[HN Gopher] Crazy New Ideas
___________________________________________________________________
Crazy New Ideas
Author : razin
Score : 624 points
Date : 2021-05-06 11:44 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| kstenerud wrote:
| The thing is, most crazy new ideas are just that: crazy. For
| every great new invention there is the other 99.999% of bunk or
| snake oil.
|
| It's very difficult to differentiate between an innovative idea
| and claptrap. Genius is difficult to recognise because it takes a
| genius to develop the idea in the first place.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil.
|
| I think you are being overly pessimistic by several orders of
| magnitude.
| f430 wrote:
| Paul's writing inspired me to start a porn studio. Thank you
| Paul!
| bilater wrote:
| Great article. What most people are not taking into account with
| Mighty is that new ideas like this rarely stay the same...who
| knows what product/use case it morphs into? Maybe the browser
| implementation takes off, maybe it pivots to an OS rather than
| just Chrome...maybe becomes a backup / cross device solution.
| Maybe something that we haven't even thought of yet becomes
| possible with new technologies like 5G coming on board. We don't
| know.
| fillskills wrote:
| Let my people try - humbly, a startup founder
| talkingtab wrote:
| I believe there is another factor, a bit more subtle, but I
| wonder if it is more pervasive.
|
| Humans need to act. In order to act we need to believe that our
| actions are actionable. Anything, anything at all, that leaves us
| unable to act is a threat to our survival. A bear jumps out at
| you. Being unable to act because you don't know whether to play
| dead or run is deadly. Being unable to decide whether to wear a
| mask or not is deadly, even if both choices are both right or
| wrong. Maybe not said well, but when you consider all the actions
| you take in a day and what would happen if we could not decide.
|
| As a side effect, I wonder if simply voicing ideas or bringing
| into view concepts that challenge the certainty we each require
| in order to get through a day, is in fact threatening.
| ammar_x wrote:
| The main idea of the article is that when someone who is a domain
| expert proposes an idea that seems wrong, there is a chance that
| this idea is a great idea because why would a smart person
| proposes a stupid idea? They must've known something.
|
| He says that in history, great ideas started like that. But he
| didn't provide examples. I didn't find the article practical
| because of that. It would have been a lot more useful if it
| provided contemporary examples that support the claims made.
| [deleted]
| kbutler wrote:
| Sounds like an essay to state Arthur C. Clarke's "First Law":
| When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something
| is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that
| something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
|
| ...which really just boils down to "it's probably possible".
|
| Here are the three: 1. When a distinguished but
| elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost
| certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
| is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering
| the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them
| into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced
| technology is indistinguishable from magic.
| paraschopra wrote:
| The issue is that domain experts often have crazy ideas outside
| their domain. Typical example is a technical expert or a
| scientist having a crazy business idea.
| activatedgeek wrote:
| I think the key statement to realize here is this,
|
| > Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be
| safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable
| domain experts.
|
| Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half
| of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were
| riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this
| day).
|
| I don't quite think that crazy bets work on "average". On average
| they fail. It mostly so happens that crazy bets are on "average"
| taken by people with a network that can attract able and
| passionate people, who can see through an idea to its conclusion.
| This is where experts come in.
|
| Experts often rely on validation by their "community", and by the
| nature of community dynamics need to upsell. They naturally
| attract the kind of people needed to execute crazy ideas. But
| then attracting such talent also has a corrective effect on the
| originally crazy idea, such that it has a higher chance of
| succeeding by minimizing the blind spots, the unknown unknowns.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter
| half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi,
| Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit
| (to this day).
|
| I don't know about Erdos, but the other had ambitious ideas,
| not crazy ones. Evidence that they weren't crazy is that the
| problems they were working on are still seen as the ones to
| solve by most of the physics community.
|
| In fact, on the case of Einstein, he worked on much crazier
| ideas on the beginning of his career. I don't think any
| respected physicist ever thought about solving Brownian motion,
| and the photoelectric effect was an interesting curiosity but
| mostly of interest of "those inventors out there", not of
| researchers.
| agalunar wrote:
| This is the whole "black swan" idea that Nassim Taleb writes
| about - events that are very rare and unpredictable but
| completely life-changing. This might be a poor paraphrase, but
| roughly: We're not very good at reasoning about these sorts of
| events, and domain experts are not immune. It's easy to believe
| you have more predictive or explanative power than you actually
| do, and to expose yourself to unacceptable risk as a result.
| the_af wrote:
| > _I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of
| many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with
| pursuing directions which bore no fruit_
|
| And don't forget Newton!
| visarga wrote:
| This video is relevant. They talk about "openendedness",
| serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas
| (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems.
|
| There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why
| Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I watched this entire video and it's awesome. Their whole
| channel is a gold mine of information.
| visarga wrote:
| Yes, it's the best channel together with Yannic's channel.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew
|
| I come every couple of days back for more.
| cptaj wrote:
| The problem with this is selection bias. When you say you've
| studied the "history of ideas", what you've actually studied is
| the history of notorious ideas that worked.
|
| You have nothing remotely resembling a proper sampling of ideas.
| The ones that failed simply get forgotten
| keiferski wrote:
| Something I've noticed a lot lately is that _the people who have
| crazy new ideas_ are often _the absolute last people that should
| be communicating them to the world._ I'm not sure if it comes
| from the insularity of academia or just a basic inability to
| write clearly.
|
| My theory is that many domain experts haven't needed to
| communicate with a lay audience in decades (if ever) and thus
| aren't aware of their own baseline assumptions. Seems like a
| startup idea, maybe? Convert academic papers into comprehensible
| English. _Two Minute Papers_ does this but it's only for
| technology.
|
| https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai
|
| This probably applies to early Apple. Wozniak, while clearly a
| technical genius, needed Jobs' communication and design skills to
| sell "personal computing" and make Apple a mass-market company.
| aadvani wrote:
| We're building this for clinical papers! inpharmd.com We have
| 10k summarized so far
| mikewarot wrote:
| I think many (but not all) domain experts end up that way
| because they are so interested in a topic, they've internalized
| all the jargon and assumptions required to get there. It takes
| quite a bit of effort (and practice!) to keep the viewpoint of
| the common person in mind as well.
|
| Feynman loved explaining things, so he had to keep trying to
| explain them in a manner that the ordinary folk could
| understand, but he also loved physics, which kept him diving
| deeper, and playing with it.
|
| Having charisma and knowing what people want, and how to sell
| was Steve Jobs portion of the game, once the initial technical
| hurdles were solved. Woz likes to minimize circuits and do
| clever things, that was his part of the game.
|
| Here on HN, the balance seems to be keeping it focused enough
| on hacking technology, while still appealing to those who want
| to make money off of it in yacht loads.
|
| It's all about balance between at least 2 domains.
| new_realist wrote:
| "Please work on new things and sell me your equity a pittance, so
| that I may become richer on a few home runs, while most of you
| fail miserably."
| benp84 wrote:
| These two parts seem contradictory:
|
| > "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be
| safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable
| domain experts."
|
| > "The lowest form of all is to dismiss an idea because of who
| proposed it."
|
| I feel like he's prematurely dismissing the idea of _dismissing
| an idea based on who proposes it_ because of who he 's imagining
| doing (proposing) it, if that makes sense.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Biggest mind shift: Instead of asking why it wouldn't work, ask
| what would it take for it to work
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem I immediately see is that you have to qualify your
| domain experts. If it's someone you personally know, perhaps it
| would apply - otherwise you're opening yourself pretty wide to
| domain experts out to scam you.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Right. Examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially
| treated as implausible, and nevertheless worked out are
| plentiful, but so are examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were
| initially venerated as the miracle way of the future, and
| turned out to be complete BS founded on deception.
| bombcar wrote:
| And because the second group fails (or were outright scams)
| the record of all of them is lost. We know about the HUGE
| venture capital failures like pets dot com, but there were
| thousands more in the $1-10m range nobody cares to even
| document. Similarly throughout history. The "crazy ideas that
| actually worked" are talked about because of how rare they
| are.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but
| in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up.
|
| What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative
| is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we
| talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for
| years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was
| undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?),
| getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural
| SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose
| interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's
| nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers
| and robber barons. How boring.
|
| I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing
| out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well,
| it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come
| from years of insights. People without years of experience will
| be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those
| insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence
| "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine)
| will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending
| the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is
| interested in.
|
| With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It
| was the equivalent of "You like money, too?" . PG, you should
| stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the
| little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.
| zanellato19 wrote:
| Capital is the most conservative thing that exists. Any little
| sign of trouble and it flees. VC is not different, they just
| play the odds and invest in a way that the money is guaranteed
| back, but the optics is that they are "taking risks". They then
| lobby to have the goverment take that risk away, lobby against
| employees having power to never have any risk and so on.
| Capitalists are the most risk averse people.
| 131012 wrote:
| And the fact that he states that he uses the word in the right
| way doesn't make it right. In fact, I find the use of the word
| paradigm quite shallow and disconnected from the Kuhnian
| definition.
| antipauline wrote:
| > _There 's nothing original there, it's the business model of
| carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring._
|
| Indeed. Venture capitalism is still capitalism, with all its
| abuse and exploitation.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| All governments are slowly and inexorably moving towards a
| synthetic mix of capitalism and socialism. The problem in the
| US is _unfettered_ capitalism, which has metastasized into an
| attempt to capture the ENTIRE vertical stack of any business
| enterprise. That's the whole play of VC money today: find a
| segment of the economy to monopolize, run everyone else out,
| and then extract ALL the profits, from top to bottom. In my
| opinion, we need GDP-adjusted limits on how large a company
| can be, in several different dimensions.
| lbacaj wrote:
| Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what
| motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It
| mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others
| can be extraordinary, it's par for the course.
|
| As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel
| corona-virus within a year. These companies didn't do it out
| of good will, they did it because they knew they could make
| money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it
| turns out it's hard to force people to produce innovation
| without the right incentive structures in place.
|
| If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature
| this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most
| effective at tapping human psychology to push people to
| produce the best possible work.
| lostcolony wrote:
| As of November last year (let alone anything since re:
| distribution), US governmental agencies paid $2.5 billion
| to Moderna to develop the vaccine and buy doses (and there
| already had been work done by Moderna on mRNA vaccines).
|
| As of July last year (again, let alone anything since), US
| governmental agencies had paid Pfizer $1.95 billion.
|
| So, basically, the government spent billions for something
| they then distributed 'for free' to the taxpayers.
|
| That's an interesting example to pick for 'capitalism'.
| lbacaj wrote:
| The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever
| market rate they/the market set.
|
| Just because it was the government that paid them, why
| isn't that capitalism?
|
| Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what
| they'll charge for the greater good of the people. At
| least that's what it is to me, someone from a former
| communist country.
|
| Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it,
| but others got paid to make it, and yet others got paid
| to distribute it (pharmacies etc).
| lostcolony wrote:
| >> 'at whatever market rate they/the market set'
|
| Really? I would have expected something a bit higher than
| $20-$25 a dose, given the limited supply (it was pure
| research at the time), and COVID was decimating the
| country (so extremely high demand). I mean, a single dose
| of insulin, requiring no research, and no protective IP,
| and costing cents to produce, will run you or an
| insurance company hundreds of dollars. Given the huge
| demand, and the non-existent supply at that time, there
| is -nothing- in the market that would have capped the
| price for the vaccine at $20-25, except either human good
| will (which is not a market factor; again, see insulin),
| or the very real threat of government action.
|
| >> At least that's what it is to me, someone from a
| former communist country
|
| And voting Republican is what Democracy means to plenty
| of people living in the US. If we actually go to what the
| dictionary definition of socialism is, rather than a
| particular interpretation or lived experience of
| something called it, it's "(a political system wherein)
| the means of production, distribution, and exchange
| should be owned or regulated by the community as a
| whole".
|
| The governmental decision to offer something for free to
| everyone is a socialist one; the use of government
| regulation as an implicit threat to pay what is
| reasonable to offset cost, rather than what the market
| could dictate, also speaks to socialism. Yes, it was a
| private company that produced it, but both the exchange
| and the bulk of its distribution are very much being
| carried out by government, and even where not, are being
| very tightly regulated by government. All of that in
| response to community need and desire, not merely the
| strictures of the market (which otherwise would have seen
| a major profit opportunity).
| lbacaj wrote:
| Appreciate your comment, it's good learning for me to
| hear a different opinion.
|
| I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist
| system too far.
|
| But the main point still stands I think, the response to
| the above comment and the fact that it is very much those
| strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in
| our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to
| do something or pure good will that lead to these
| results.
| lostcolony wrote:
| That I can agree with. Ensuring people can reap some
| benefit to their efforts is important. The problems with
| capitalism that I personally have tend to be around
| places that people are able to reap benefit from other
| people's efforts unduly (i.e., billionaires), or from
| other people's needs unduly (i.e., shareholders making
| bank from healthcare).
| antipauline wrote:
| > _As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel
| corona-virus within a year. These companies didn't do it
| out of good will, they did it because they knew they could
| make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because
| it turns out it's hard to force people to produce
| innovation without the right incentive structures in
| place._
|
| Most vaccine development occurs in academic research
| institutions, even if the large-scale manufacturing is then
| taken up by the capitalists. For example, the Covid vaccine
| manufactured by AstraZeneca was created by and innovated
| upon by a vaccine research group in Oxford University, who
| are obviously not in it for making vast wads of cash. And
| in general, it's the state who funds vaccine development,
| and the state who buys the vaccines.
|
| On the broader subject of medicine, capitalism also gives
| us harsh enforcement of supposed 'intellectual property
| rights', stymieing the availability of medicines in
| developing countries. Fortunately, it looks like this will
| be waived for Covid vaccines, thanks to some government
| intervention. But it shouldn't have to be this way. Jonas
| Salk had the right idea when he released his polio vaccine
| freely to the world, to benefit all, without profit motive.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel
| corona-virus within a year.
|
| You realize Cuba also produced a vaccine within one year.
| So did China; though some people consider Dengism a kind of
| capitalism, so who knows, good for you, maybe.
| mids_hn wrote:
| > These companies didn't do it out of good will, they did
| it because they knew they could make money.
|
| Which can exist in a socialist economy.
| ad89aud89adjas wrote:
| The whole SV/VC thing is just a big shallow marketing scheme to
| get young people buy into bad deals because they are
| brainwashed into thinking it's the cool thing to do. Have been
| there, done that, regret it. It took me years of being outside
| of SV to realize how brainwashed I was by comparing myself to
| the media and people around me.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| > It took me years of being outside of SV to realize how
| brainwashed I was by comparing myself to the media and people
| around me.
|
| The media doesn't represent normal people, and there are
| different regions of the country with very different norms,
| cultures, and beliefs. I know we are social animals heavily
| influenced by those around us, but it's also important to
| reflect and try to determine if those influences are right or
| productive.
| graycat wrote:
| "Crazy new ideas"? A VC, Graham, is praising crazy new ideas?
|
| After I sent some hundreds of emails to Silicon Valley, NY, and
| Boston venture capital firms with nearly no positive feedback
| and nearly no feedback at all, I concluded several points:
|
| (1) VCs won't invest in, consider, look at, or pay attention to
| crazy new ideas. Might guess that one reason can be that when
| the ideas are _deep technically_ the VCs don 't have the
| expertise to evaluate them, but the VC rarely seek evaluations
| from technical experts either. Net, VCs don't want to invest in
| crazy new ideas and hardly value ideas at all.
|
| (2) My best guess is that most of all VCs like to invest in
| _traction_ already significant and growing rapidly. The
| _traction_ most desired is after tax earnings, but also good
| enough can be pre-tax earnings, revenue, or just Web site
| traffic.
|
| (3) VCs also like the traction to be in a big market.
|
| (4) VCs also like a team of several founders: Maybe the VCs are
| afraid that a sole, solo founder would get into human
| relationship problems as their company grew, and the team of
| several founders helps alleviate that fear. Also with several
| founders, if the VCs don't like the CEO, then the VCs can fire
| the CEO and promote one of the other founders to CEO.
|
| E.g., I have had at least two _crazy new ideas_ for new
| businesses:
|
| The first idea was new and much better than anything else for
| real-time monitoring of _health and wellness_ of servers and
| networks. I had running code and some quite good results on a
| variety of real data. The idea would not have had the potential
| of building a company worth $10 billion but might have built
| one worth $500 million and, maybe, with more advanced versions
| of the product, continued to grow. I gave a talk at the main
| NASDAQ site in Trumbull, CT, but apparently no VC had any
| interest at all. So, I went ahead and published the work; so,
| at least it was good enough to pass peer review!
