One of the primary differences between humans and monkeys creating start-ups
is that humans have human lives. We have bills, families, responsibilities,
higher wants and needs, and so much more. The start-up arguments seem to
forget that we are all people, real human people. Even entrepreneurs are
people, and they will have to address their humanity at some point.

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giffc
Agreed that copycatting and lame ideas are to be discouraged, but the author
makes one fatal error in my mind: consumers and venture capitalists have the
benefit of "portfolio" thinking. Entrepreneurs have all their eggs in one
basket, and a finite amount of time to make things happen. So while being
totally zany might indeed be good for the whole, I can pretty much guarantee
that it will be terrible for 99% of the entrepreneurs.

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GotAnyMegadeth
> ... the cost of domain names involving monkey puns would skyrocket. But such
> is the price of progress.

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andyhmltn
That would drive me bananas ...

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jt2190

      > The... ecosystem [of random startup ideas] would be
      > arguably more diverse, more innovative and overall better
      > for consumers. Instead of having 8 million photo sharing
      > apps and 11 million social network aggregators, you would
      > instead have an infinite number of truly bold products.
    

Somehow I think that there must be a better approach to creating more
innovation than generating ideas at random, but I get his point: There are a
lot of "me too" startup ideas. I wonder though: Is that really a bad thing?

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davedx
I think to some degree, it can show you what is in demand. The problem is, is
it something in demand by developers or by bill paying customers?

And there is definitely a better approach, it's called "market research". :-)

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jt2190
We may be talking about the inability of our research techniques to find all
possible markets then. If companies targeted markets at random, then some of
them would find the markets missed by our imperfect research. This would
require that companies stop caring about survival and profit though, so
perhaps the current funding models don't do a good job of incentivizing
founders to think broadly.

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edw519
This post is the exact opposite of my primary mode of building software and
yet I still love it. Why? Because it makes me think outside the box, which is
my secondary mode of building software.

I've longed believed that addressing the hair-on-fire needs of real customers
was the best way to stay on the critical path. But every once in a while, the
world throws you a curve ball and things work out differently.

Just recently I needed to build a bunch of tools to help me build something a
customer needed. I had no idea that the tools would turn out to be the better
product. Who knew? An infinite number of monkeys, maybe.

Thanks OP for the enlightening thoughts. Now go build something someone wants.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Imagine an infinite number of 32GB microsd cards. One of those cards would
contain at least 100's of the best apps out there for every platform, 100's of
the best books, and 100's of the best photos, as well as 100's of the best
blog posts. It would truly be original unlike all the software today that
builds on previous ideas, or books that build on previous ideas, or art that
builds on previous ideas.

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Retric
It's not that bad a mere 2^(8 * 32 * (1024^3)) cards can get you there.

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smoyer
"They wouldn’t pay any notice to flimsy trends, since monkeys don’t read
TechCrunch."

Maybe we do pay too much attention to TechCrunch, but can you imagine the
articles you'd read there when they start reporting on the Simian Start-ups?
(simianstartups.com and simian-startups.com are both available ... let the
gold rush begin).

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jentulman
Startup opportunity, dealing with the infinite food supply and the infinite
amount of monkey poop.

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GotAnyMegadeth
Monkeys are not apes and vice-versa

[http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/mammals/monkeys-
vs-...](http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/mammals/monkeys-vs-apes.htm)

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wambotron
When I read something about crushing skulls with monkey paws, I knew he was
way off. A mandrill would be more likely to bite you!

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jiggy2011
This sounds like the development process of most Linux distributions.

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drorweiss
Great post. Would be nice as long as natural selection worked so that really
awesome startups would thrive.

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richardlblair
I really am sick of people making photo sharing apps.

Can we please make something different? Please.

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nikisweeting
Your blog sub-text is missing the oxford-comma. "Lies, damn lies and
startups."

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FailMore
MONKEYSSSS

