Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental

What Hacker News said

Strong rec romaniv · 2017-03 · on “The AI Misinformation Epidemic”

Alan Kay spoke about it length in many of his talks. For example: [this video] Excellent video. I highly recommend everyone working in or with IT to see it. I think he is right. PCs and smartphone are mostly recreating thing from the past, and not the best things either. However, this isn't because we invented everything there is to invent. It has more to do with how research in computing is currently funded and how companies approach invention and innovation.

Strong rec gambler · 2017-04 · on “Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award”

>He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people will use it. Because that's exactly what they did in Xerox Park, many times over. >That's why his designs aren't deployed. No comment. >But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good. Kay has many talks about the difference between invention and innovation (which are much better terms than ones you're using). In fact, his analysis of this difference is probably the most insightful and though-provoking technology talk I have ever seen: [this video] Of course, this subject makes a lot of developers

Recommends nrao123 · 2014-09 · on “Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress”

This slow reading idea also jives with Alan Kay's observation of "Slow Deep Thinking" which allowed us to have massive & non-incremental leaps into the future. [LINK] Video by Kay which goes into more depth: [this video]

Recommends rtens · 2016-12 · on “What's wrong with Software nowadays and how we can fix it”

Wow that's exactly how I feel. I couldn't even formulate it that well. But I'm very happy to know that other people feel this itch as well. Your sentiment of "aiming for the future we want" instead of "piling up more stuff on our existing stack" reminded me very much of this talk: [this video]

Recommends georgewsinger · 2017-10 · on “Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea”

I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind: - There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool. - Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle). - Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of). - The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the mar

Cites leoc · 2014-04 · on “Alan Kay at Demo: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental”

It's amusing that the same optical illusion has been discussed by Michael Abrash [LINK] and Alan Kay [this video] in talks on very different topics recently. > Thomas Paine said in Common Sense , instead of having the king be the law, why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just going to invert thousands of years of beliefs". Pfft, tell that to the 13th-century Venetians: [LINK] . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.

Cites goblin89 · 2014-05 · on “Why I'm sending back Google Glass”

My takeaway is the opposite—you buy Glass to buy Glass. A wearable computer with 1 hour battery life isn't practical, any your expectations won't be met, but you can be closer to the future so that you invent appropriately. Think problem-oriented vs. idea/tool-oriented mindset, illustrated by Alan Kay in his talk The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental: [this video] . As you surround yourself with tools of the future, you can think of problems and solutions no one else sees (problem-finding as opposed to -solving).

Cites ecocentrik · 2015-01 · on “Survey shows surprise decline in US startups run by young people”

Why did I get down-voted? I answered the question and added a little humor. "Innovation" is not analogous to "invention". (Here's Alan Kay on the subject: [this video] ) TLDW: Technological adoption follows patterns of consumption like fashion. When we talk about "innovation" we're really talking about technologies that succeed in the marketplace and were successfully adopted by society. Over the last decade we've seen major tech growth in two areas: mobile computing (computers as fashion accessories) and social networks. Both happen to be areas where youth culture has historically served a role as early adopters. If you're looking for historical perspective to figure out when 20 somethings were