|
| Second I have an idea, and 100,000 lines of .NET code
| apparently ready for at least initial production, for a huge
| market and that, if people like it at all, and there is various
| evidence they will, should be worth $10 billion, maybe 200
| times that if I further develop the work and people around the
| world like it a lot, and there is some evidence they might.
|
| The idea makes powerful uses of some poorly known and
| understood advanced pure math (maybe understood by fewer than
| 10 computer science professors in the whole world, and only a
| tiny fraction of pure math professors will look for or see the
| connection with computing or business) and some original
| applied math I derived likely beyond over 90% of computer
| scientists.
|
| But apparently no VC in the country is interested at all. Same
| for YC, the NSF IIP, etc. But, and really I designed this
| project this way, I don't really need funding now and won't if
| the traction grows. I've had some delays from unpredictable
| outside interruptions but am about to return to the work.
|
| I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care,
| and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.
| ahstilde wrote:
| > I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to
| care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to
| believe.
|
| This is actually true. The model of VCs requires that they
| take extremely high risk with extremely high upside. But
| their job is to derisk as much as possible. They derisk
| market risk, technical risk, and operational risk.
|
| Get the traction, and the money will follow.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| There is a thing I realized a few years ago about about VC.
|
| They are not in the game to fuel innovation, contrary to what
| they pretend.
|
| They are in the game to protect old-money against innovation.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| as PG has gotten richer, astoundingly so, I feel his writing has
| become of lower quality and less general utility. But, that's
| fine. I don't have to read it, but I do still adore and re-read
| his older works.
|
| That being said, it's amazing that mental gymnastics all VCs
| these days will go through to make something that's completely
| nonsensical seem like it "could" make sense. e.g. NFTs and
| Andreesen Horowitz
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a
| person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different
| cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their
| society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics.
| You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or
| mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars
| or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telling this one story over
| and over again, a story of a person with a crazy new idea being
| ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they
| have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a
| problem.
|
| The system, lol, I mean our culture and society, is very
| resilient to change. If it wasn't, it would be a different
| system. A part of the resilience, the reason it doesn't crash
| down into chaos and anarchy is because it rejects and ostracizes
| people with new ideas. It's by design, how it evolved. However,
| it also needs to evolve and grow and the people who do that have
| to endure.
|
| Not all people who are on this 'Hero's Journey' are correct.
| Disney isn't addressing whether the crazy new idea is good or
| not, although in their media it is always a good idea, which is
| what Paul Graham is writing about. Their stories are addressing
| the journey a person endures if they have any crazy new idea that
| challenges their culture and society, good or bad. Whereas, Paul
| Graham is looking to quantify signals that a crazy new idea is
| good, something he should invest in. To which, I'd add asking if
| the person with a crazy new idea is honest, not only to other
| people, but more importantly honest to themselves, integrity. If
| a person can separate delusion from fact except for that one
| idea, that's a signal.
|
| [0]https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-
| memo-1.p...
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| I feel like Godwin saying this, but the other side of that coin
| is that's the same process that Joachim Feist's biography
| describes Hitler as going through.
|
| You might be a Skywalker, but you don't know which one.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| Also, Erich Fromm's, a German psychoanalyst, 'Escape from
| Freedom' which is a social psychology treatise on the rise of
| Nazism published in 1941 about how people innately shirk
| responsibility and the relationship between a person's
| freedom to make decisions and how much social and personal
| responsibility they assume.
|
| The book is about how Hitler came to power but what I saw was
| a manual on how to become a very evil person. I remember
| thinking halfway through the book, 'Oh, this is why negging
| is a very effective seduction technique.'
|
| (I looked up the word assume to make sure I'm using it
| correctly here and even in its definition power and
| responsibility are interchangeable which makes sense because
| there is a relationship in our reality between power and
| responsibility. Strangely, Fromm didn't use the word shirk in
| this context, I think I get that word from Dr. Seuss' 'Horton
| Hears a Who'. Probably a good thing that Dr. Seuss got to me
| first. That is the wisdom of the Disney folks.)
| the_af wrote:
| I think Campbell's "journey" is about storytelling and the
| narrative journey, with a heavy dose of Jungian psychology, not
| about tech/science ideas. So I'd say it doesn't fit here.
| tlb wrote:
| That's the part that screenwriters often talk about. But his
| book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, covers more than that
| and there are insights applicable to being a scientist.
|
| A key insight is that mythology's interpersonal structures
| are special to people, and our minds are wired to see them
| everywhere. A neuro-Bayesian might call them a prior. As a
| result, if your role in society somewhat resembles an
| archetype, the public is likely to perceive you mostly or
| entirely in terms of that archetype.
|
| Scientists are at risk of being pattern-matched to the
| Daedalus archetype. The public will ascribe all sorts of
| Daedalus-nature to you (even those who don't recognize the
| name) and you'll wonder "Why would they assume all those
| things about me???".
|
| The book may shed some light what's going on and how to deal
| with it.
| bttrfl wrote:
| Unrelated to PG's post... I had no clue what MightyApp is so I
| went to their website [0]. When I scrolled to "Work without the
| fan noise" section on the homepage my fan started to work pretty
| hard. Haven't checked if they intentionally got the fan to work,
| but it was a nice coincidence.
|
| [0] mightyapp.com
| OhNoMyqueen wrote:
| They could do the equivalent of those images comparing Full HD
| and 4K side-by-side, by having a button "with MightyApp" which
| reduces CPU load and makes your fan stop.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| I didn't think there was anything crazy about Mighty.
|
| It looks like a straightforward play to implement app streaming
| to deliver an application that holds immense amounts of
| personal data, and Mighty will (eventually) monetize that data.
|
| It feels weird to bet on devices not being fast enough though,
| in a world where my phone is faster than my laptop.
| nearbuy wrote:
| > Whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model,
| astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus
| proposed it. Far, in fact, from it.
|
| I don't think this tells the whole story. The church didn't
| immediately view the heliocentric model as a crazy new idea.
|
| > In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered a series of
| lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus's theory. Pope Clement VII
| and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures and were
| interested in the theory. On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus
| von Schonberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from
| Rome:
|
| > "... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most
| learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this
| discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible
| moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe
| together with the tables and whatever else you have that is
| relevant to this subject ..."
|
| (From
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentr...)
|
| The church's stance against the heliocentric model developed
| later, and probably for religious and political reasons.
|
| Secondly, rational astronomers shouldn't have been convinced of
| the model as soon as Copernicus proposed it. It wasn't yet
| proven. It's like string theory today. It may have been an
| elegant theory, but a good scientist shouldn't consider a theory
| proven until it's actually proven.
|
| Relating this back more generally to the essay, I think there's a
| bias in how we retell stories from history that makes it seem
| like great new ideas were initially mostly considered crazy. It
| makes a better story when one person overcomes the odds and
| invents something great despite everyone telling them they're
| crazy. But reality, most new ideas had a mix of detractors and
| supporters. We just remember the detractors better and amuse
| ourselves thinking about how wrong they were.
| grodes wrote:
| can the font size be smaller? please
| drux wrote:
| And the text a little more to the left
| [deleted]
| mellosouls wrote:
| _But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new
| ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing
| them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm._
|
| This sounds like the sort of nonsense used by scientific
| crackpots to attack their critics for "not understanding" them.
|
| Sure, your idea may be revolutionary and actually upend
| everything, but the overwhelming likelihood is it won't and you
| need to go through the same evaluation process as everybody else
| and not be so salty about that.
|
| Incidentally, I find the MightyApp concept interesting and wish
| it well in forging a new market, but this sort of rationalisation
| as the "main" driver behind reasonable scepticsm is a very poor
| defence.
| tosh wrote:
| > Having new ideas is a lonely business
| bruhhh wrote:
| Here's a crazy idea for you: use SSL on your website!!
| danybittel wrote:
| That is kind of reaching for the stars. Or shall I say last straw
| argument. I think a much easier winner is if you have a domain
| expert in one area and bring his or her knowledge to another
| field. A Designer who creates a web app to design logos. A
| fitness guru who develops a Drink. A car maker who builds space
| ships.
| II2II wrote:
| The reference to the Copernican Model of the solar system is an
| interesting one since it produced less accurate predictions than
| the Ptolemaic Model. Improving the predictions of the Copernican
| model initially involved the introduction of epicycles,
| diminishing the value of the crazy new idea.
|
| It took the work of Kepler (elliptical orbits) and Newton (a
| physical basis for elliptical orbits) to elevate the heliocentric
| model to the status that it enjoys today.
|
| There are two reasons why I bring this up: one is the validity of
| many of Paul Graham's assertions and conclusions. The other is to
| point out that things aren't so simple. Copernicus did not reap
| the rewards of his ideas since it took the work of others to
| prove those ideas. In fields outside of science, there is little
| reason to expect people to arrive upon similar conclusions. (Even
| within the sciences, there is no reason to believe we would
| converge on similar conclusions in the same time frame via
| different paths.)
| bombcar wrote:
| I think there's a very strong analogy between the Copernican
| model vs Ptolemaic and computer languages (for example) - you
| can have something like C which has obvious defects (grant this
| for the argument, substitute something else if you like), but a
| replacement like Rust isn't taking on just C, but the entire
| ecosystem around C and all the tooling and knowledge therein.
|
| Similarly the Copernican model was "more correct" depending on
| how you look at it (currently we model everything relative to
| everything else, the earth and sun "orbit" around a midpoint
| that is inside the surface of the sun but not the exact center,
| for example) but it provided WORSE predictions than the
| Ptolemaic model of the time.
|
| And this had real practical implications in the technology of
| the day - navigation charts, etc, analogous to trying to use
| new tooling and finding it doesn't support aspects the old
| tooling did.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Graham has a tendency to use hindsight to show that, yes,
| indeed he is contrarian and genius.
|
| The Ethereum people do it, too. They use the example of old
| massively successful tech to prove that Eth too can catch on,
| but they don't cite all the failures.
| antipauline wrote:
| Paul Graham is high on his own ego. Unfortunately, too many
| people take what he says at face value, like he's some sort
| of magical preacher of the Valley.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into personal attack on HN, for any
| meaning of $person. And please stop creating accounts to
| break HN's guidelines with. You're damaging the community
| you're part of by doing these things, and that is self-
| defeating behavior--especially if you consider how fragile
| this place is. I'm sure you're not the kind of person who
| would drop lit matches in a dry forest or even litter in a
| city park. Please stop doing the equivalents here.
|
| The odds are overwhelming that the internet converges to
| pure suckage. We're spending a lot of energy trying to
| stave that off. Since you're such an active community
| participant, wouldn't it be in your interests to help that
| effort, rather than hurt it?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Laremere wrote:
| To add to this:
|
| He lists two reasons why people want to dismiss "crazy new
| ideas": envy, and the desire to seem sophisticated. Using
| Copernicus as an example simply does not fit these claims.
|
| Reasons to dismiss Copernicus's ideas:
|
| 1. They were worse predictions, so for all 'practical' purposes
| of the day (essentially, only knowing where the wandering stars
| would be), adopting his ideas would be poor.
|
| 2. Most crazy new ideas like this proposed by people on the
| fringe of a field are flat out wrong. The Copernican Model is a
| good example of a common mistake, really: Someone saw a complex
| but accurate system and tried replacing it with a simple system
| that is easier to understand but rejects the actual data. Turns
| out the world is complex and doesn't care about being
| intuitive. See all of quantum mechanics for an example.
|
| 3. Classical relativity was only established later by Newton.
| The moon, sun, and other planets were poorly understood at the
| time. It wasn't until Galileo's observations that evidence was
| gained for a rocky moon. The idea that the whole Earth could be
| moving and spinning without violating everyday observation, and
| therefor the other bodies in the sky follow the same rules as
| those on Earth, is simply a large and unnecessary leap in
| intuition. Sure, it's a correct leap, but the path of reasoning
| there is backwards. It is only with Newton's laws of motion
| that heliocentrism begins to make any sense.
|
| 4. Further, much better evidence (as discussed above) came to
| light far before Copernicus's ideas had any effect on non-
| academic matters. Other than finding things interesting, and
| generally liking to know how the universe works, heliocentrism
| has no practical affect on life even today. Sure if you work at
| NASA it's super important, but most people don't. Trying to
| force an idea before it's time, when it won't effect things
| anyways has little practical value.
|
| The crux of this is that this article is not a response to
| people dismissing a new idea. It's people dismissing a new
| business. He seems to be arguing that new ideas by domain
| experts shouldn't be criticized because they might be right,
| while ignoring that people can have strong financial motivation
| to promote incorrect ideas. Fighting such ideas is good
| because:
|
| - If the ideas prove correct, internet criticism of it really
| won't matter. Only a few key investors need to be convinced,
| and yeah they'll make a lot of money.
|
| - If the ideas are wrong, healthy skepticism is the strongest
| force against snake oil salesmen.
|
| 90% of starts fail, so the criticism will usually be on the
| correct side, even if the exact criticisms don't point to the
| true cause of failure.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > heliocentrism has no practical affect on life even today
|
| I disagree. These discoveries (showing that we aren't
| "special" or at the "center") had huge
| religious/philosophical implications and through some
| intermediate steps ultimately led to the kinds of secular
| states we (most of us) spend our every day in practice.
| [deleted]
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com
| posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often
| on HN.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| People ask for the same thing for politics, and for various
| subjects. So how many different "hide" filters should we
| create?
|
| Then there's the classification problem. Is post X really about
| politics? It's not binary.
|
| The only solution that would even approximately work would be
| to add a block list of domains to peoples' profiles. That way,
| if you don't want to see anything from paulgraham.com, and I
| don't want to see anything from HuffPost, we can each do that.
| But even that only approximately works. I've seen articles
| posted here that are Twitter comments on Paul Graham articles.
|
| Or, the absolute simplest solution: Skip over the articles that
| don't interest you. It's really easy to just move your eyes to
| the next line.
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| It could be very easy. Just hide all posts from that specific
| website, a very easy filter, not classification problem.
|
| > It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line.
|
| Well if it's that easy, then why is there an hide button on
| HN in the first place?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It really is that easy. And, I don't know why there's a
| hide button. I have never used it that I recall; I had
| forgotten that it existed.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are down voted. It's a very legitimate
| question.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| should be prefaced with "within the context of american
| capitalism", because i don't think such views on personal ego and
| taking credit apply universally. There were a lot more crazy
| ideas when experimental science wasn't there to debunk them. And
| many science fields even today are lacking ideas, not methods,
| but not necessarily for fear of being ridiculed.
| kevinskii wrote:
| I can't speak to Mighty's potential, but this essay is quite
| good.
|
| As one anecdote in support of its argument, I have an
| acquaintance who co-founded a startup about 10 years ago. Much
| like Dropbox's early skeptics, I didn't understand how this
| business solved any real problem that couldn't be trivially
| addressed in a multitude of other ways.
|
| I was puzzled as the business continued to grow and open offices
| around the world, and I was astounded when they were acquired for
| many multiples of the minimal VC investment that they eventually
| accepted.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| WeWork?
| kevinskii wrote:
| Heh. Not far off, in my opinion.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I really wish PG would actually talk to some historians. History
| of Science is an extremely deep field with tons of professionals
| who have spent their lives studying this material. His overview
| is shallow. The only history book he cites is from _fifty years
| ago_!
|
| It is so frustrating. There is this huge wealth of content
| available and a large group of people who'd want nothing more to
| be able to share what they know about the history of science and
| instead we get think pieces based in hunches, feelings, and
| generalities. The historians are right there! They want to talk
| to you!
| jean_tta wrote:
| A very smart man, PG himself, once said [0]:
|
| > I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able
| to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared
| say before.
|
| PG started writing essays about what he knows well
| (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit
| (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic
| policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well.
|
| [0] quoted here
| https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm from
| there http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html#c8508
| walleeee wrote:
| I see little evidence he would want to talk to them, indeed his
| way of life is an insult to their discipline and their
| discipline is a threat to his way of life
|
| Consciousness of history is inoculation against the sort of
| "thought leadership" PG sells
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I personally know an unusual number of historians of science
| for a software engineer. If PG approached them with an open
| mind, I'm very confident that they'd love to talk to him.
| Historians do history because they love their topic so much
| that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and low
| pay. They want nothing more than to talk about the things
| they study.
| walleeee wrote:
| > Historians do history because they love their topic so
| much that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and
| low pay.
|
| Yes, incidentally people like this are probably not easily
| swayed by the minimally researched thoughts of a venture
| capitalist
|
| I hope he talks to some historians but I fear he may intuit
| this and avoid it, consciously or not
|
| I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their
| work with engineers!
