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How to Invent the Future II - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

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  • Recommended by 3 people: 3 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2018 to 2024.
  • Presented by Alan Kay, pioneer of personal computing

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

26K views9 years ago3 recommendations

History and cultureCareers and interviewsHistory of computingPeople who shaped computingStartups

Alan Kay discusses Xerox PARC, personal computing history, and how to design technology that addresses universal human needs.

One of the pioneers of personal computing, Alan Kay thought of laptops and graphical interfaces years before they were realized. At XeroxPARC, Apple, HP and Disney, he has developed tools for improving the mind. This is part two of his lecture.

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers recommend this lecture for Alan Kay's profound insights on innovation, technology design, and thinking outside current paradigms.

mindcrimeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Why is there still guessing involved in “Make something people want”?”

…nature that really don't vary. A writer named Donald Brown wrote a book literally titled Human Univerals 3 which catalogs a number of these (a lot of them are pretty obvious though: food, shelter, sex, etc.). Kay suggested reading this book, pick one of the human univerals, and figure out a way to use technology to address that. 1: link 2: link to this video 3: link…
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mindcrimeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: How do you come up with creative, original ideas?”

…not sure I can say any of them specifically helped, although a few of the ideas may have been useful without my being consciously aware of it. I read some of the Lateral Thinking book and I vaguely recall thinking it seemed somewhat useful. YMMV. link I also recommend Alan Kay's video series on "How To Invent The Future". Part I: link Part II: link to this video Another thing: I think sometimes ideas come out that are "ahead of their time" and seemingly die on the vine, or just get left behind. But sometimes when the environment changes, those ideas become ripe to get re-invented. There's a book title Rethink that sorta deals with this idea. link Anyway, I think there's…
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matt_son Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Other examples like “Kodak missed digitization” for presentations?”

Counterpoint is that they picked one thing (laser printing) out of the dozens of ideas coming out of PARC and capitalized on it to the point that they were found to be a monopoly 0 and forced to license their patents 1. Watch Alan Kay's "How to Invent The Future" talks from Stanford about this 2 and he talks in more depth. I don't think any company could have built products around all of the ideas that came out of there and been successful, they would have been focused on too many things. 0 link 1 link 2 link and link to this video
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mindcrimeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: How do you start researching for a project idea?”

…you can find a new angle or hook that's "just right" maybe you can succeed. Or the whole exercise may actually bring a completely different idea to mind. Try to be open minded with this stuff. Also, find the two video series12 that Alan Kay did on "Inventing the Future" and watch those. He shares a lot of great ideas in those. 1: link 2: link to this video…
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mindcrimeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Where can I find ideas on what to build (for fun)”

I'll repeat my answer to the previous iteration1 of this question from a couple of weeks ago: ---- You might find something of use in some of this stuff: link link link link link link link ---- In addition, the two videos on "How to Invent the Future" by Alan Kay might be inspirational to you (or anybody else thinking about this topic): Part I - link Part II - link to this video Actually, this entire playlist is quite interesting, even if you're not looking to launch a startup right now - link to this video 1: link
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morphleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]”

Xerox made a ROI of 20000% on the laser printer alone 1. A better version lecture Alan did for Ycombinator startups 2 but doesn't focus on the return of investment. Xerox did shrink a bit since then. 1 link 2 link to this video
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roman_savchukon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Entrepreneurs Aren’t a Special Breed – They’re Mostly Rich Kids”

It also has a lot to do with "being born into context" 0 of money. I can imagine kids observing good skills (like money management or business communication) of their parents will develop these skills for themselves rather easily. 0 Quote from Alan Kay's talk for YC link to this video
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mindcrimeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Is it harder and harder to be an entrepreneur as time goes on?”

. Internet was still relatively new. I mean, if your approach is "find problem, add Internet, equals solution" then yeah, you're probably going to find it a tough row to hoe these days. But I'd challenge you to broaden your thinking and be more imaginative. There's a lot more to creating solutions that "mix in some Internet". Think about the staggering array of things you can do today, with almost no up-front investment at all, using AWS, GCE, Azure, etc., that would have cost millions 20 years ago. You can deploy a virtual super-computer running in AWS and throw it at a problem for crying out loud. Consider too the range of awesome open-source / free software packages that are out there, an…
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mindcrimeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: How to Choose Problem?”

I don't think there's one simple, straight-forward, cookie-cutter answer to this. There are a lot of different ways you could approach this, depending on ... stuff. But to start... I would say you should begin not by thinking in terms of identifying a problem, but by thinking in terms of identifying a candidate problem. That is, some hypothesis that you can then turn around and try to validate. (I won't get all Popperian here and point out that you can really only invalidate hypotheses, but instead will just lean on our intuitive notion of what it means to validate a hypotheses). Once you have a candidate hypotheses (or two, or three, whatever) there is a somewhat straight-forward process fo…
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greenyouseon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Billionaires Build”

Alan Kay had an interesting talk about designing for the future. One part was on building a company to appeal to basic instincts vs creating tools and systems to benefit people. link to this video There are universal human traits that have negative impacts on people over the long-term but are craved during the short-term. These are like legal drugs. If you can use a few of these traits and tie them to an addictive feedback loop, then you probably have a product that's successful (and totally evil). It's concerning that some of the bestselling books in the startup bubble are about how to create these addictions in people. It would be nice if there were more tools and systems companies for helping humani…
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morphleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2023)”

Location: Europe, Brazil Remote: preferred Technologies: Custom Supercomputers (always cheaper than existing hardware, especially Wafer Scale Integration running on solar, starting at $100K), P4/openflow proframmable terabit linespeed routers, custom chip design and IP, custom terabit optical internet and solar battery energy providers, EV chargers and datacenters, Smalltalk and other late bound encapsulating object languages, massively parallel distributed message passing VM's, compilation and load balancing adaptive JIT compiling to bare metal, FPGA, ASIC and wafer scale integration, million core reconfigurable processors. Single app program bit-identical VM software, deploy on most platfo…
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Phiwise_on Hacker News • Mentions

On “What does Alan Kay think about LLMs?”

Kay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: link to this video
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morphleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor”

…lying mess. Good EDA tools should be written by just a few expert programmers and scientists in just a few thousand lines of code and run on a supercomputer. So the first ambitous goal is to learn how to write better software (than the current dozens of millions of lines of EDA software code). Alan Kay explains how 1-3: 1 link 2 link 3 link to this video The second ambitous goal is to (learn to) design ultra low power transistor and free space optics. Learn from the best quantum…
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