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Re:Ask HN: What do you do with big ideas? by greendestiny on Thursday August 13, 2009 @04:42AM (#760309)
Well it all gets down to definitions and its more of a rule of thumb. However, I'm very suspicious of ideas that seem to be good only because the complexity gives them a certain gravitas. Its sort of a version or expansion (or misappropriation) of Gall's law:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

Re:Ask HN: What do you do with big ideas? by diN0bot on Thursday August 13, 2009 @05:56AM (#760402)
Please list a dozen. I like the challenge of attempting to break problems down into small parts. THx.
Re:Ask HN: What do you do with big ideas? by ntoshev on Thursday August 13, 2009 @06:54AM (#760481)
What less than a search engine can you build if you've got pagerank? in fact you can't even know if pagerank works unless you have a search engine.
Re:Ask HN: What do you do with big ideas? by michael_dorfman on Thursday August 13, 2009 @08:22AM (#760577)
Sure, but you don't need to index the entire internet to build PageRank; only a subset of pages that form a graph. And, it's pretty easy to break the notion of building a search engine into smaller, discrete steps-- hell, I'd imagine that it could be done by two Stanford grad students.