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing
| their work with engineers!
|
| They do! There are growing collaborative projects between
| the humanities and software all over the place today.
| walleeee wrote:
| That's cool! Always thought that would be fun to work on.
| intergalplan wrote:
| Being actually-correct about one's historical analogies and
| still making them work (or even finding that they don't! Gasp!)
| is harder than repeating "common knowledge" tales or fudging
| things to fit your narrative while writing with the same bold
| voice you would if you were actually-correct.
|
| Not to pick just on PG--that's more common than not, really.
| anatoly wrote:
| You should use this opportunity to recommend an especially
| high-quality introduction/overview of modern history of
| science, approachable by a curious outsider.
| walleeee wrote:
| Philosophy of Science: the Central Issues (Curd, Cover, &
| Pincock) is a decent although limited aggregation
| anatoly wrote:
| Thank you.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Diving straight into books can be hard, since academics write
| for other academics.
|
| But I recommend works by Paula Findlen and Tom Mullaney
| highly! Mullaney's work pushes back against a whole bunch of
| myths about the chinese language and its effect on
| technological innovation. Findlen's work covers both the
| history of technologies but also the technology of
| communication and the nature of information in the
| Renaissance period. Mullaney is weirdly involved on social
| media so that can be more approachable and Findlen's work is
| on the readable side for academic history.
|
| The world is so much more complex than "a new idea is created
| from the ether, people criticize it, and then a paradigm
| shift happens and it takes over the world".
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I feel like the same thing can be said about Boring Old Ideas. If
| the person who is speaking to you _knows_ what they 're talking
| about, there's good chance that they've identified a
| gap/opportunity and you _should_ listen to them.
|
| This seems more like an exercise in listening and trust than
| whether the idea is crazy or novel.
| kehrlann wrote:
| It's also a common theme for Kent Beck, who "invented" extreme
| programming.
|
| > i have good ideas, i just don't know which of them are good up
| front. hence, looking foolish is a prerequisite for looking
| smart.
|
| Source:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/kentbeck/status/11329885166594867...
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Seems like the privacy implications of this are not worth it for
| any serious company.
|
| I was watching Rudy Giuliani yesterday on youtube, talk about how
| the FBI accessed and monitored his iCloud account for over a
| year. Which included his privileged lawyer/client information. If
| they can do that to a president's lawyer, while he's defending
| the president. They can do it to anyone.
| srckinase123 wrote:
| The idea of using reasonable domain experts as a filter to
| implausible-sounding ideas seems obvious for hard-technology and
| scientific problems. But what about entrepreneurial ideas that
| provide a social service, such as Uber or Airbnb? Were the
| founders "domain experts"?
| jimhi wrote:
| He has a different essay explaining the Stripe founders were
| not experts at all when they started. I think there's multiple
| paths to success and change
| bombcar wrote:
| What's interesting is both of those examples are relatively
| removed from the "original proposition" - Uber was
| "ridesharing" and now is "taxi on demand" and AirBnB was "couch
| surfing" and now is "unlicensed hotel".
| andai wrote:
| Don't scroll down.
| swayvil wrote:
| From the footnotes
|
| >3] This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may have
| an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always flying on
| instruments
|
| On the contrary, it is everybody else who is flying on
| instruments. The sperg sees straight.
| anotha1 wrote:
| Maybe he meant to say we're observing the rules via mental
| systems(instruments) we developed to "fit in" instead of
| whatever neuro-typs use.
| swayvil wrote:
| I interpreted"flying on instruments" as employing an
| abstraction-layer (insulative, enculturated, solipsistic
| even) vs direct-observation.
| zug_zug wrote:
| So for some context, "flying on instruments" is considered
| much better in flight. A fair number of novice pilots kill
| themselves because they get lost in clouds and get
| emotional and think they aren't level anymore.
|
| The instrument tells them they are level, but they get
| paranoid and either stall or crash because they don't trust
| that the machine is more reliable than their emotions, even
| when it's drilled into them.
| [deleted]
| qshaman wrote:
| He is an investor on this "crazy new idea" , I don't believe him,
| he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about
| a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido
| van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention
| a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the
| respect of millions , you don't see them hyping crappy startups
| for a few bucks (billions* ) . I do respect the founders , and
| understand the have worked hard on this project , I just don't
| think that just working hard on something makes it good , or
| whatever Paul Graham says is something I should accept as truth.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| > he is just hustling his audience
|
| And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to
| feel _something_ is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the
| default reaction to this idea is "well that's dumb".
| Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a
| smart move.
| qshaman wrote:
| yeah, good point. The saddest part is, I'm confident that
| people will buy into that "crazy idea" and before you know
| it, they have a 4B valuation. VCs always win, even when they
| loose.
| drclau wrote:
| In today's startup and VC ecosystem, they've already won.
| They don't have to ever become profitable, they just need
| to get money from their friends and connections, forever.
|
| I don't recall who said this (if anyone does, please do
| share!), but it goes something like this: if you reach
| Series F, it means exactly what you think it means. Well,
| not anymore. It won't be long until we'll exhaust the
| alphabet for funding series names, and we'll go two
| letters.
|
| And this is not even a critique of PG. It's just what the
| VC and startup ecosystem seems to have become. If anything,
| YC does seem to be a sort of counterbalance to this trend.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Sooo... it seems like you've got it all figured out. But
| from the bitterness in your voice, it doesn't seem to be
| the case.
|
| I remember being at a similar point in my life - the
| success of other people seemed so different from mine that
| the game definitely felt like it was rigged. And of course
| it was rigged to some extent given the human nature, but
| there truly is a way to take advantage of the parts of the
| game that are a more of a level playing field than anything
| we've ever experienced since the dawn of humanity. And the
| first step towards getting there is to be less bitter and
| more inquisitive. If you think you got the VC industry all
| figured out but you can't get it to work in your favor,
| then clearly there's a mismatch in your thinking.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| This is such an uncharitable read that I think it's doing you a
| disservice.
|
| I recommend imagining "what frame of mind or perspective would
| PG need to have to _honestly_ believe what he's saying?"
| nostrademons wrote:
| All of the people you mention are examples of the sort of folks
| the article mentions - domain experts with a "crazy new idea".
| anotha1 wrote:
| Looks like pg discovered consensus vs non-consensus ideas[1],
| good for him.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/entrepreneurship-at-work/non-consensus-
| ba...
| dools wrote:
| The most important idea like this in the world right now is
| expounded in the book The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton which
| everyone should read. MMT fits this article exactly except for
| the fact that PG says it doesn't extend beyond "hard sciences".
| It also extends to the dismal science
| npsimons wrote:
| > When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea,
| its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence.
|
| I mean, this is basically QAnon, antivaxxers, creationists and
| trickle-down economists in a nutshell. That said . . .
|
| > Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be.
|
| By default I assume I'm in the wrong. There's just so many
| domains of knowledge, the probability of me having enough depth
| of even more than a handful is highly unlikely. The hard part is
| distinguishing those who are domain experts, and those who are
| not, when you are not a domain expert.
|
| > If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know,
| because it means there's a hole in your model of the world.
|
| And I _love_ viewing everything as a mental model, because, well,
| it is, plus models are plastic: they can be changed. Asimov 's
| "Relativity of Wrong" comes to mind.
| 21eleven wrote:
| I think there is some evolutionary psychology at play in people's
| bias against "Crazy New Ideas". A human hunting and gathering on
| a savanna with a crazy new idea is likely to be killed by a lion
| or starve. Sure the new ideas sometimes were breakthroughs but
| the idea-haver's peers likely experienced strong selective
| pressure to wait until there was good evidence that an idea was
| unlikely to get one killed before endorsing it and practicing it
| themselves.
|
| In modern times we should feel more safe to have "Crazy New
| Ideas", we probably need them to solve many of the problems our
| world faces today. But we are biased against new ideas since our
| brains have evolved to see them associated with negative outcomes
| like death by lion or exile from the tribe. There is a lower risk
| of death by big cat today so people should feel more willing to
| have an celebrate new ideas.
| bestinterest wrote:
| Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0]
| launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently
| after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as
| Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2].
|
| [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| My hang up with Mighty isn't about their idea or their
| technology or their execution. It's impressive to see what
| they've done.
|
| My issue is that it's not a product I could feel good
| recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was
| proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and
| even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing
| options, it doesn't make sense for anyone to throw their money
| away at a SaaS service that simply cannot perform as well as
| local Chrome on a modern machine.
|
| I could see the narrow use case for limited situations where
| someone has
|
| 1. Weird IT department restrictions that require them to use
| old, slow computers but also
|
| 2. Budget rules that allow them to spend monthly money on a
| SaaS but not on financing the hardware they need to get their
| job done and
|
| 3. Guaranteed high speed internet all of the time and
|
| 4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them
| sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data
| to a 3rd party service
|
| Surely this situation exists, but it still feels like Mighty is
| targeting a broader audience by providing untrue claims about
| remote thin client technology somehow being faster than a
| halfway decent local machine. I'd feel equally uncomfortable if
| Stadia was charging $50/month while claiming to be lower
| latency than local gaming.
|
| The counter arguments about disrespecting hard working startup
| founders or doubting visionaries feel like a strawman response
| to legitimate questions about the value of their service. The
| technology and execution look to be good, AFAICT. It's the
| product, pricing, messaging, and value that I can't recommend.
| pantulis wrote:
| I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed
| work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart
| from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very
| smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they
| do not seem to have it.
| IAmLiterallyAB wrote:
| > E2E encryption
|
| How on earth would that work for their product? They need
| to access the data so they can render it.
| nomel wrote:
| Surely that could happen client side.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The whole value proposition is that the beefy remote
| machine is handling the rendering, isn't it? At least
| half the performance of a web page is wasted on DOM re-
| shuffling.
|
| Not to mention, it's not like Chrome can run Javascript
| without looking at the data, and if they're not running
| Chrome, they'll start getting into compatibility issues.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| >4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with
| them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser
| data to a 3rd party service
|
| Or just an IT/security department that is blissfully unaware
| of the shenanigans that some of its users are up to.
| Especially if people are accessing this from outside of the
| corporate network to start with.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| RE: 4.
|
| My company uses webmarshal which fronts requests and blocks
| pages deemed not good for productivity/data security. In that
| type of situation you already have an intermediary so mighty
| could make sense - make everyone use mighty and give it a
| custom blocklist. Obviously not a situation that employees
| would be a fan of, but it's something that corporate is
| already doing, and mighty could improve the experience.
| mchusma wrote:
| I agree with your stance. I was confused to come here and
| read that people thought he was referring to Mighty. I think
| Mighty is a pretty small, easily proven/disproven, not-crazy
| idea, not-that-new idea, with niche applications. To me that
| is a bit different than how this article reads. I think the
| debate is market size. The only real debate I hear with
| Mighty is whether it is good for <10M people worldwide or >1B
| people worldwide.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| No but it makes a lot of sense for Mighty App to be the
| middleman between your computer and the Internet. If I was
| them I'd just give it away for free and sell your data to
| Facebook (anonymously of course!)...
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite
| confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead
| he was deploring the state of software engineering in general
| and web programming in particular. He is saying something like
| "I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like
| Mighty actually makes sense". See his talk about preventing the
| end of civilization (!!):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
| elbasti wrote:
| I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month,
| not $50.
|
| At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps.
| They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and
| Front.
|
| These four tools have one thing in common: they are all
| Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a
| $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open
| before their computer starts to stutter.
|
| One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of
| these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) +
| they are still a bit _too_ expensive (we 're in Mexico where
| they cost 1.5 - 2x).
|
| I would _love_ to be able to buy our customer service reps a
| setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them
| use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks
| a month. That would scale to a customer service org of
| hundreds.
|
| At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac.
|
| IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy
| to buy a designer _any_ computer they want. But outfitting a
| CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be
| amazing.
| easton wrote:
| You can probably buy them a VDI desktop for $20 per month
| (Amazon Workspaces and Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure are
| in this ballpark) and run Chrome on that. Especially with
| WVD, there are thin clients made specifically for it (or you
| can just use an RDP client on any OS).
| username90 wrote:
| Can't you buy a decent desktop and have them chromote into
| it? A desktop should be more than enough to run the apps of
| many people.
|
| Edit: Although, I'm not sure it supports multiple separate
| logins.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, if the Lenovo or Apple M1 were 3.5 to 5 times cheaper,
| they'd also be a good deal, right? In fact, they'd be a
| better deal than a 5 times cheaper Mighty, I would wager.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Then you'll simply have to wait a few months.
|
| They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet.
|
| The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their
| servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of
| money from rich/dumb early adopters.
| aboodman wrote:
| If that were the case you'd expect them to reply to the
| several beta test requests this rich/dumb early adopter has
| sent over the last year+.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Maybe the tech was not yet ready?
|
| Fake it until you make it is still a thing in Silicon
| Valley.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| >At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac.
|
| Yeah, agreed. I kind of thought the savvy business plan would
| be to charge at a loss, make up the loss with VC money,
| gather a lot of market share (customers like you), then raise
| the price once the pain of moving off is too high
| chrisco255 wrote:
| How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark
| performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will
| inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it
| will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace.
|
| I don't buy the argument that performance will always get
| tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what
| even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.
| elbasti wrote:
| Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the
| situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the
| apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I think the situation is bad because developers are
| expensive, and really expert devs that know how to
| optimize app performance are even more expensive. You
| mention Notion and Slack and other Electron apps. Not to
| disparage the teams on these projects as they are
| impressive from a pure UX perspective. But building these
| complex apps cross-platform native is particularly
| difficult today. So Electron is used as a shortcut. The
| usage of Electron allowed Slack and Notion to grow
| rapidly with a smaller team than they otherwise would
| were they to try to replicate in Windows, Linux and Mac
| as well as web... not to mention mobile. And once an app
| is established and has tons of features, as they both do,
| doing a rewrite is both expensive and risky. Big rewrites
| almost always fail, and they divide your precious dev
| resources even more.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine
| product made by some decent people.
|
| No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an
| industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core
| machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and
| quickly render documents without offloading it to a central
| server.
| lghh wrote:
| I don't understand how Jonathan Blow of all people, figurehead
| behind several great video games that would have been
| impossible to run on a supercomputer 25 years ago, could
| possible have this take.
| ta_ca wrote:
| you can't just compare a game and a web page. vastly
| different requirements.
| detaro wrote:
| He is very much in the church of hand-optimized low-level
| programming and anything that abstracts over that being where
| computing is going wrong.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise
| of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for
| replacing judgment with curiosity.
|
| I'll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was "I can't imagine
| it ever being faster than my behemoth PC." But then I stopped
| for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a
| thin-client. That's it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well,
| if latency is an issue, sure. But "high-ping" is a somewhat
| solved issue, whether in multiplayer gaming, in terminal
| utilities like Mosh, or even in optimistic GraphQL mutation
| updates. Where's the use-case where near-zero latency is vital?
| The only cases I can think of are games like Rocket League:
| fast-twitch games where even the latency between my controller
| and my PC is something I happily spend hours optimizing --
| where latency prevents the necessary feedback loop for learning
| (akin to trying to learn how to hit a baseball while drunk).
|
| But beyond near-zero latency use-cases, why would a thick
| client ever be better than a thin client? At the edge of
| performance, this question is easily answered: I would never
| attempt to train a PyTorch model on my admittedly powerful GPU.
| That's what the cloud is for. So when it comes to my browser,
| why am I content to eat up memory and cpu-time with hundreds of
| tabs open that almost always include one or two that are
| broken, soaking up my resources, and have to be hunted down and
| killed off so that IntelliJ can return to its normal lightning-
| fast speed?
|
| Might goes even further and asks why I would want to run
| IntelliJ on my machine at all. Wouldn't I rather run IntelliJ
| like I used to run Vim over Mosh, where I never have to worry
| about storage space, about download/upload bandwidth, or about
| my computer becoming sluggish?
|
| And that's the killer idea here: that thin-clients almost
| always beat thick-clients. One could even argue that the entire
| internet is premised upon this reality.
|
| I'd happily pay Mighty to try it out for a bit. Even if it
| doesn't work, I've dropped more money of less fascinating
| ideas. At the very least, I'm rooting for their success,
| because it would change a lot more than how you consume content
| over the internet.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client?
|
| Because thick client distribute the load among many computer.
| With a thin client all that load is way more centralised.
|
| > I would never attempt to train a PyTorch
|
| No one is asking you to do that. We're talking about _Mighty_
| , a thin client that:
|
| - runs a beefy VM in the cloud
|
| - runs a single app, Chrome, in that VM
|
| - streams video to the client
|
| If a million people run Chrome on their laptops and keep it
| open for the entire day (and your browser is usually open
| throughout the day), that's... just a million people with
| their laptops.
|
| If a million people run Chrome through Mighty, Mighty needs a
| million VMs always open, and a million video streams, also
| always open.
