hyperthesis

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Humanity's greatest creation is therefore manufactured scarcity, through marketing, mortgages and competition.

Similar to TFA's footnote 4 (switching from `cat` to `curl`), it's easier to edit the filename with `cat`, because it's nearer the start.

Yes, there's an argument that our "increasing returns" are related to population size, not technology itself. So the coming population plateau may be interesting. Perhaps AI's will compensate for this.

Tooth decay rate? Smoking and obesity related diseases?

I think getting something worthwhile done is a better focus (actually quite hard!), and naturally increases your productivity as a side-effect.

Productivity has no inherent value - like efficiency and perfection, it is necessarily of something else. Its value is entirely derived.

I've always thought a x10 is one who sits back and sees a simpler way - like some math problems have an easy solution, if you can see it. Also: change the question; change the context (Alan Kay)

(And absolutely not brute-force grinding themselves away)

What aspects does fidelity improve?

Your point on a/v feedback reminds me of "cow clicker", started as a joke, creating the idle-game genre.

So, important game mechanics and interactions, not the entire game.

If it's fun even without full-fidelity, it's fun. But if it's not fun, it might just be the lack of fidelity - not believable enough. I guess one needs an opinion for how much fidelity is enough to know, for the specific mechanics/interactions.

EDIT can always increase fidelity.

Through this discussion, I realize I'm more interested in "feel" than fun as such - e.g. a sense of place, being somewhere, in a walking simulator; or the feel of guns in COD. Not a mechanic; but perhaps a kind of interaction.

Not necessarily "cinematic", but probably more akin to issues in cinema than game mechanics.

I suppose one can still isolate an aspect and iterate on it; but it seems fidelity is important here...

Thanks! Seems like you had excellent ideas, for all to end up being workable.

I did similar at about 15yo, wrote a game, exhausted myself actually completing it. A game store agreed to stock it, I just needed to supply the game on media and packaging. I looked into it... runs of 100 copies... but didn't do it. Eventually made a pity-sale of 1 (one!) copy to a hobbiest.

The lesson I took was that the business side was as important as the technical side. I noticed many startups had two guys, one in each role, since they require incompatible value-systems.

Despite all the talk of "testing hypotheses", I think many of these things about the market are simply impossible to deliberately find out - just have to keep trying and learning about it: research, discovery. It requires faith/hopefulness/optimism - unreasonable, unjustifiable. With my later business that did work, I remember imagining/visualizing customers that were assessing my product and soon would buy (plausible, because the product was good; the market just needed to realize it!).

For vague, nebulous, frog-boiling decision-points, it's good to decide on a threshold, for what would it take, for you to decide to stop.

Just to be clear, you've regretted abandoning projects every single time? Or just when a similar project took off? How often has the latter happened?

"artificially create poverty" - don't like this being imposed either, but I find the real survival motivation in a wilderness situation very enjoyable. I think their concern is that people won't work without it - they may be right: many people want direction/purpose in video games; only a small proportion are happy to create their own fun.

Why not build something to help solve "finanicial independence"? It would attract money.

Please elaborate.

A well-executed game can be fun, when a poorly-executed version of the same idea is not. But if execution is everything, how can you experiment to test the hypothesis without making the whole thing?

I like the sheet music vs hearing analogy.

I think the standard trick for testing hypotheses of user experience is to fake it. e.g. a GUI with no literally backend. It feels real. (Perhaps a "sizzle reel" in pitching movies is similar)

Divide into testing market/user-experience vs technical hypotheses:

"Would it be fun" you can test by faking it, like curating it by hand for a small specific area (e.g. a popular street in a popular part of a popular city; or your hometown; or somewhere that appeals/you want to visit).

"Can I make a general algorithm using publically available data to do this for everyone, for everywhere, automatically" is the technical hypothesis. It seems like a really challenging problem! But because it is clearly defined and scope-limited, I feel it's more straightforward than the first one.

Could you elaborate on it being a "psychology problem" please?

I agree with your perfectionism point; but how to test the hypothesis that it would be "fun"? A rough prototype can easily not be fun, even if the hypothesis is true! User experience seems hard...

Perhaps this is the reason for Mark Cerny's Method in game dev: to complete a slice of a AAA game to shippable standard, to tell if it's worth completing. Because players can't evaluate the experience of a game without the finished game. It's a hell of a lot of work, like $3 million; but doing just a slice makes it less than the $30 million for the whole game.

Whereas, for some reason, for Zelda: Breath of the Wild, they developed a cheap 2D prototype to test out their "physics" and "chemistry" ideas. How were they able to test their hypothesis so cheaply?

What makes a hypothesis cheap to test? Is it a bit like unit tests versus functional tests?

I can see becoming more efficient at feeling confident in your opinion, but how can you know you were right - particularly the ones you dismissed? (Though I don't know what else one could do).

Never tell me the odds.

Learning out of interest is surely the most effective way to learn, by far.

HN began as startup news, and remains part of YC (news.ycombinator.com): commercialization bias.

I think your attitude is healthier. But fame and fortune do attract people. There is also something else exciting about a gap in the market: a kind of discovery and a way for the impact and usefulness of your efforts to be multiplied.

> I've been delaying sharing a complete list of my personal work for about 10 years

Can relate. I think the problematic word is "complete"; it's a kind of perfect. Initially aim at incomplete/minimal, then build.

winners never quit and quitters never win but those who never win and never quit are idiots https://despair.com/products/stupidity

I think this is really important, because pushing through on one project that's not working makes you neglect other projects that are more deserving of your time, attention, effort, love, blood, sweat and tears. Opportunity cost.

I had a really compelling but unproven idea once, for a gap in the market for a library. I made an absurdly ruthlessly minimal prototype in 2 hours; then spent 1 long day (9 hours) making a website. My rule was if no one appreciated it in 10 days, I'd forget it. Someone did, and it ended up making me ramen-FU-money.

Reminds me of Feynman saying that when he learnt a new mathematical technique, he'd try it to see if it helped on his unsolved problems.

I meant it's a superficial rather than fundamental design flaw, easily rectified.

interesting idea + overblown expression = advertisement

So, if it's so bad, the more productive companies will take over - like Costco.

Abstractions obscure connections between hidden information.

commoditizing skill

Starlink would have that control.