I get encouraged reading HN. It's not a zero-sum game, a rising tide lifts all boats and all that. Having so many smart people eg developing cool open source helps me, and vice versa.
Sometimes I wonder, though, what's the purpose of associating oneself with advances in the world? If you knew other people could do it better, would you still want your solution to win? I guess the answer is that we don't know other solutions are definitely better, when everyone is developing theirs, and betteris a relative term.
Perhaps it's more interesting to think in terms of Alan Watts' philosophy of growing and competing. Things just happen and there is no "ceramic theory" of good ideas.
I love hearing mathematicians talk about picking problems. You think hackers have it hard about seeing other peoples accomplishments and feeling powerless? Try being a mathematician and hearing about how Gauss or Euler were better than you at the age of 15! And mathematicians devote their whole [professional] life to solving problems.
One advice I hear often is: if you're not the quickest, just don't try to race anyone else for solving a problem (there are many people you could legitimately call 'genius' working on certain problems!). Work on things you know no one else is working with -- if you fail, it's only because the results aren't very useful (but for most things it's really hard to tell when they'll be useful anyway). I call this "work orthogonalization".
And there's my favorite, and probably most often said: be guided by beauty. If you feel what you're solving is "just right", it most likely will work and will work well.
Common sense stuff, so it has exceptions of course. Engineering for instance has a whole extra layer where we have to deal with physics, resource constraints and follow more closely the needs and demands of our users.
"if you're not the quickest, just don't try to race anyone else for solving a problem"
I have heard that too. I was talking with a noted probabilist, who co-authored a well-regarded book, about some work that Michel Talagrand (a very accomplished mathematician) was starting to publish.
He said, "just have to get out of the way," and when I gave a quizzical look, continued, "That guy is a bulldozer." Basically, you might sweat for a year and end up being a special case of a more general result that Talagrand just proved.
“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.”
―André Gide
Sometimes I wonder, though, what's the purpose of associating oneself with advances in the world? If you knew other people could do it better, would you still want your solution to win? I guess the answer is that we don't know other solutions are definitely better, when everyone is developing theirs, and betteris a relative term.
Perhaps it's more interesting to think in terms of Alan Watts' philosophy of growing and competing. Things just happen and there is no "ceramic theory" of good ideas.