|
| See how a thick client is better than a thin client?
| sjg007 wrote:
| This is the standard network computing paradigm. In the past
| you had terminals connected to a mainframe etc.. Same thing.
| X11/RDP and what not.
|
| The biggest gain here is security, you won't ever run code
| natively. The caveat is you also have to trust the host.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > The biggest gain here is security, you won't ever run
| code natively. The caveat is you also have to trust the
| host.
|
| That assumes any malware cannot bust out out of mightyapp's
| sandbox to the host's host.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| The biggest gain is the security of all of the code running
| on someone else's hardware.
|
| The biggest loss is _also_ security: all of your
| keystrokes, passwords, traffic, etc. are stored on someone
| else 's hardware.
| mbesto wrote:
| > It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the
| premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons
| for replacing judgment with curiosity.
|
| His arguments are too vague to specifically defend Mighty.
| You can insert any technology and his arguments are neither
| valid or invalid.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I think the key difference between a pytorch model and your
| browser is that you're actively using and manipulating your
| browser and a pytorch model is a long running process without
| the need for second by second interaction.
|
| And as you note the need for more power goes beyond a
| browser, IDEs, gaming, rendering, Bitcoin mining. Why just do
| it for the browser? You can, and some people do, remote into
| a more powerful machine for all of their work. This was the
| norm when terminals were true terminals. We could go back to
| this, but having your own computer historically had much
| larger benefits for people.
| xfer wrote:
| The post is about crazy-new idea. This app is a RDP solution
| that is not a crazy or a new idea. It all depends on economic
| viability and marketing to the right people.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Where's the use-case where near-zero latency is vital?
|
| I would say typing is a pretty big one. It is extraordinarily
| unpleasant when typing lag is anywhere above maybe 50ms,and
| even worse when it is variable, like it would inevitably be
| if going over the Internet. It's even worse with mouse
| movements, where occasional spikes in lag can ruin your day.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| This is a solved problem though, with optimistic updates.
| See Mosh, which does this for the terminal. If you've ever
| had to run Vim on a high-latency remote connection, it
| feels like having superpowers.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing
| judgment with curiosity
|
| PG wants you to think that they're mutually exclusive.
| They're not, but he has a product to hustle.
|
| The problem (for PG) is that curiosity is not uncritical.
| _Curiosity_ poses more questions than those in the category
| "how well does this product work?" Anyone actually curious is
| going to wonder about the problem space, not just one
| proposed solution.
|
| Pretty obvious questions include: "how did software get us to
| the point we're exploring this as a design?" and "could the
| problem it seeks to solve be addressed in a way that
| eliminates assumptions about the solution space?", "What are
| peripheral ramifications of design decisions, and how much do
| I care?" "Would other approaches solve the same issues, have
| the same ramifications?" or "Are they synergies to leverage
| by trying multiple things in concert?"
| nearbuy wrote:
| > I'll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was "I can't
| imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC."
|
| I haven't found Chrome slow on my mid-range PC (i5-7500). Or
| my phone (Pixel 3).
|
| I feel like I must be in some parallel universe to everyone
| else talking about how slow Chrome is.
|
| Just now, I loaded the first 6 links on Hacker News. 1 didn't
| load at all due to a server error. The other 5 all loaded in
| under a second (measured by DOMContentLoaded). I have uBlock
| Origin enabled (only in Firefox on the phone). Maybe that
| helps.
|
| I can have 100+ tabs open without slow down if I want to. The
| bigger problem is I'm less productive with 100 tabs open
| because... there are 100 tabs open. It's just too cluttered.
|
| I'm willing to admit Mighty might be a good product if people
| have this problem with slow browsers. I just never found this
| was an issue. Maybe it's a problem on low-end machines, but
| how many people have a low-end computer but are willing to
| pay $50/month for Mighty?
| chubot wrote:
| Do you use AdBlock? That makes a huge difference.
|
| I just set up a new computer and I was wondering why Chrome
| and Firefox was so slow. Then I remembered I hadn't set up
| AdBlock yet.
|
| I wonder if Mighty has ad blocking? It's an interesting
| question of which will be better for their business --
| blocking or no blocking. (I won't try it because of the
| obvious privacy problems, because I use a fast computer,
| and avoid slow web sites. But it probably has an audience.)
| nearbuy wrote:
| I use uBlock Origin for ad blocking. Maybe ad blockers
| are the secret.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the
| premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons
| for replacing judgment with curiosity.
|
| I was curious about Mighty and looking forward to their
| technology. That's not the problem.
|
| The judgment came largely when they announced that it cost up
| to $600/year. It costs so much that it's actually cheaper to
| buy a whole new computer if you might need it for a year or
| more. Once you put a price tag on something and ask people to
| pay for it, judgment is fair game.
|
| This whole dismissal of people saying that they couldn't
| justify the product for the price as some sort of anti-
| curiosity thing feels disingenuous.
| chubot wrote:
| If people will pay 2x or 10x the price of self-hosting for
| AWS, then I have no doubt that some people will pay 2x or
| 10x the price of a laptop for Mighty. (I wouldn't, but I
| also don't use AWS :) )
| gargs wrote:
| You just described a Netbook
| Secretmapper wrote:
| What's mosh?
|
| Edit: Managed to find the right string of words to google:
| mosh = Mobile Shell
| detaro wrote:
| https://mosh.org/
| moultano wrote:
| I did not take Jonathan Blow's tweet to be saying it's a bad
| idea, or won't work, but rather that it's an indictment of the
| whole web stack that it's necessary.
| runako wrote:
| I have no dog in the fight either way, but I think it's weird
| that their demo product shots are on a Mac when part of their
| pitch is
|
| > "50+ tabs without your computer coming to a crawl"
|
| On Macs, people can just switch to Safari for free and solve
| that problem. Yes, Chrome is a memory hog. Stop using Chrome,
| don't send all your browsing data to a third party.
|
| Perhaps Windows would be a better choice for Mighty demo shots,
| since there may not have a better option than Chrome for
| Windows.
| mstipetic wrote:
| I just bought an used Lenovo desktop that's a few years old,
| but has an i7 and 32gb of ram. It handles a hundred tabs
| without blinking. I think the bigger problem is the
| artificial constraint we've put on ram, why are we still
| selling computers with 8gb of ram?
| anotha1 wrote:
| Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean,
| who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a
| cost, even if it's "free."
|
| I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing
| to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.
| bhouston wrote:
| I think that corporations may want to force all their users
| to use Mighty so that they can control exactly what goes on
| in the browser -- it is easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize"
| the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and
| without malicious extensions.
|
| Maybe even prevent browsers from downloading files onto the
| local computer. A full recording of each user's sessions.
| Integrated password manager that uses the Mighty login to tie
| them all together.
|
| So I view it as valuable to corporations and thus mighty
| falls into the B2B category of company which makes software
| end users hate, but corporations love.
|
| Probably a fair bit of money in that.
| dd36 wrote:
| Don't they already do this with VMs for less cost?
| calvin_ wrote:
| Except VDI products for enterprise already exist and are
| _much_ cheaper than Mighty. AWS, Citrix, VMware, and
| probably others play in this space.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it
| is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious
| extensions.
|
| Not denying your other points but Amazon Workspaces[1] is a
| product that perfectly fits their needs.
|
| From a top-level exec's stand point I would imagine they
| would be more willing to buy something like Amazon
| Workspaces which gives them 100% control and peace of mind
| Vs piecemeal approach such as browser, conference call
| client etc.,
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces
| blocked_again wrote:
| Do you think low paid workers are going buy a cheap laptop
| for 500$ and pay 30$ or 50$ per month for Mighty instead of
| just getting a more powerful Window laptop for like 1000$ or
| 1500$?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| M1 macs can be had for $999, and they can even be bought
| with cheap financing options to convert it to a monthly
| payment.
|
| Maybe there's a market for people stuck on old computers
| but whose companies still spring for super fast internet
| and $50/month SaaS bills per user instead of just spending
| that same money (or less) financing the laptops they
| actually need, but it would be a small market.
| criddell wrote:
| Is it just the price that's the problem? What if Might were
| $30 to $50 per year?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by
| downloading something called "Web Packs". This was back in 2005
| just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team.
| They were naturally quite confident about the product taking
| off. Something seemed off to me I couldn't point out what so I
| didn't take the job offer. After all these years I realized the
| source my discomfort. They were actually betting _against_ the
| speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses
| like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to
| improve this product did exactly the opposite.
|
| To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They
| are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from
| this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows
| the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price.
| From this point it's a matter of time other hardware also
| catches up in terms of performance and price.
|
| Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing
| history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don't
| know.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo
| weasel_words wrote:
| "They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will
| stagnate from this point on."
|
| Me playing the devils advocate...
|
| Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years
| (enough for them to make some good money).
|
| Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage.
|
| Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two
| years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new
| tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two years ago would
| have been approx. $2500). On top of that, have to wait two
| months for it to be assembled. (ouch)
|
| I agree with you that speed will probably not stop
| increasing, but if prices continue to go up, or even just
| level off, few people will be able to afford the new tech.
|
| That being said, would I invest in Mighty? No since I agree
| with you in general....and agree with you about the zero
| privacy issue...very regressive position for someone like PG
| imo.
| samstave wrote:
| What if the future is that you don't necessarily just buy a
| machine in the future.
|
| What if, when you purchase your machine, it includes a host
| of features including a could suite of things like; VPN,
| Cloud Browser, An actual amount of decent cloud storage,
| portable applications, hosted in your cloud bucket, but
| accessible from any device (If I have Illustrator, I can
| just run it from any machine - not just my own. I can allow
| guest access to my paid licenses - like Say i want my
| brother to be able to draw stuff on my Illustrator license
| while I am not using it.
|
| Etc.
|
| Imagine if instead of that $7,500 "computer" you bought a
| $7,500 'stack' and the access terminal you happen to be
| using most is the physical laptop that youre used to.
|
| I tried to build something similar to this more than a
| decade ago (2007 or so - but wrote about it in 2004).
|
| My biggest issue is better information/knowledge
| management.
|
| I have TBs of files and data strewn all over. We should be
| focusing on "my information" and let me manage and secure
| that - and access it from any device easily, and securely.
| frozencell wrote:
| If augmented reality tech works better the necessity of
| cloud as your machine will become ubiquitous.
|
| However I think we gonna do have RTX in our mobile
| devices - AR glasses, whatever modern mobile tech -
| because of decentralization (security/ethics purpose)
| easton wrote:
| That assumes that AWS/Azure/GCP won't have the same issues
| getting chips to run Mighty on that PC manufacturers have
| getting chips to sell to consumers though. If the shortage
| keeps up, that is not necessarily true.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Couldn't they instead be betting that despite improvements in
| hardware speed the web will bloat faster than the hardware
| improves? Betting on that doesn't sound that crazy to me.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| That is indeed one of their premise. However that also has,
| perhaps unforeseen, implications. To start with, their VMs
| have to be at least one step better than the end consumer's
| machine. Can they do it without increasing their price?
| Secondly, there's no guarantee that developers will
| overwhelm even Mighty's cloud resources?
|
| All that said, it's worth noting that the first set of
| customers seem super impressed. So maybe Mighty are on to
| something.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs. At least 80% of the
| time my computer isn't even used. And when I use it, I doubt
| average load is over 25%. So the Mighty model has a 20x
| utilization advantage by those numbers.
|
| That should easily support twice the peak CPU power for me
| when I need it.
|
| Another thing is that the Mighty CPUs will (presumably) be
| upgraded continuously, while my laptop CPU gets no faster
| after purchase. If that makes me only buy a new laptop every
| 4 years instead of 2, I've saved a lot of money and hassle.
|
| I'm not saying this means Mighty will conquer the world. But
| there are reasonable arguments behind the model. Especially
| if you assume bandwidth will keep improving.
| e12e wrote:
| > The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs.
|
| Yeah, but I think it's better to think about it like
| virtual/remote desktops, where the granularity is a browser
| tab.
|
| At least, that's the only way it makes sense to me. I might
| understand that to do 4k high res 3d on my phone - my phone
| will need help. And once that "help" is available - my TV,
| and my tablet and my smart watch can make use of it.
|
| But I'm not generally willing to trade latency for cpu time
| sharing. What _is_ interesting is an always on, always
| working desktop session. It 's why I like screen/tmux and
| ssh, rdp - and would consider running a Linux terminal
| server, so my laptop(s) and desktop(s) could be a disk
| less, stateless thin client.
|
| Make the observation that the browser tab is the new
| process/application granuality - and it makes sense to host
| tabs in the cloud.
|
| Personally I'd want to self host it - but the idea doesn't
| sound quite so inane.
| topaz0 wrote:
| >> And when I use it, I doubt average load is over 25%.
|
| So the idea is you can get your laptop utilization down to
| 1% by pushing your load to their cloud? Fascinating.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Hmm, I feel like this is missing that those cpu workloads
| are "bursty", and probably all burst around the same time
| for a given region. This analysis of unused computer time
| assumes they can sell your unused time to someone else,
| which either means network latency to another region or
| more capacity in the same region as you when you have
| similar usage times as everyone else. I have no idea if
| this idea works but I don't think it does for that reason.
| dmitriid wrote:
| >The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs.
|
| It's not. It's literally spinning up a VM in the cloud to
| run Chrome and stream a video to you
|
| > At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used.
|
| Yes, but Mighty isn't running (and will never run) on
| _your_ computer.
| 55555 wrote:
| Wow you are really not understanding the comment you are
| replying to. He's discussing the business model.
| dmitriid wrote:
| And I've responded with the _reality_ of the business
| model. There 's no "CPU sharing" on "my computer". It's a
| beefy VM in the cloud.
|
| Well, it most likely shares the CPU with other VMs, but
| that depends on the cloud, and the instance. And since
| the browser is always open, Mighty will always run that
| VM, with no sharing:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063554
| tomhoward wrote:
| > They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will
| stagnate from this point on
|
| No, they are betting that no matter the processing power of
| computing devices of the day, developers will always push
| things to the limit and ship products that can end up being
| slow on devices used by a large share of the population.
|
| This has always happened, because software product makers
| always want their products to have as many
| features/capabilities as possible, and release them to market
| as quickly/cheaply as possible, which means there are lesser
| incentives to limit functionality or to invest in performance
| optimisation.
|
| There's no reason to believe this trend will cease, so Mighty
| is offering a service that allows people to get much higher
| performance of their webapps without always needing to have
| the highest-power computing device in their possession.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| > developers will always push things to the limit
|
| Agree, it's an arms race at this point between end
| consumers and app developers. However, it also means once
| Mighty becomes popular they have to contend with developers
| overwhelming their computing resources as well.
| blocked_again wrote:
| Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned
| as one of the people who draft read this essay.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Graham does this often. Instead of directly saying what he
| wants to say, he beats around the bush. When Allred was
| getting criticized for shady business practices, Graham wrote
| haters and thanked him and Musk and a bunch of other people.
| Not sure why he does it, it is very underhanded, as though
| he's afraid of actually getting in a legit argument with the
| person. Easier to pontificate form his essays, have them
| posted to his website, then have the mods defend him.
|
| "Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are
| bad attempts, of course.
| herendin2 wrote:
| I think he genuinely believes these issues are much broader
| than a single company. So he wants to encourage discussion
| about the general issue, instead of sparking even more
| unproductive, repetitive argument about a single company
| which would overshadow the broader and more interesting
| issue he sees.
|
| (As we can see here, where a quarter of the comments are
| debating the business model of Mighty.)
| domnomnom wrote:
| Probably terrified of outrage mobs.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had
| Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will
| affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the
| best time to prove your product to have a good effect.
|
| Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a
| literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a
| reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.
| schmorptron wrote:
| Geforce now or even renting an entire computer with shadow is
| for graphics performance, and is not 30 bucks a month. You
| also won't be entering any sensitive data while playing
| games. I think it's a cool thing they've done, but it
| requires you to put full trust into them as a company.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| We have a game streaming service from Google, too (Stadia)...
| which is apparently struggling.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| > Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a
| literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a
| reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.
|
| By that same token the average persons browsing habits are
| also not the same. Optimising for Chrome power users who have
| eleventy billion tabs open and run hefty web apps isn't the
| normal usecase. My families browsing is mostly taken care of
| on a 2012 MBP and a couple of ancient iPads. Mighty would be
| functionally useless for us.
|
| Heck my entire day is spent in Chrome working in Drive and
| writing code in our own development environment in our web
| app. I am a browser power user in that sense on a three year
| old gaming laptop and I don't understand the Mighty usecase.
