Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by. It's partly why I hated doing projects for friends as an undergrad. They'd think, I have this amazing idea that's going to become huge on the internet and really just need a trained monkey to translate idea into a functioning web property. The problem is that they'd have an idea like, "create a website where bands could upload music and users could listen for free and bands would get a cut of the ad revenue!" and then everything beyond that was my problem. Even something as simple as a name couldn't be chosen because they couldn't implement even simple things. Better yet were the people who had just "stolen" an already implemented idea (say, eBay) describe it and then at the end casually say, "kinda like eBay" as if that wasn't something I knew existed. Then when I ask, well, how should the reputation system be implemented (positive only, wait a week after each has entered their feedback to display, require some feedback or the user themselves gets neg feedback as a non-feedback provider, auto-extend auctions so that there's at least a minute after the final bid before it closes to prevent sniping. . .) they'd be clueless. Those were my problems. They had an idea!

However, sometimes people do what I would consider stealing of ideas. For example, you and a friend start creating mockups and going through the interactions and then he decides to take that and go his own way. Then again, I guess the author would probably classify that as design and implementation rather than idea.

Truly, what is patentable should be very small. Discoveries, ideas and business models are not the implementation of an invention. Likewise, it must be an implementation. For example (since the History channel always seems to have stuff about this), if you come up with a way that a gun pushes the next bullet into the chamber and pulls back the hammer, fine. If you say, I want to patent a gun that automatically gets the gun ready for the next bullet, not fine. In the first, you've done a specific thing - there might be more than one way to do it and you've developed a specific fashion. In the second, you're just saying that it could be done through some method you haven't implemented anything.

I agree with the article for the most part. People like to think they're special because of their ideas, but ideas are easy to come by.

I find this strongly depends. I agree with the article, but this sentence seems to generalize it a bit too much. As a developer, I'm bottlenecked by ideas, not by coding. And I don't mean "make a site kinda like eBay" ideas, but ideas like:

"How do I optimally distribute quality across a video frame to best approximate the human visual system?"

"How do I measure video quality in a manner that takes into account the human brain's dislike for certain types of artifacts?"

"How do I reorder the operations in this 2D frequency transform to avoid having to transpose the data?"

The answers to these are certainly "ideas"--but they're ideas that are far harder to come up with than their implementations. While "make a site like eBay" takes a few minutes to come up with and a few months of development to implement, something like the above might take an hour or even as little as 15 minutes to implement, but the ideas are few and far between.

Here's the anecdote for the third of the above:

Developer1: I found a way to make this frequency transform a whole lot faster, but I'm not allowed to say yet because my university won't let me.

Developer2: Wait, that can be done faster? I didn't think it could be done much faster. If it can, it must mean there's a faster way to...

30 minutes pass

Developer2: Here's a patch, it makes the transform 60% faster.

No speed advancement had been made in that extremely important and often-called function for over 6 months--and it took only about 30 minutes to make it that much better merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done better.

Boyer-Moore string searching is a good example of a simple but non-obvious "idea" (search backwards; it's much faster).

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-searc...

Boyer-Moore is far from non-obvious. I remember having the same basic idea when I was a kid, when I was programming on the C64 and before I had access to the internet or decent programming books. The details - e.g. jump distances based on whether and where the characters occur in the search string etc. - come up in trying to create a working implementation.

I tend to think that ideas are a dime a dozen, and actually doing it is what makes the difference - Boyer-Moore is one of the few counter-examples. But if you also had the idea... could it be that you're unusually smart?

The details of Boyer-Moore seem obvious to me, in that you bump into them in trying to get it working, even if you don't foresee them. They are like workshop improvements. Did you manage to implement a version of it, as a kid? Or is this another instance of showing that actually doing it is what counts?

Our "idea" legal structure (patents, copyrights, etc) is not about ideas at all. Its about commerce. All that matters is implementation in a manner that increases money exchange. Everything is optimized around that, or is supposed to be.

An idea itself is of little value. If it were, the really hard stuff, like math itself, would be patentable.

If you had implemented a simple string search, and then someone told you that it was usually possible to do a string search without examining all the characters of the string, you'd probably come up with some Boyer-Moore variant. Nevertheless it took decades for people to come up with it. It's one of those cases where the basic idea is the really hard part.

Binary search, among the very basic algorithms, is toward the other extreme. An incorrect version of the algorithm was published something like 20 years before a bug-free version was published.

Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) is an excellent hard science fiction novel, in which merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done better figures prominently.

Similar to your gun example, the first seven claims of Morse's telegraph patent were upheld, because they claimed his specific invention; but the eighth was struck out, because it tried to claim the general idea of transmitting information by wires.

Not all ideas are easy to come by. For example, the idea of the Cathedral and the Bazaar and discovery of Linus's law is far from easy to come by. Only great thinkers are capable of generating such ideas.

The fact that Eric Raymond generated both of those ideas refutes your assertion.

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