创业与商业paulgraham.com编辑精选
令人恐惧的雄心勃勃的创业点子
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
2012 — 2017，它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页（≥ 50 分）的那次投稿，空心点是没冲上去的投稿，点越大分数越高。
导读
Paul Graham 在这篇文章里列出他认为"恐怖地雄心勃勃"的一批创业方向——例如做一个取代 Google 的搜索引擎、取代电子邮件、取代大学——并解释为什么看似不可能的目标反而值得创业者去做。文中也讨论了这些想法为什么会让创始人觉得太冒险而放弃。
为什么经久不衰：它给创业者提供了衡量野心的框架，而评论区从技术史、"第一世界问题"和搜索引擎现实等多个角度质疑它，使文章五年后重登首页时仍能引发讨论。
HN 评论精选
技术突破往往先在矿井/工厂里积累很久，只有惠及普通人的日常需求才真正改变世界。
人们发现一种会燃烧的黑色石头；挖得越深得到的越多，但深井有水。为了顺利挖这种石头，人们发明了以这种石头为动力的蒸汽机来抽水——注意不是我们熟悉的蒸汽机，而是纽科姆蒸汽机。纽科姆机有致命缺陷：回程时冷却蒸汽，每次都损失汽化潜热；瓦特发现了汽化潜热，意识到把冷凝器和活塞分开能提高效率。于是我们该去修铁路了吧？别急，还要再过30年（距纽科姆机发明100年），铁路和渡船才普遍由往复式蒸汽机驱动。寓意是什么？100年间一次次技术大跃进中，人们发现了热力学定律，许多博学之士互相拍肩称赞自己多么成功、多么有创造力——而他们做的事是从地里挖煤。可大多数人并不挖煤，大多数人都要经常从A点到B点。只有当100年的技术走出矿井和工厂，让人们出行快一点，世界才真正改变。
jballanc查看英文原文
Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Engine has a fatal flaw: it cools the steam for the return stroke, losing energy to the latent heat of evaporation each time. James Watt discovers the latent heat of evaporation, and realizes that separating the condenser from the piston would improve efficiency. So let's go build some railroads, right? Not so fast. It would still be another 30 years (100 years from the invention of the Newcomen Engine) before railroads and ferry boats would be regularly powered by reciprocating steam engines. What's the moral? For 100 years, vast leaps in technology came one after the other. In the process, the Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered and described. Many learned men stood around patting each other on the back at how successful, how inventive they were...at digging a black rock called "coal" from the ground. But most people don't dig rock from the ground. Most people do travel from point A to point B on a fairly regular basis. The world changed when 100 years of technology left the mine shaft and the factory, and got people where they were going just a bit faster. I'm convinced that computers are still at the Newcomen/Watt transition. We have a ways to go before the world truly changes.
文章的想法局限于硅谷视角，是世界第一世界问题，而非真正紧迫的全球难题。
这些想法，以及"它们恐怖地雄心勃勃"这个判断，明显来自常年住在北加州、与科技创业公司打交道的个人经验。这些基本是第一世界的问题。真正雄心勃勃的想法是：足够便宜、可再生的分布式发电，让撒哈拉以南非洲农村不再停电；像《星际迷航》那样的合成食物；莫桑比克的农民自己就能负担得起的海水淡化。还有很多很多——硅谷泡沫之外的人面临的是真正的问题。
waterside81查看英文原文
These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time. These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas: - distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore. - synthetic food generation a la star trek - desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself There are more, lots more. People outside the valley bubble have real problems.
现有搜索无法胜任严肃的科学文献检索，这是一个小而高价值的空白。
搜索的问题不只是 Google 变差了，还在于它对我而言已经不够用：它根本无法回答我几乎任何一个想提的科学问题——没法搜索一个科学问题并得到当前科学共识或各方观点的摘要；很难在线访问学术期刊；就算能访问，也很难知道该查哪些文章来回答我的问题，有时连问题属于哪个领域都不清楚；就算大致知道领域，也未必懂那个领域的术语；无法按自变量、因变量、混杂变量来搜索；也无法按方法论质量、期刊质量、研究者水平来排序文章。我知道这不会是超过1%的人用的产品，但如果有人做出来，也许还能用在别的方面。
Alex3917查看英文原文
The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which field(s) your question falls under. - Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field. - No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding variables, etc. - No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc. I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for.
这些想法只是在击败现有公司，对社会整体进步的贡献有限。
这里展示的"恐怖野心"看起来是要打败现有巨头。这没什么不对，PG 也正确指出回报巨大（读起来很像《从0到1》）。但就社会影响而言，我看这些想法，除了摩尔定律那条（而且还都是五年前的），只觉得一般。一个稍微好一点的 Google、一个稍微快一点的 Gmail（其实已有，只要你愿意放弃垃圾邮件过滤）、一个替代牛津/哈佛的学校、一个稍微好一点的 Netflix，究竟给了我们什么？显然它们并没有解决我们当下面对的任何重大挑战。
kristianc查看英文原文
The 'frightening ambition' on display here seems to be to beat out incumbents. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and PG is right to point out that the rewards for doing so are huge (this reads a lot like Zero to One). But in terms of social impact I look at these ideas, with the possible exception of Moore's Law (albeit they are from five years ago) and think, meh? How much does an incrementally better Google, a slightly faster GMail (exists, if you're willing to give up spam filtering), a replacement to Oxford/Harvard, a slightly better Netflix really get us? Certainly it doesn't seem to solve any of the major challenges that we face today.
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