| It's a niche within a niche at the moment although I
| understand the appeal of the business model.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| If a "Crazy New Idea" (CNI) is getting VC funding from
| establishment tech capital to deliver a twist in an existing
| product, it doesn't seem like it could be so crazy.
|
| Reading this I thought of CNIs like the Internet of the 1980s,
| women's suffrage in the 19th century, Project Mercury, The
| Eiffel Tower.
|
| The CNIs gaining ground today in tech seem to be crypto, brain-
| computer-interfaces, quantum computing, and CRISPR gene
| editing.
| busymom0 wrote:
| If there was a similar offering as mighty for certain
| development tools including Xcode and android studio together,
| that would be awesome and something I would look into.
| Basically something which would reduce the build times.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of
| their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about
| abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty
| doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like
| Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".
| paulgb wrote:
| Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is
| advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an
| OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just
| want to do basic browsing.
|
| I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of
| growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to
| fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is
| working in this space, because I genuinely _would_ like to
| rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing
| task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer
| for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a
| step in that direction.
|
| Can't you already do that pretty easily on AWS or Azure?
| paulgb wrote:
| At minimum it seems like I'd have to choose an instance
| size, an OS that was compatible with my software, install
| the editing software, mount a common storage location
| with my footage, etc.
|
| What I'd like to see is a service that let me add my
| credit card, click a button, and launch a video editor on
| a high-RAM machine that I pay for the hour (including the
| software license fee).
| ta_ca wrote:
| unfairly? privacy concerns aside they just added another
| huge abstraction on top of an already huge pile of shit we
| call modern web.
| [deleted]
| antipauline wrote:
| Why are you all upvoting this shit?
|
| Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth
| reading. Usually the opposite, in fact.
|
| You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every
| word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be
| him, or whatever.
| fallingknife wrote:
| You actually add credibility to his writing because you make it
| obvious that you don't actually have a counter argument.
| tnzm wrote:
| Burden of proof, my dude.
| flunhat wrote:
| How can you effectively counter an essay with so many empty
| generalizations and broad assertions? It would be like
| debating jello.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Well you could say that instead of going after the author.
| Igelau wrote:
| I recall "Dr. Gene Ray" defending the credibility of Time
| Cube on similar grounds. There wasn't enough of an idea
| presented to even have an argument about.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Fully agreed. A lazy article all-round. Where are the examples?
| Where are the pitfalls?
|
| Is the insight merely that some wacky ideas turn out to be
| right sometimes?
|
| Yeah, sure so how can we tell in advance? How is this
| actionable? And his answer is: listen to _reasonable domain
| experts_. That phrase is doing some real heavy lifting there...
| shmageggy wrote:
| Pretty much all of his articles are similarly lazy (edit: and
| usually articles from other top SV folks). I'm always
| astonished that people upvote his stuff. I've come to think
| of it as an HN tax: we get a well-moderated forum with
| otherwise good content and in return we have to scroll past
| one extra article every month or so.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > I've come to think of it as an HN tax
|
| That's a great way to put it!
|
| All this stuff about Copernicus, Darwin, Galileo... You're
| not revolutionizing our understanding of humanity's place
| in the universe... You're buying companies that make
| filesharing apps and (often untaxed) hostel booking
| websites.
| wrnr wrote:
| You are being unfair, its not any better then most HN articles,
| fits here just fine if you ask me
| the_only_law wrote:
| I agree that it fits here just fine (more than a lot of the
| crap that hits the front page) but I also agree with the OP
| that the "cultism" is annoying, not that I expect anything
| else given his association with the company that created HN.
| ta_ca wrote:
| pg is one of the people introduced me to lisp and i think lisp
| is the greatest idea in computer science. so his ideas have
| some weight for me, but lately the disconnect is quite
| unbearable. he is again picking the wrong side in history.
|
| will these supervillians ever stop? nothing less than world-
| domination is enough.
|
| microsoft tried to own everything about _computing_ , they
| largly succeeded. they even infiltrated schools and still every
| pc is sold with windows-preinstalled.
|
| then came google/facebook/apple... and they all want to own the
| entire internet.
|
| unity wants the entire gaming/gamedev/computer-graphics. i am
| sure there are schools out there have unity classes, just
| unbelievable. "unity-developer" is the norm in job titles now,
| and i have never once heard "photoshop-artist" in the title of
| a job description.
|
| this particular case is no exception.
|
| ok, most logical conclusion is i too am envious.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| You created an account just to say this? Damn, commitment.
| antipauline wrote:
| Well, I don't want to get my usual account banned for
| expressing such apostate views. They're very protective of
| their cult leaders round here.
| imhoguy wrote:
| What are your views then?
| hooande wrote:
| Imagine if people could completely change their idenitites
| every time they said something. It would make conversation
| and discourse as we know it impossible.
|
| It would make the idea you created an account to express
| invalid. You can't criticize Paul Graham if he can say
| "That wasn't me, it was Gaul Praham".
|
| If your ideas aren't good enough for you to stay by them
| with some form of consistent identity, do not express those
| ideas. Think about them, develop them and then communicate
| them when they no longer embarrass you.
| ta_ca wrote:
| powerfull people can silence you in so many ways. they
| will always have a platform, you won't.
|
| you also got _discourse_ backwards. you should be judging
| the arguments presented (which in this case not much),
| not the persona.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I do not think that the problem is with the content, moreso
| with the unnecessarily aggressive tone. _Shit, cult ..._ -
| HN generally rewards civility and does not like sliding
| towards Twitter mode of operation.
| Tycho wrote:
| My favourite type of dismissal is:
|
| "X is a stupid idea that nobody asked for and it will never even
| work. Besides we already have Y[1], so this is nothing new."
|
| [1] Where _Y_ is some product that foreshadows the functionality
| of X and is already successful among some set of users, although
| has some incidental limitations that prevent its growth
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| The problem with education is that u r always taught to look for
| the right answer someone else discovered long time ago. Coming up
| with crazy ideas means u were either a bad student, or u have a
| post-doctoral education. It is hard for anyone in the middle to
| come with crazy ideas (unless u worked with someone crazy coming
| up with crazy ideas requires a certain training or exposure, it
| is very difficult to learn on ur own
| darkerside wrote:
| > Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy
| way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it
| usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received
| wisdom is full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch
| a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem
| clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry.
|
| I wonder if most people realize this? In my experience, it seems
| like a characteristic that defies intellect and education.
| Incredibly smart people are, if anything, someone's more
| dismissive of new ideas because of their confidence that it just
| won't work.
| peter_retief wrote:
| I wish somebody would take my wild ideas seriously.
| bob33212 wrote:
| This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing
| bitcoin.
|
| 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people
| who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded
| by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who
| are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign
| probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps
| 1-5 and chart the progression of the probability space.
|
| Currently, It seems 40%+ likely that Bitcoin will end up as an
| accidental Ponzi scheme with a crash based on late adopters
| rushing out. But there is also still a 10%+ chance that it
| replaces gold as a currency hedge for the next 20+ years and 5+
| percent chance that it becomes a first class currency.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Who exactly is a "domain expert" in bitcoin? The whole thing
| was created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago, and all of
| the so called "domain experts" are johnny come latelys who
| smelled a quick buck.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Andreas Antonopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, any of the core devs
| at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, anyone who has studied
| blockchain and cryptographic currency systems for the past 10
| years, etc. Keep the wool over your eyes.
| nomadiccoder wrote:
| The whole thing was not created by an anonymous developer 10
| years ago. The building blocks used in bitcoin have been
| around for many years before this in things like hashcash.
| Furthermore distributed consensus is a topic researched for
| decades. The term cryptocurrency uses crypto as a base which
| has been researched for centuries. Bitcoin is a novel
| constuction around crypto primatives relying on economic
| incentive to solve distributed consensus. There are clearly
| domain experts here.
| fallingknife wrote:
| In terms of the tech, yes. But that doesn't give you any
| insight into the market, which is what the comment I was
| replying to was talking about.
| vaylian wrote:
| For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that
| you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?
| jhgb wrote:
| Who in his sane mind would use an appreciating asset as
| currency?
| zonethundery wrote:
| I'm new at this, having just purchased some miners, but have
| followed the space using a similar logic. For the 10% view
| I'd consider the insane amount of institutional money chasing
| the entire value chain, which will not be shy about
| protecting itself.
|
| The policy environment is still evolving; the FinCEN travel
| rule will put the hurt on crypto ATMs and the exchanges (to
| some degree). But it's good collateral, it doesn't
| (generally) have storage costs like gold, the growth of
| supply is well understood. Potential positive catalysts
| remain, including a US btc ETF, the impact of cme's micro
| contract, and geopolitical developments further constraining
| the supply of ASICs.
|
| Its clear from the above that I view it more as a store of
| value than something you should spend as a currency.
| Ethereum-world (incl stablecoins) seems to have a lock on the
| latter. It will be interesting to see what happens when ETH
| shifts to POS.
| max_ wrote:
| People buy BTC so they can sell it for USD.
|
| Most BTC sits idle in exchanges like coinbase.
| tw04 wrote:
| >The reason is that everyone is too conservative.
|
| Everyone isn't too conservative: veterans in a field are
| conservative because they have earned the war wounds they carry.
| Which is why you tend to see "disruptive apps" targeting younger
| people. They don't have the life experience to understand, at
| first glance, why an idea may be extremely dangerous.
|
| I'm young enough to remember being that way myself: Who cares if
| someone gets my bank account info, what are they going to do, pay
| off my student loans? Spend the $25 I have in my checking
| account? Oh no!
|
| I abhor people who throw around the idea that someone in tech
| being "conservative" is somehow wrong or bad. They're
| conservative because they know just how much is at risk for the
| folks who don't know any better.
| dralley wrote:
| It's technological manifest destiny.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=36m48s
| OhNoMyqueen wrote:
| It's not necessarily true. Some people are conservative and
| have forgotten the reason why.
| bko wrote:
| From the article, PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken
| seriously predicated on the person having deep domain
| expertise.
|
| I don't think anyone with deep domain experience in banking
| would say "Who cares if someone gets my bank account info"
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| How exactly do we identify these domain experts? This also
| implies crazy disruption comes from within, which doesn't
| explain why successful companies are the ones getting
| disrupted. My only conclusion is that PG wants us to trust
| him or that his theory is a whole lot of smoke.
| ProblemFactory wrote:
| > PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously
| predicated on the person having deep domain expertise
|
| Depending on what you mean by "seriously". It's not that a
| crazy idea by a domain expert is certainly the future - but
| they might be right 1 out of 10 times, compared to a crazy
| idea by a nobody who might be right 1/1000. Given the
| potential large return of crazy ideas, it's worth the time to
| investigate in more detail.
| [deleted]
| borski wrote:
| That founder naivete, however, is also what often leads to
| founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if
| you've built a payments company before - so much so that you
| might not want to do it. It's hard, and annoying, and has all
| sorts of regulatory hurdles.
|
| But if you _don't_ know any of that, you build it anyway,
| because schleps are really just long collections of much
| smaller problems, and naive founders can solve much smaller
| problems at a rapid succession, whereas "conservative industry
| experts" simply wouldn't even start because it's too hard.
| russellendicott wrote:
| This reminds me of people who have children very young and by
| the time they realize in their late 30s how crazy the idea of
| a 21 year old being the sole example of how a human should
| behave, the children are now adults. Some things best done
| with youthful ignorance I suppose.
| zaphar wrote:
| There is a difference between thinking something is a bad
| idea because it's hard and thinking something is a bad idea
| because it's dangerous. Your Stripe example is an example of
| something that was hard. Mighty is an example of something
| that is may not actually be hard but is most likely
| dangerous.
| borski wrote:
| The problem is that early on dangerous and hard are
| sometimes synonymous; people argued Uber was dangerous, and
| in some cases, it was - relatively unvetted drivers driving
| people around the city without a taxi license. But now it's
| changed how we move about the world.
|
| It's hard to predict how the end of a startup will look
| from the beginning, but ambitious ideas often look
| dangerous, scary, hard, or impossible at the beginning.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| This. I started my company in my early 20s and had no clue
| how much work it would be due to my own naivete. Indeed, we
| broke the problems down and worked through them one-by-one
| until we had a functioning business model. On the one hand,
| it would be a lot harder to start over knowing what I know
| now about how much work it takes. On the other, it would be a
| lot easier because I got a lot better at problem solving and
| decision making.
| borski wrote:
| Yeah, I have absolutely less than zero interest in starting
| my last company again. That was hard, and I had no idea all
| of the problems I was going to run into.
|
| I'm super excited to start my next thing, though, which is
| surely going to be way easier! ;)
| thisisbrians wrote:
| Godspeed, soldier.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| It's true, but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here. We
| tend to focus on the stories of _successful_ founders. To
| some extent, those are even the only ones we hear about.
|
| Because of that phenomenon, there is absolutely no
| incompatibility between the existence of disruptive startups,
| and the opinions of more conservative voices. Similar to how
| there's no incompatibility between the existence of people
| who win the lottery, and the opinions of people who don't
| play the lottery.
| borski wrote:
| This is a good point, but I'd argue survivor bias doesn't
| really apply here - successful startups often have naive
| founders because they are otherwise considered 'too hard'
| by most people to start. It is simply hard to take down a
| massive incumbent, for example, so most people don't try.
|
| Lots of startups fail, and a few succeed. I find it an
| interesting leading indicator that most startups who
| succeed have founders that are naive in some way.
|
| Doesn't mean you can't win and _not_ be naive, and
| obviously correlation doesn 't imply causation, but the
| phenomenon is frequent enough that I don't think it's
| entirely baseless either.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> That founder naivete, however, is also what often leads to
| founders winning
|
| I think you overstate your case with the word "often". It is
| far more often that what they're building never amounts to
| anything. Even the most successful founders typically bat
| less than 500
| borski wrote:
| You're right, but misread what I meant (and/or I was
| unclear!). I meant that _when founders win_ it is often, at
| least partially, because they were naive when they started.
|
| I did not mean to imply all naive founders win; that would
| be absurd. :)
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I 'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math,
| engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example,
| crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though
| arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose
| them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain
| experts in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to
| get legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts
| upon. Perhaps no one could be._"
|
| Weird. Math, engineering, and the hard sciences are the few
| places where it is possible to positively say an idea won't work.
| xmeadow wrote:
| I think the biggest problem of these statements is that you don't
| hear much of terrible ideas which failed initally.
| dvh1990 wrote:
| "Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to
| be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets -- to have
| sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do.
| I think if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding
| ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net
| ahead."
|
| That's the VC business model in a nutshell
| lucideer wrote:
| This entire article seems like some pretty obvious stuff that
| most people understand very well, wrapped in a veil of apparent
| profundity.
|
| First of all: it makes one very large assumption from the
| beginning that is never mentioned: "I, pg, can confidently
| identify a reasonable domain expert".
|
| That's basically a fallacy: this is the hardest thing to be sure
| of and Dunning Kruger applies heavily here (both for the apparent
| domain expert, and also for the person listening to their idea,
| who considers themselves such an excellent judge of the speaker's
| expertise).
|
| Beyond that, there's nothing profound here: any "average" person,
| when listening to a person they trust (and "trust" here means
| they believe that this person is competent, i.e. is a "reasonable
| domain expert"), will heed their ideas, and be more likely to
| consider the "crazy" ones. Paul is not unique nor advanced in
| this regard.
|
| The unstated problem is knowing whether you're good at
| identifying experts.
| reddog wrote:
| Isn't this pretty much what Thomas Kuhn said in his Structures of
| Scientific Revolutions back in the 60s? At one time that was
| hailed as one of the most important books of the 20th century.
| taytus wrote:
| >People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested
| interest in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example, that
| some of Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen.
|
| Nah man, it's because every time they're asked about security
| they say "yes we did an audit no we won't release the results"? I
| don't know about you but I'd like to keep my passwords to myself
| CJefferson wrote:
| This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right
| -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain
| experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid
| discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of
| implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts,
| you'd end up net ahead.".
|
| I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of
| the main points of academia is to give people the chance to
| explore those ideas. But they don't turn out good "on average",
| not even close.
| magusdei wrote:
| Ending up "net ahead" does not necessarily mean maximizing the
| fraction of successful projects. I don't think pg is saying
| that implausible-sounding projects usually turn out good. He is
| saying that _when_ they turn out good, they have outsized
| impact, precisely because they initially sounded implausible
| and therefore produce lots of new information if true.
| tlb wrote:
| The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure.
|
| But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you
| exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big
| paradigm shift.
|
| A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas
| through their history. Would you have invested time in solving
| Schrodinger's weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you
| have invested time in public key cryptography in 1975? 1976?
| 1980? 1990?
|
| People who got in early, got to make the big discoveries in
| those fields.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| > A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas
| through their history.
