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Until I joined HN I wasn't aware that all these tech companies deserve the same rareified air as core scientific research. The real world barely thinks about Airbnb and how it's "revolutionized the world for a narrow slice of remote tech workers that want to rent a house in Mexico for a month".

If anything "the real world" (read: average people) don't care about core scientific research either. Maybe when they or their parents get ill they care about medical research, but that's all. Try to pick any Nobel physics nominees in past 50 years and explain why their work is important to average people.

It's an easy task because many of the prizes are given well after the discovery and so many are for things everyone recognizes.

For example, Bohr was recognized in 1975.

Some prizes for more recent discoveries:

2014: Blue LED 2009: fiber optics and they blue lcd.

Oops I meant the CCD, not blue lcd.

That really doesn’t sound hard, try taking the initial pitch for Reddit and explain why anyone should care about some internet link aggregator.

But by that argument, we'd no doubt still have transistors if the transistor hadn't been invented. The traitorous eight, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts shaped our world in a way that no one else could. Same with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We'd no doubt still have computers, and smartphones, but the landscape would be much different and we'd be poorer without them.

The larger picture is to say that you can have an effect on the world. Even if it is just being in the right place at the right time, what you do, and how you do it matters. If Elon Musk hadn't bought Twitter, there would still be a Twitter, but with less Elon Musk brand of shittery. Maybe a different brand of shittery, but it would be that other person's brand.

The point I was trying to make is that just ordering take out food on a computer or storing files on a computer on the network or sharing URLs and comments on a public website are not ground breaking ideas - these are trivial ideas that I am sure anyone here could have come up with.

But the transistor? Or the laser? Are these things that were thought up by the layman independently on a regular basis? (i.e. like the ideas for a lot of the y-combinator startups have been thought up independently many times over by laymen) I don't think so. I feel like these scientific endeavours require years of hands on scientific research and hard work before they ever become anything meaningful, and not just an idea for an app that pops into your mind while sitting on the toilet one day.

I think articles like these and the recent "how to do great work" one recently shows quite how out of touch and how much of an over-inflated sense of importance people in the tech industry can often have - to even begin to think that booking a taxi on a computer is anywhere close to something like inventing the transistor is just absurd.

Storing file or sharing URLs aren't, y'know, the transistor but looking at say WeWork, or MoviePass, the companies that have succeeded at that says successful despite naysayers. I think it's overestimating their intelligence and under estimating yours (and mine) to think that you and I couldn't have come up with the transistor given the exact same set of circumstances, and over estimating yours (and mine) to think that our file or urls service cold be as remotely successful. We can agree to disagree, I suppose. The laser was preceeded by the MASER and was deemed to be a niche device, of no interest except maybe to a few. History proved otherwise, and I hope to be able to afford a 4k laser projector in the near future. It could have just sat in the dustbin of history like the memristor but the right set of people found it and brought us to the world today.

Thank you for calling this out!

I think the cult of pg is strong on this website, but it's important to strive for a bigger perspective.

I don't think. credit card processing is curing cancer either, but the level of adulation some people have for others, and lack of respect for others, is either worth calling out. Have a bigger perspective. I think you could have invented the transistor given the exact same set of circumstances, and I've never met you.

> These people just happened to be born to the right parents in the right country at the right time to have the privilege to have someone throw money at a not very original idea that could have been anyone's

You elaborated precisely that not just anyone could have implemented the ideas, which is in fact the single most important thing. Having an idea is not very meaningful, as nearly all ideas are close to worthless. It's a common mistake to think ideas are what have a lot of value.

The thing that primarily matters is who can and or is willing to act on an idea, who can bring it into existence (whether in a tangible sense of a product/service, or in terms of reaching a community to spread an idea (such as an idea in the field of published science)).

Those ideas only come into existence as a thing because some people were in the right place at the right time to make them happen and acted on it (with several other critical factors being required, some of which you listed). Not just anybody can bring an idea to fruition; literally millions of Internet users could easily have the idea for a subscription Internet-based Photoshop (circa 10-15 years ago) - now try making it a thing and try making it successful.