|
| Everyone assumes they would always have been on the right
| side of history. It's basically impossible to know what you
| would have been like had you been born in those times. Better
| is to back-test your rule against paradigm shifts that have
| occurred in your own lifetime. What are some ideas you
| dismissed that turned out to work? What are some products or
| projects you have a revulsion against that are still
| succeeding years later? What caused you to reject them? What
| did you miss?
| TimPC wrote:
| A very smart professor of mine once thought "They added
| pictures to hypertext, that's sort of cool I guess."
|
| Looking backwards definitely biases you to seeing things
| you didn't see at the time. Even memories get tinged. But
| memories are probably the most accurate you can do.
|
| I missed bitcoin entirely despite knowing many people who
| bought as I still don't understand what the appeal is. It
| doesn't seem efficient to me as a payments technology or
| from a privacy perspective. I kind of wish I bought early
| even though I probably would have cashed out way too soon,
| as the money would have been nice.
|
| I liked Stripe due to my revulsion to PayPal but wasn't
| exactly going to be on them winning. I was pleasantly
| surprised. Ditto Shopify because of my dislike of Amazon
| stores. I think I underestimate the chances of good ideas
| and good products winning because I know it's very hard.
|
| I took a few bets early in my career on start-ups. I think
| I underestimated the difficulty of selling into retail on
| one company that I still think had a good idea. The others
| ended up being acquisitions, although the products weren't
| continued. I still believe social notetaking is an
| interesting hard problem in need of a good solution but I
| don't think we had found it.
|
| I think the big lesson for me is to not get taken in by the
| cult of personality around strong founders and focus more
| on the merits of the ideas. That can be tricky as you're
| not getting the full picture when you interview making it
| even harder to see a crazy idea as good for the right
| reasons but it's the right approach.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah, and some ideas are just ahead of their time, like
| the noted pets.com 90s failure contrasted with
| chewy.com's success today.
| EEMac wrote:
| Good point!
|
| Ordering pet food over the internet in 1995: crazy
| moonshot weirdo stuff.
|
| Ordering pet food over the internet in 2021: just another
| day.
| marvin wrote:
| This is an excellent point, and I think this comment thread
| would have much less negativity if everyone asked
| themselves this question.
|
| But then they'd have to own up to the nauseating idea of
| callously dismissing some truly spectacular sea changes,
| such as failing to buy 1000 Bitcoins for a few dollars in
| 2009. I think most people are too full of envy to do that.
|
| How many can honestly say they kept an open mind to the
| handful of such paradigm shifts we've experienced in the
| last 20 years?
| tlb wrote:
| You only have to be right a few times in your life to
| make your career. Most people are right zero times, and
| hardly anyone is right 10 times. Von Neumann might have
| hit 10.
|
| So regretting past mistakes is a big waste of time. Learn
| from them, but don't let it get to you emotionally. (All
| easy advice to give, and hard to follow.)
| nostrademons wrote:
| I've found that you can get surprisingly far in life simply
| by being willing to fix your mistakes and switch your bets
| once it becomes apparent you're wrong.
|
| I initially dismissed the WWW as a disorganized mess when I
| first encountered it in 1994 - I liked Gopher better. By
| 1997 I had changed my tune and was all-in on learning HTML
| and CGI and even some of the new technologies like Java
| applets, RealAudio, and DHTML. (Note that Java and
| RealAudio were themselves eventually losers, but by then I
| was all-in on Javascript.) It felt like I had missed the
| boat in 1997; the dot com boom was in full swing and people
| were getting rich off much more sophisticated stuff all
| around me (TBF, I was in high school). But the WWW and
| Javascript/DHTML remained a lucrative career for 20 years
| afterwards.
|
| A lot of people, once they take a position on something,
| dig in and don't change that position for a lifetime, then
| miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because they
| dismissed it to begin with. But truly world-changing ideas
| usually have a lot of room to grow. If you're wrong for 2-3
| years and then change your mind, you'll feel really stupid,
| like you totally missed the boat, but that's nothing
| compared to the 20-30 years left of growth that the idea
| might have.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| But keep in mind each of those was one of n implausible
| sounding ideas at the time. Even if you might have been
| willing, would you have had the resources to put into it, or
| would they have already been wasted on implausible ideas we
| don't remember?
| anotha1 wrote:
| Yes, because even when those implausible ideas fail, your more
| likely to learn something than when experimenting on an
| existing hypothesis with just a minor change.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Your framing of the question totally ignores opportunity
| cost. All that time spent working on ultimately failing crazy
| ideas is time you did not spend working on anything else,
| either marginal and likely or less risky/crazy.
| rmason wrote:
| One area PG missed is someone, exceedingly bright, who gets
| interested in a totally new field where they have little or no
| expertise.
|
| Using first principles they announce a bold and crazy idea. Say
| like Elon Musk and rockets. Sure he read some books and recruited
| people with domain expertise.
|
| If you remember his story he tried to buy Russian rockets, they
| didn't take him seriously because he lacked the domain
| experience. So he was forced to take an even greater risk and
| build his own rocket. Doing something previously the province of
| only large nation states. Still he was able to pull it off.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| Should probably credit Thomas Kuhn:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...
| FiatLuxDave wrote:
| Check footnote number 2?
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I will admit that I missed that but its barely enough. The
| whole piece is basically a paraphrase of Kuhn.
| notananthem wrote:
| As someone who writes notebooks full of completely new, bad
| ideas, this comes naturally to many of us
| bernulli wrote:
| My favorite crazy ideas from Science are
|
| - "Imagine, they're like really small animals, but the're too
| small to see! The're everywhere! They live on us, in us, around
| us! They are what makes us sick!" (Pasteur, germ theory of
| diseases)
|
| - "You know how there can be mountains as huge as the Himalaya?
| Easy! In reality, all continents are really like small leaves
| floating on a see of magma, and they're bouncing into each other,
| and when they crash we get these huge mountain ranges and
| continents." (Alfred Wegener, tectonic plates)
|
| - "You know time? Yeah, it's really different for everyone, and
| there isn't even a thing such as 'simultaneous'. I'm serious!
| Just imagine riding on a train and playing with a flashlight and
| a watch!" (some patent clerk in Switzerland)
| Metacelsus wrote:
| More recently:
|
| Seeing small things is difficult. Instead of making microscopes
| better, what if we made the samples bigger?
|
| (Expansion microscopy)
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| There is no question that many important ideas sounded crazy at
| first.
|
| The problem is that these ideas are a tiny minority of all new
| ideas.
|
| The vast majority of new ideas are eventually proven invalid.
|
| So just because an idea is rejected, does not mean that it is
| guaranteed to triumph.
| unchocked wrote:
| Might as well introduce this project here:
| https://planetarysunshade.org
|
| We are domain experts, and are developing the support of domain
| eminences. It's an umbrella organization for anyone working on
| space-based climate intervention. Happy to chat with interested
| parties.
| gman83 wrote:
| I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I
| must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify
| ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're
| trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts,
| etc.
| deadite wrote:
| Not the first time, not the last time. We were misogynists when
| we were criticizing Elizabeth Holmes. It comes with the
| territory.
| dang wrote:
| That conflates different cases in a way that strikes me as
| misleading.
| deadite wrote:
| The gist of it is that there was a flippant, reactionary
| tone to anyone criticizing Theranos, that attempted to
| brush off valid criticism with "you don't like her because
| she's a woman" or "you want to see the company fail because
| it's run by a woman". No, actually, I just want to see some
| data, regardless of who is in charge. Save the "women run
| the show in SV" rhetoric and flashy cover page photography
| for Vogue. This is strictly a business analysis. If we
| can't have a civil discussion about these things without
| being accused of being sexist, or envious, or whatever
| other pejorative people use to redirect criticism or
| probing questions, then we might as well not have a
| discussion at all because we all know how these things go.
| The comments write themselves.
|
| Having said that, it's tiresome to have the same pile-on
| garbage of negative comments every time a PG article is
| posted. The last 4-5 of his articles invite so much
| backlash and scathing kneejerk rhetoric, I wonder why these
| people use HN forums at all.
| dang wrote:
| > there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone
| criticizing Theranos
|
| That's not accurate. No doubt some responses were like
| that; "anyone" is an extreme exaggeration.
|
| The internet hivemind (which absorbs all of us) goes from
| _a few data points_ to _anyone_ , _always_ , _everytime_
| , etc., surprisingly seamlessly. Truth be told, one can
| even substitute "single" for "few" in the previous
| sentence without too much loss of fidelity--but perhaps
| it's cynical to insist on it.
|
| To a great extent this is just how human memory works,
| but I pay close attention to it because it deeply affects
| this community's perception of itself, and that is a
| _big_ problem because memory skews negative.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| p.s. I agree with you that we can, should, and need to
| have substantive discussion about these things.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious'
| founders, especially the YC crowd.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand
| my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!"
|
| It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage
| issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely
| crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which
| crashed and burned.
|
| Of course _some_ of these ideas - a minority - turned out to
| be successful. But a little digging shows success was not
| about the quality of the tech, and more the quality of the
| marketing, with some occasional monopolist strong-arming.
|
| In fact this is very much the US model. Take an okay to good
| idea, hype it into the stratosphere with a massive marketing
| and brand recognition campaign, and sell it at an inflated
| price.
|
| If you're lucky you can pitch it as a B2C Veblen lifestyle
| good or a B2B strategic corporate necessity. Win.
|
| That's very different to debating the tech itself purely on
| intrinsic technical merits.
|
| In a very literal sense _it 's a different argument happening
| in a different space_. It's neither helpful nor clarifying to
| imply it isn't.
| TimPC wrote:
| I don't think most crazy ideas crashing and burning is good
| enough to disprove the thesis. Even if 1 in 100 ideas that
| can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that
| succeed, we need those ideas to improve things. I think if
| you look for marketing you'll find it, so even ideas that
| win on technology can look like monopolist strong-arming if
| that's what you're looking for. Also not all ideas that win
| on technology are the very best the technology could be,
| they are often the right compromise that's a good deal
| better than what they competed against. Windows for
| instance did a lot of strong arming monopolist tactics but
| was also the clear technical winner on PC for ease of use
| for much of its existence. I don't think the monopolist
| tactics would be enough if the average joe found it too
| hard to use.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change
| in important areas are all that succeed, we need those
| ideas to improve things
|
| Even by your own math this is a bad idea, with 1 in 100
| leading to a 10x improvement we'd be better to stick with
| what we've got.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The word "idea" might be the problem. "Business plan" or
| "business strategy" might be better? Even "mission
| strategy"?
|
| That encompasses the idea and how to get it executed and
| what resources are needed to get it to be sustainable, over
| what timescale.
|
| This applies to business but also charity, non profit,
| political efforts etc.
|
| Notice I didn't mention profit or even revenue. These days
| ideas can go a long time being supported by investors who
| see the strategy.
|
| For example I am thinking of YouTube, Tesla etc.
|
| But there needs to be a strategy. Like a rocket launch or
| starting a campfire there might need to be different stages
| where the idea to the uninitiated looks very different at
| each stage, but it's all part of the same master plan.
|
| For example. Uber was a taxi firm + app at first. Peer to
| peer came later.
| biztos wrote:
| > Just read some vintage issues of Byte
|
| I still have the AI issue of Byte[0] and there still aren't
| any robots that can draw for shit. /s
|
| [0]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| If so that suggests it's the right attitude to have.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Your just not a domain expert on _ideas_ though. Just look at
| all the words he wrote on ideas. You should be more open to his
| absurd belief in the idea of Mighty App being a game changer.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't be snarky or take HN threads even further in the
| flamewar direction. No matter how you feel about $person or
| $subject, it's not good for the community to pee in the
| swimming pool this way. It encourages the more discerning
| swimmers not to stick around--and we're trying for something
| else in any case.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mcguire wrote:
| This is one of the major problems with PG's essays---he
| frequently assigns the worst possible motives to the people he
| disagrees with.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| gman83 did the same: "This smells like a way to justify
| ignoring difficult criticism."
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| but did he do it incorrectly, or frequently?
| robomartin wrote:
| > it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and
| anyone who does will seem clever
|
| This happened to me when I was younger. I had an idea that could
| best be described as Uber, years before Uber existed. I worked
| hard on analyzing this idea, preparing all sorts of financials,
| enrolling in an incubator program to understand how to pitch,
| getting help everywhere I could.
|
| The incubator held a pitch event that would be attended by a
| range of people from different professions and judged by a panel
| of their choosing.
|
| I made my presentation. It went very well. Until one of the five
| judges essentially took over. Up until then I had received
| reasonable questions and offered reasonable answers. He chose to
| be brutally dismissive. I don't know his background but the guy
| attacked at such a level that no other judge asked any questions.
| It was truly distressing, to say the least. Once the firing squad
| treatment ended I said "thank you" and left the auditorium.
|
| I must have been obviously fuming and the attack must have been
| obviously unfair to some in the audience because an executive
| from UPS (the shipping company) decided to follow me out and talk
| to me. After calming me down he said he though my idea was
| excellent, that it needed refinement and that I should not give
| up on account of that jerk. Still, I was rattled. Definitely.
|
| I was too young and stupid to process that event for what it was:
| A jerk being elevated to judging startup ideas who was there to
| feel superior by hurting people. Again, I was too young to
| process that and I did not have anyone around to help me get past
| it. I quit. I abandoned that particular dream. All because of
| that one jerk.
|
| Now, many years later, I wish I hadn't. I wish I had been
| equipped with the wisdom to dismiss him for what he was and move
| on. Again, too young, didn't have enough experience and this guy
| was at the right place and the right time to destroy me. And that
| he did.
|
| Thankfully my career moved on. I have nothing to complain about.
| I sometimes wonder how much of that goes on in the startup scene.
| I wonder how many great ideas (or potential entrepreneurs)
| evaporate because of assholes who want to "seem clever".
| aranchelk wrote:
| Taking this article at face value, the idea Graham is talking
| about, already has a name: jootsing (jumping out of the system)
| coined by Douglas Hofstadter. I'm familiar with it from Daniel
| Dennett's excellent book Intuition Pumps.
|
| A feature of ground breaking ideas is they contradict established
| wisdom, but that's also a feature of most awful ones. The latter
| greatly outnumber the former. For every brilliant mind
| contradicting and redefining a discipline there are a multitude
| of clueless ones who lack basic knowledge of that discipline
| producing total crap. Think Einstein vs thousands of crackpots
| who don't understand kinetic energy and momentum are not the same
| thing.
|
| For this reason Dennett points out that the presence of jootsing
| is not a valuable metric to assess an idea. He goes on to say as
| it's unhelpful advice to give to someone attempting to produce a
| valuable concept. He compares it to teaching someone how to
| invest by saying "buy low, sell high". Yes this is a feature of a
| successful investor, but in and of itself, quite unhelpful.
|
| Unfortunately, saying "my ideas jootses" isn't saying much.
| cryptica wrote:
| This is article comes at a good time. I feel like the tech sector
| over the past 10 years has been focusing mostly on very safe
| bets.
|
| It's been shocking for me to see how terrified multi-millionaires
| are to invest even $100K into a risky but potentially
| transformative project; instead preferring to pile onto the
| latest hot startups which other big investors are dumping their
| money into... Like a herd of sheep. This behavior underlies a
| lack of self-confidence.
|
| When you have a lot of money, your odds of success are much
| better, so why waste it and act like a sheep? Is it because a lot
| of wealthy people nowadays come from lower classes and they've
| struggled to shake off the herd mentality which is so pervasive
| among the lower classes of society? They think they're playing
| the same game as before; with all odds stacked against them, but
| this mindset is counterproductive to a wealthy person. Once you
| have a lot of money, the game is rigged in your favor, not
| against you; there is no excuse to act like a sheep anymore.
|
| If the majority of rich people keep acting like sheep, the system
| will collapse under its own weight from the sheer inefficiency.
| Capitalism doesn't tolerate deadweight; it shakes it all off
| sooner or later.
|
| Now investors are realizing that if they want to only make safe
| bets, then they should just invest in Bitcoin or some other
| scheme with high network effects... Maybe now is a good time for
| investors to actually judge investments based on their disruptive
| potential instead of just looking to other investors to outsource
| decisions. If you just want to participate in a social scheme;
| just invest in crypto. If you want to invest in a business, then
| you can't avoid taking risks!
| aerosmile wrote:
| There are two ways of looking at this:
|
| 1. PG is selling us something. 2. PG just open-sourced a part
| that seems like a component of the YC admissions logic.
|
| I personally don't care if it's just 2) or if it's 1) and 2) - in
| each case I get to learn something new and for that I am
| grateful. Basically, they must have established that whenever
| they can't tell if you're right or wrong, they ask themselves how
| likely are you to know something that they don't. This seems
| obvious enough, but only after you've heard it explained. Also,
| it might be obvious to each individual to a different degree, so
| when you consider that YC applications are reviewed by a large
| group of people, it's almost certain that this is all codified in
| such a way that the reviewers are not just judging the startup
| alone, but likely also the founder independently of their
| startup. As you can tell, I clearly don't have any inside
| knowledge here and this is all just speculation. But if I were to
| submit a YC application, I would certainly ask myself now more
| than ever before how to make people believe that I am an expert
| in the field of my startup.
| arua442 wrote:
| I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes
| just because it's by him.
|
| Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a
| cult around him.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I think that's the curse of our social media. At best you get a
| binary Like/Dislike mechanism, at worst just Like. There's no
| contextualization of those choices.
|
| In this case, PG's writing is directly related to the
| discussions around MightyApp even though he doesn't disclose
| this fact. I think that's important because it's seemingly a
| conflict of interest being passed under the auspice of
| objectivity.
|
| I also think it's important to discuss MightyApp, not for it's
| merits but for it's implications.
|
| Unfortunately social media doesn't offer a "look at this shit"
| button along site the like button. I venture to say if they did
| there'd be a lot fewer likes.
| bkirkby wrote:
| You should offer some criticism about what he wrote. Dismissing
| something because of who wrote it is just as ineffective as
| liking something because of who wrote it.
| vaylian wrote:
| Upvotes don't mean that something is perfect or worthy of
| worship. It means that something is interesting or (partially)
| insightful.
| drclau wrote:
| I think this may be an American thing. People as successful as
| PG, Musk, Bezos, Gates etc become demigods, for a majority of
| people. Cults are created around them. They can never be wrong
| and so on.
|
| As a result, the opposition arises too: the people who dislike
| these demigods for the same reasons their followers like them.
|
| I say this is probably an American thing because I don't see
| this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the
| most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the
| names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now.
| distances wrote:
| > I say this is probably an American thing because I don't
| see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of
| the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea
| what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by
| now.
|
| I agree there's much less business related worship in Europe.
| I also worked a couple of years for a successful "startup"
| (it's a public company so hardly a startup any more), and
| wouldn't be able to name the founders. I've also been
| visiting HN for a good while and have no idea who PG is,
| beyond that he apparently is some boss at YC and likes to
| write controversial blog posts.
|
| We do get our share of Gates/Bezos/Musk news but lots of it
| is quite critical, I don't think anyone sees them as role
| models.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| All of the attention around these guys seems like an
| extension of celebrity culture. I know Europe (in particular
| the UK and France) have a somewhat large culture around
| celebrities and their opinions / comings-and-doings, but the
| US is on a different level.
|
| These founder-cults seem like the cults around the
| Kardashians (or whoever), but for guys who couldn't care less
| about movies but really want to be rich.
| adwf wrote:
| You are aware this is his website, right?
|
| A large proportion of people are here specifically because of
| PG and his endeavours, of course he's going to get lots of
| upvotes. Even if you don't agree with him, he's worth listening
| to, particularly if you have any aspirations to join YC.
| [deleted]
| ck425 wrote:
| I don't think he gets hundreds of likes because he's amazing
| (though some of what he's written has been). It's because his
| writing is an insight into silicon valley and VC culture. Even
| when I completely disagree with his opinions they're
| interesting to read because they give an insight into how him
| and many of his peers think. And as someone interested in this
| industry that's fundamentally interesting even when it's not
| great. Arguably more so.
| temp-dude-87844 wrote:
| This essay is a frustrating read, because you can feel his
| condescension towards critics (oh, they must be envious, or
| taking cheap shots), and you get a window into his headspace in
| which he believes that his way of examining the world and
| arriving at substantially the same beliefs is the only correct
| way.
|
| But to be quite honest, many PG essays fit this same basic
| structure, whereby some venture or belief of his is introduced
| in a slow-burn way, with lots of short sentences light on
| content as if trying to sound off-the-cuff but way too authored
| to sound convincingly so, and then a dispassioned but complete
| teardown of the critics of the idea. A subversion of an appeal
| to historical authority thrown in for good measure. He always
| comes across as the understated luminary whose low opinion of
| the clueless hordes or meddling schemers below him is
| emotionlessly obvious, and anyone who disagrees is clearly a
| meddling schemer because of envy or fear or some other
| existential insecurity, because his seldom-mentioned
| achievements ought to speak for themselves about the supremacy
| of his approach.
|
| But what's especially frustrating about this essay is that it's
| clearly precipitated by the dismissive public reaction towards
| the Mighty app -- an observation shared by many others in this
| thread -- but this is intentionally unacknowledged by him,
| presumably so that he can pontificate about the bravery of
| weird ideas the envy and fear of others on his personal blog
| without soiling the name of a business venture he backed. But
| it's also evidence that with a simple Twitter beef, you can get
| under his skin -- a sad fact you'd be forgiven for doubting if
| you hang on every word of his essays.
| fillskills wrote:
| Wow, I came here to say that this was possibly Paul's best essay
| ever. There is so much to learn here. Completely surprised by the
| negative comments and so many of them :). Specially on an essay
| that is essentially asking to not being critical right away.
|
| In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many
| founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions
| from friends and family. Most of the VCs, friends and family
| members were critical of my ideas or simply didn't spend the
| effort to really listen. I see the same thing happening to other
| founders and startups. Specially fun is meeting VCs who have
| never built a startup themselves or coming from a non technical
| background be overly critical and share their strongly held
| opinions on how my startup could fail. I ran out of fingers
| counting how many ways.
|
| Ofcourse a startup can fail. Thats why it's not a company yet.
| There is a saying that it takes many miracles to make a startup a
| success. Most founders know that already. We are already scared.
|
| Paul is suggesting a different approach. A more positive one. And
| given the statistics around Paul's and YC's success versus other
| VCs, you would think that the HN crowd of all people would at-
| least pay attention.
|
| P.S: My startup was rejected multiple times by YC. So not a fan
| exactly.
| npsimons wrote:
| I don't know if I'd say it's Graham's _best_ essay ( "Beating
| the Averages" still ranks as one of my favorites), but reading
| this most recent essay, I was thinking of Elon Musk.
|
| Say what you will about the guy, and there's an argument to be
| made that Tesla at least is incremental and not a crazy new
| idea, but Musk co-founded Paypal and is now pushing limits in
| spaceflight.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Do you not think there is a balance between unalloyed
| boosterism and lying (the YC way) and not giving you any good
| feedback?
|
| There are just way more people that I know and trust personally
| that I think could give positive, but constructive advice. I
| would believe absolutely nothing coming out of Paul's mouth
| because he hasn't shown that he's an honest person. He's not
| disinterested about any of this, but feigns like he is above
| it.
|
| I think some of us are very sick of the absolutely fake and
| fraudulent way he and others like him and Musk operate. They do
| not care about the truth or other people, they care about their
| own egos and people for whatever reason buy that.
| dang wrote:
| You can't post personal attacks like this to HN, regardless
| of who you're attacking. Perhaps you don't feel that you owe
| $person better, but you owe this community much better if you
| want to participate here.
|
| You crossed badly into bannable territory in this thread.
| I've responded in more detail here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066921.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| How exactly would we deal with this issue then? I'm sure
| you've seen where people have accused you of editing Austin
| Allred's username on his account. Nobody else can do
| that.If I believe that lambda school or coinbase has been
| involved in shady business practices, is HN not the place
| to discuss that? Do you not have a conflict of interest
| here?
| dang wrote:
| (Although your account is rate-limited because of the
| quantity of flamewar comments you've posted, I've
| temporarily turned the rate limit off so you can reply.
| You don't need to create new accounts, which HN's anti-
| troll software is rejecting anyhow.)
|
| You posted surprisingly vicious smears in this thread,
| even blaming one person for the death of another. Some of
| that you edited in an extremely misleading way, so that
| the community's original response seemed unreasonable,
| when in fact it had been appropriate. Even in the above
| comment, which is still up, you've accused someone of
| being fake, fraudulent, and dishonest, with zero basis.
| When asked not to do any of this, you haven't even
| acknowledged what you did--instead you're changing the
| subject dramatically. Isn't that a little distasteful?
|
| > _I 'm sure you've seen where people have accused you_
|
| Since you saw the thread where people were bringing it
| up, I'm surprised you didn't see the explanations:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959559
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959675
|
| > _is HN not the place to discuss that_
|
| People discuss companies, including YC-funded companies,
| at great length on HN all the time. That's not the issue
| here. The issue is that you've been breaking the site
| guidelines very badly, and we need you to stop.
|
| > _Do you not have a conflict of interest_
|
| I've written extensively about that over the years. If
| you or anyone is interested, some of those past
| explanations can be found at the following links:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &qu...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false
| &so...
|
| The short version is that we don't moderate HN to
| suppress criticism of YC or YC startups, because that
| would be (a) wrong, (b) futile, and (c) dumb. We moderate
| HN to try to keep it interesting and in line with the
| site guidelines
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) --
| that's all. I'd never claim to be immune from bias (who
| could?) but I can tell you what principles we try to
| apply and we can at least claim to have years' worth of
| practice at them.
|
| There's nothing secret here, by the way, in the sense
| that anyone can get an answer to any question about how
| HN works (other than technical details about anti-abuse
| software, and that only because they would stop working
| if they weren't secret). Trying to run an online
| community any other way would be inefficient and self-
| defeating. We try never to do anything that isn't
| defensible to the community, because the community's good
| will is the only asset HN has.
|
| I completely understand how easy it is for unexplained
| details to compound into weird and sinister pictures.
| That's a fact of human life that we all have to deal
| with, especially online. But really the clearest and
| freshest way to deal with it is to check what's actually
| happening, when that option is available. HN, even though
| it has millions of users, is still small enough that that
| option is actually available. Why not take advantage of
| that?
| themdangrules wrote:
| My "smears" involved talking about how Reddit didn't ban
| the watchpeopledie and greatawakening subreddits until
| they became a public issue. People were making death
| threats in the latter, talking about secret messages from
| Trump. It's preying on mentally ill people. It's
| _wrong_.I said that Graham 's influence encouraged Swartz
| to take the actions he did. To believe that the world was
| his oyster that he could hack without consequence, and
| that now the conspiracy subreddit thinks that Swartz is
| some kind of martyr for freedom.I promise you nothing I
| said is factually incorrect. You consider them smears
| because they "smear" the people that pay your salary. You
| do get paid for this, I hope?I accuse Graham of being
| dishonest because he won't actually directly discuss
| issues he has, instead he does it this roundabout way of
| posting essays, essays which you review and you have
| banning and moderation power over. You don't see the
| conflict of interest? It's punching you in the face. I
| consider Musk a liar, because well, he's a liar. I know
| Sam has interviewed him before.I did edit my post, but
| that's because I knew it wouldn't fly. You accused me
| editing it to be neutral of being "abusive". But I was
| editing it so it would not ideally cause trouble. But it
| did anyway because damned if you do, damned if you don't.
| Now you're trying to portray my edits as abusive. Come
| on, dude.You've never stood up for me, dang, when people
| are being pedantic and bullying. What do you want me to
| admit to? That I have a really strong dislike of you and
| Graham because here you are being manipulative for all to
| see? Yeah, I did. That you aren't honest with yourself
| about the "essays" that Graham attacks people in? Yeah, I
| feel that. That your moderation is arbitrary and
| selective and doesn't scale? Yeah. I'll admit, I'd never
| heard of that essay is French excuse, but it's a good
| one. I'll have to teach it to my kids (re: Uncle
| dang).This is a new account, not to be "abusive", because
| I logged out and don't have the password to the old one.
| I'm not so offended to call your accusations "smears",
| but please be aware this is a two way street.I wonder if
| you would have banned Musk when he called an innocent
| person a pedophile? Hell of a smear.
| dang wrote:
| This account is getting caught in HN's anti-abuse
| software (correctly), but I've let the comment through
| because I don't want to prevent you from replying. (You
| may need to edit it to fix the whitespace - sorry, that's
| our bug.)
|
| I don't want to keep doing this, though, so would you
| please use your main account? I removed the restriction
| from it, so it should work.
|
| If you say you didn't intend to mislead by editing your
| comment, I believe you. Nothing factual that you're
| describing about pg remotely justifies the abusive
| language you've used. Elon Musk, it seems to me, has
| nothing to do with any of this. If someone was bullying
| toward you on HN, or you felt they were, that sucks, and
| I'm sorry we didn't stand up for you. I try to stand up
| for someone who's being unfairly criticized when I know
| about it--don't forget that we don't see the overwhelming
| majority of what gets posted. I consider it a smear when
| people say awful things about others without
| justification. It doesn't depend on who's paying me.
| fillskills wrote:
| After marriage and running a decent sized org, I learnt that
| all people are not exactly like me. They are different. In
| many ways. While some like PG like to support others and shy
| from confrontation, others like Steve Jobs etc found success
| by being more direct. Looks like both ways can work. And I am
| teaching my team at work the same - that there are many paths
| to a win. This was not easy in the beginning for me
| personally, I could not appreciate the differences. But I am
| learning.
| dd36 wrote:
| I wonder if the backlash to Mighty and the resulting
| defensiveness will cause it to persist longer than it would have
| had it announced earlier or gotten less friendly feedback.
| Presuming it doesn't get the widespread traction it was hoping
| for.
| tworats wrote:
| > The rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value
| of the outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has
| a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x
| better
|
| This is the primary point here - the "crazy idea" may (and likely
| does) have a low probability of being correct and succeeding, but
| with an outsized reward it may still be worth pursuing. This is,
| almost by definition, the correct way of looking at it.
|
| Also note that he's talking about crazy ideas from "reasonable
| domain experts", not your run of the mill crazy.
|
| This is not just a response to Mighty - he's been talking about
| this for years.
| davesque wrote:
| It seems people often have a weird "anti-bias" to believe that
| everything that goes on to be wildly successful was originally
| dismissed as ridiculous or impossible. First of all, it's not
| true. There are plenty of examples of ideas that seemed good to
| begin with and turned out to be good in practice. So something
| seeming ridiculous doesn't really count as an important quality
| in predicting success. Secondly, even if it were somehow true
| that all successful ideas seemed ridiculous, that _still_ says
| nothing about how likely something is to succeed. What percentage
| of failed ideas originally seemed ridiculous? It 's also an
| important question, but I guess one you don't need to answer if
| you're a billionaire and have a large audience of worshipers.
|
| Sometimes a stupid idea is just that.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| The problem is compounded by the fact that most of this is just
| a storytelling retcon anyway.
|
| Mighty is trying to make your browser experience smoother,
| faster, whatever (saying nothing of the larger vision). That's
| _obviously_ a good idea, and it 's easy to tell a story about
| how the founders overcame huge technical hurdles to make it
| work, and so on.
|
| But then Mighty is also _obviously_ one of the ugliest, most
| inelegant ideas ever invented, which, in case it fails, can be
| used to point it how obvious it was.
|
| So, yeah. Not sure there's much to be learnt here?
| codingdave wrote:
| > Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss
| it, then it gradually takes over the world.
|
| This is survivorship bias. He is not wrong in that yes, we should
| consider ideas from domain experts carefully and not be overly
| dismissive. But it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe
| that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out.
| david-cako wrote:
| Having crazy ideas seems to be a prerequisite for taking over
| the world with an idea. The alternative is having familiar
| ideas which are already pervasive, or having no ideas.
| yesenadam wrote:
| > it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every
| crazy idea from a domain expert worked out
|
| Who believes that?
| zby wrote:
| It would be survivorship bias if the author suggested a rule
| here - but this quote is only a statement that 'this can
| happen'.
|
| Where the author suggest a rule: "Such ideas are not guaranteed
| to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be
| sufficiently good bets -- to have sufficiently high expected
| value." - it is hedged against survivorship bias.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Graham should know better, he talked about arc as the messiah
| for five years before getting beat to market by Clojure. Now
| they barely do proper language releases.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| He doesn't say that crazy ideas by domain experts always work
| out. He makes two claims:
|
| 1) That if the crazy idea is from a domain expert, it
| deserves to be taken seriously. It doesn't deserve to be
| taken as gospel, but it shouldn't be dismissed outright.
|
| 2) He's betting (but not stating as fact) that if you did
| blindly support the crazy ideas of domain experts, you'd be
| right more often than you're wrong.
|
| This is not the same thing as saying domain experts are
| always right. Simply that all things being equal, you're
| better off betting on their expertise over your own
| ignorance. But even better than that is to look into the
| matter until you have sufficient expertise to properly
| evaluate their idea.
| sneak wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > _Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don 't have
| to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets -- to have
| sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they
| do._
|
| It's likely that you're both right. If something is biased 45%
| off of a coin toss, but gives 25x returns, it's still positive
| EV.
|
| This is a part of VC and speculative investment that a lot of
| people gloss over. Success is the difference between being
| wrong 95% of the time and being wrong 97% of the time. (And,
| with Softbank around, sometimes it's the difference between
| being wrong 97% of the time and 99.5% of the time.)
| ANarrativeApe wrote:
| There's more than one crazy new idea floating around, checkout
| cituzenshareholders.com reimagining of capitalism and their (ok,
| our) crazy, yet feasible, plan to democratize corporate
| governance. With $40 trillion in shares owned thru collective
| investments Larry Fink's wish for a new form of shareholder
| engagement will come true!
| umutisik wrote:
| The essay seems to be about startups. It could use more examples
| to illustrate the point.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Let's not kid ourselves, this thin-client re-package is a
| marketing effort to push forward a paradigm shift that allows
| companies to grab more power and control of our 1's and 0's
|
| ... whatever value proposition it is packaged up in is just
| marketing and propaganda ... even if they charge money for it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| A fast heuristic on the value of crazy ideas would be: a) is the
| premise of this idea based on the rejection or falsification of
| an established consensus or convention, and b) does this person
| (the proponent) survive?
|
| A crazy idea is just betting a majority is wrong. What makes it
| smart is not about being right, it's that you have figured out
| how to make money if the consensus is vulnerable or wrong.
|
| Some of the the biggest startups and plays of the last decade
| were bets against conventions and rich country taboos like
| letting strangers crash on your couch, driving strangers around
| in your car, straight women wanting anonymous hookups and the
| normalization of sex work, non-technical people using
| cryptography, working class people investing in alterantive
| assets - let alone understanding what a short squeeze is enough
| to execute one, watching movies on little laptop screens.
|
| What makes an idea 'crazy' is that it is against one that people
| align with because the alignment itself means being aligned to
| power. Most of what people believe, they do so because it _works_
| for them, and by works I mean aligns them to what they percieve
| to be powerful. Most money seems to be made getting short weaker
| middle class conventions.
|
| A crazy idea is making the call that an emperor has no clothes. I
| suspect the secret to getting short naked emperors is not so much
| a track record for upholding convention, but rather, a track
| record of suviving.
| robofanatic wrote:
| The title is misleading. I went into it thinking I will find some
| new crazy ideas, but there were none.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| "If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable
| person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous" - my reaction
| would be to ask: that's unexpected to me, what is different?
| 9erdelta wrote:
| > Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the
| history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone
| proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then
| it gradually takes over the world.
|
| Funny how he says this but then later goes on to mention Darwin.
| Perhaps we could say part of the natural selection of new "big
| things" is if they (both the ideas and the people) survive the
| early dismissiveness and criticism. I would welcome criticism
| from highly experienced and conservative people, because if you
| can respond meaningfully and survive - you're probably on to
| something.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I think most "crazy" ideas seem that way given the current
| constraints in that point in time and it's the domain experts
| that see the changing landscape which will make them viable.
|
| It's hard to remember, but there was a time that YouTube seemed
| "crazy" as it was assumed that bandwidth costs would swamp the
| viability of any video startup.
|
| See also: almost all the "dumb" early web startups that weren't
| dumb, but mistimed the market (Webvan, ePets)
| woopwoop wrote:
| > Everyone is too conservative.
|
| Interesting. Do VCs outperform the S&P 500 in general?
| nottorp wrote:
| If this is about Mighty, the bad parts of it aren't technical.
|
| - Even with today's concentration of information, there are
| several independent information sources left... and they want us
| to access them from a single point of failure?
|
| - Who pays for this and how? How do I install my own ad blockers
| and anti tracking extensions on Mighty? Am I supposed to just
| trust them that they won't sell my advertising profile?
|
| - What happens to the sites Mighty management disagrees with? Do
| they become inaccessible? Or they render badly? Especially since
| they're an American company and society is getting ultra
| polarized over there...
| intergalplan wrote:
| Exactly. The tech is _farcical_ (surely even a proponent of
| them can see that?) but that 's not really Mighty's fault.
|
| It's _bad_ because their strongest viable business plays seem
| to all involve leveraging their access to people 's browsers in
| not-so-nice ways.
| not1ofU wrote:
| Founders: "Write that down"
| guerrilla wrote:
| Weird pop psy in the middle of this article. Forgive me if I
| don't just take your word on millions of people's motivations
| with no data or argument.
| rsp1984 wrote:
| I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that
| most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate
| within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly _because_
| being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the
| box.
|
| Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music
| industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com
| didn't invent Tinder. It's often the curious outsiders that
| disrupt the status quo, not the well connected insiders.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Google didn't come out of Yahoo.
|
| from my reading of the history of Yahoo they had plenty of good
| ideas that they destroyed because the problem was not domain
| experts but thinking they were in the wrong business (media!)
| shoto_io wrote:
| I agree 100%. The list could be continued indefinitely.
|
| Less positively formulated, you could also say people outside
| an industry are naive enough to start something people inside
| would deem impossible.
| pilingual wrote:
| I'm curious to see a list of world-changing ideas that came out
| of domain expertise and those that the essay claims could be
| dismissed because the person was not an expert.
|
| AirBnB, which is perhaps pg's favorite company, would never
| have gotten into Y Combinator without Michael Seibel and the
| endorsement of the JTV crew. AirBnB simply would not exist
| today.
|
| So I hope people don't read this essay and think, "I'm not a
| domain expert, so I'll give up on this idea." Somewhat of a
| dangerous essay for that reason.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'd argue that for unique companies like AirBnB the founders
| _become_ domain experts while they 're building the company.
| marvin wrote:
| I figured that was subtext, and that we're not necessarily
| talking about what a hotel executive would think.
| Putshort wrote:
| You could also look at the list of Google's failures.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Why are all your examples software companies? Certainly not
| because most of the world's revolutionary ideas are from
| programmers. Perhaps there are benefits to domain knowledge for
| coming up with revolutionary ideas in, say, biology or
| chemistry or electrical engineering or literature or political
| science or manufacturing or medicine...
| matt_s wrote:
| I don't think pg intended that crazy new ideas require someone
| to be a domain expert, just some expertise. Slight wording
| difference.
|
| In the case of music, one could have domain expertise on audio
| files, compression and domain expertise about file sharing and
| domain expertise about younger people's listening habits.
| That's just having some insights into the domain, several as is
| the case with Napster. Music industry execs in those days
| probably had domain expertise on contract law, revenue sharing
| models, marketing and didn't have a clue about file sharing or
| audio compression.
|
| Also want to mention the examples you mention seem to have not
| much "newness" to them to be "crazy new" in my opinion.
|
| When I think of "crazy new" ideas, I think of things like stuff
| that came out of PARC in the 60's. If you go watch the Stanford
| 2 part series "How To Invent The Future" with Alan Kay on
| youtube [0] it goes into a lot of detail about them.
|
| The challenge there with Xerox was they couldn't capitalize on
| every single idea that came out, just not logistically possible
| for a company to really do that.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ
| tomhoward wrote:
| He didn't say "the accepted circle". Just domain experts.
|
| Larry Page and Sergey Brin were domain experts - they were
| doing a PhD dissertation on mapping and indexing the web.
|
| The other businesses you mention aren't all that crazy; they
| just needed good implementation.
| samstave wrote:
| SpaceX and Tesla came 'out of' PayPal.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary
| just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain
| experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more
| unlikely to think out of the box.
|
| I don't know about that... look at physics for example. You
| have plenty of experts who are total mavericks and then a bunch
| of outsiders spewing crankery and messing up on the basics.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Those are all excellent examples of the main reason why
| innovation can not be done in established businesses: the fear
| of cannibalizing the cash cow will stifle any real innovation.
| kolinko wrote:
| Bell Labs is a counterexample to what you said. It developed
| the first transistor, photovoltaic cell, fiberiptic, lasers,
| cctv and some other things. Oh, and cellphones of course.
|
| Ditto Xerox Parc and modern user interfaces, ethernet and and
| laser printers.
| ta988 wrote:
| Agreed, it wiuld be more accurate to say it is not possible
| in companies that are optimizing finances short-term. Bell
| invested a ton of money with the hope it would bring
| results long term. I have yet to see a company's board
| authorizing that now...
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Was the Playstation not revolutionary?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I don't think so, at least not in any technical aspect.
| Pretty much everything about the tech was a logical
| extension of industry trends. It began life as a CD-ROM
| add-on for the SNES similar to Sega's SegaCD for the
| Genesis/MegaDrive. Outside the technology, the low license
| cost and relative ease of developing for it built a
| sizeable and varied library of games, which I think was a
| major contributor to its success, but neither of those
| things strike me as particularly revolutionary.
| taurath wrote:
| It's also just as often someone who's worked in an industry for
| a while and has a bunch of good ideas from understanding the
| problems. We put the college kids making big companies on a
| pedestal but most startups are from people who know the domain.
|
| You won't find a revolutionary import/export company that
| doesn't have some knowledge about the logistics industry. But
| you are more likely to be paying attention to new technologies
| as they emerge that might allow you to come up with the
| revolutionary ideas. I've noticed as I've gotten older I've
| stopped spending my time fiddling with all my devices. As a
| result I'm less likely to realize when something new and
| exciting might be within reach, until it hits a higher point on
| the bell curve of maturity.
| phenkdo wrote:
| However, for everyone of those examples there are many counter-
| examples: Intel came out of Shockley, ex-IBMers went onto found
| several other companies (SAP, Peoplesoft,...)...
|
| So Im skeptical of this outsider/insider characterization, IMHO
| it's almost always the individuals.
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| I agree. The iPhone is the perfect counter-example to this
| narrative: perhaps one of the most revolutionary pieces of
| hardware or software in the last 20 years, it came out of
| Apple, an established company at the time.
| enumjorge wrote:
| Yeah this feels like an example of a narrative that sounds
| compelling but could easily be overstated. How many
| breakthrough innovations have "insiders" made that aren't as
| noteworthy because they are more expected? Google was given
| as an example by the parent comment. Google also made a lot
| of breakthrough innovations in the distributed systems and
| browsers space after their outsiders phase.
| heipei wrote:
| Let's try something fun and imagine Mighty (and similar RBI
| services) were the only browsers available when finally Google,
| Microsoft and Mozilla launch their own browsers. Imagine the
| headlines:
|
| "Run your own browser for free, forever, without having to sign
| up or put in your credit card!"
|
| "Run your own browser, even when your network connectivity is
| bad!" -
|
| "Run your own browser to access resources on your corporate
| intranet that are not available on the Internet".
|
| "Run your own browser, you stay in charge of your data, login
| credentials and browsing history!"
|
| "Run your own browser which efficiently caches resources locally
| so you only have to download them once instead of a constant 4K
| video stream".
| Nihmie wrote:
| Everything Paul wrote about in this post resonated with me. He
| avoided any examples, and looking through these HN comments, it's
| clear why. A lot of people assume that his experiences are
| specific, but no, there really is a culture of shooting down
| crazy new ideas.
|
| I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I
| remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out
| if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored
| or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the
| camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of,
| "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't
| convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all
| sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite
| reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this
| capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy
| idea might have generated such a personal attack.
|
| Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch
| Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that
| protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to
| discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea
| challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable.
|
| There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with:
| incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to
| evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By
| extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy
| new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be
| rejected immediately.
|
| I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the
| school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a
| typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast
| banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are
| important starting points, but after that the only thing that
| matters is hard work.
|
| My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery
| ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut
| gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless,
| the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before
| checking them against the winning numbers.
| taytus wrote:
| > He avoided any examples
|
| Because _most_ people following HN knew about what
| _SPECIFICALLY_ he was talking about.
|
| This was a reaction, not something that happened out of
| nowhere.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly
| talking about the feedback received by Mighty App.
|
| And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid
| defense.
|
| First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly
| neutral about it.
|
| Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new
| tech".
|
| People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is
| infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also
| because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside
| thin client)
|
| https://www.mightyapp.com/
| https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389
| https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
| dunkelheit wrote:
| > First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be
| credibly neutral about it.
|
| I think this is a general and important point (and sadly not at
| all discussed in his post). When an expert publicly says
| something that seems wrong, my default explanation is that they
| have a vested interest that consciously or unconsciously forces
| them to consider the implications of what they say and alter
| the message accordingly. Recent case in point: public health
| authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even
| harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and
| then reversing their stance when masks became abundant.
|
| This is especially true for public statements. If I were a
| friend of pg and we would go to a pub and he would not stop
| talking about how awesome one of the startups he invested in
| are, that would be a strong signal for me. But if he shills for
| one of his investments on twitter and on his blog just like
| some influencer-investor would do, I don't find this especially
| strong evidence that said startup is revolutionary even though
| he is an undisputed expert on startups.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>"Recent case in point: public health authorities telling
| the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the
| pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing
| their stance when masks became abundant."
|
| I agree with your general point, but my interpretation of
| those events has additional axis:
|
| 1. Masks are in shortage, and may not protect you, and public
| doesn't know how to use them and will probably do more harm
| than help by reusing and handling and touching their masks
|
| Then as time passed and we learned more
|
| 2. This is getting bad; even if masks don't save the person
| wearing them, if it helps _others_ , we are at a point where
| we need all the help we can get. Please wear masks to help
| slow the overall spread.
|
| While there's definitely part of the complex factoring of the
| recommendation that masks became more abundant, I feel
| initial message was "Crappy masks won't save you" and later
| message "Crappy masks won't save you, but may save others
| from yourself"
|
| 98% of people I talk to don't understand that surgical mask /
| cloth mask will do extremely poor job of protecting them; but
| may protect others. (it also adds an axis of complexity for
| those who don't want to wear masks because they feel they
| have the right not to protect themselves, because that's not
| what mainstream masks are for; it's not about wearing a
| helmet or not to protect your own head; it's about protecting
| heads of those around you)
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > Then as time passed and we learned more
|
| Yeah, lots of time has passed since people started to use
| masks to prevent a spread of infection. Like, 100 years?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That's sarcasm but let me try to address the notion
| behind it, to best of my limited personal understanding;
| "prevent spread" has multiple factors to it.
|
| My impression, in my locality, is that at beginning of
| pandemic people focused on notion of using masks to
| protect themselves (and many though not all governments
| indicated that's not efficient/recommended).
|
| Then "as time passed and we learned more" focus moved to
| using masks to protect others (though many individuals,
| in my circle, still aren't clear on that).
|
| My impression is that we have evolving, and still not
| necessarily 100% certain evidence/understanding, on how
| it spreads and what are the most effective measures. It's
| made more complex because
|
| a) there's no silver bullet; most measures increase your
| chances to some percentage. This makes discussion between
| experts and public more difficult as public tends to
| think in binary terms.
|
| b) While yes there are many public health measures we've
| known for 100 years (wash hands, have clean water,
| cook/boil/heat things to sterilize them, sneeze in
| elbow/Kleenex, wear mask, remove waste, etc etc), not all
| are equally effective against all vectors. What seems
| "Common sense" / "Logical" to a layperson like myself,
| may be more nuanced to an expert with experience.
|
| I mean, for what it's worth, I'm 100% certain my dad, a
| year in, is still worse off for using a mask _because of
| how he uses it_. Many and especially older people around
| me reuse their masks for days and weeks , touch them
| constantly, put them under their nose for prolonged
| periods, don 't squeeze/tighten them sufficiently, etc.
| Even if all that touching doesn't hurt, their belief that
| they're protected coupled with incorrect usage coupled
| with likely increase in risky behaviour is a net
| negative.
|
| People can scream liberty and freedoms and personal
| responsibility, but I feel public health officials have
| to look at cold hard facts, of both disease but also
| people's actual behaviour (as opposed to some ideal non-
| existent form) and how it actually affects spread rather
| than how it logically intuitively should.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think OP meant the general public's familiarity with
| using masks day to day. I think Japan has had the jump on
| the US for some time in that regard.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| And then, when they finally got around to actually applying
| some science to the question, the message became, "Surgical
| and (decent) cloth masks will protect others from yourself,
| and may also protect you."
|
| I can't track down papers atm, but, on a more anecdotal
| level, there have been quite a few case studies of
| superspreader events where the people who were wearing
| masks were much less likely to contract the illness than
| people who weren't. Given the specific details at play,
| it's hard to explain how that could happen if cloth or
| surgical masks don't protect oneself as well.
|
| The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew
| exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of
| caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol
| transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And
| a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer
| very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet
| transmission seems to be the better model.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew
| exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of
| caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol
| transmission, and speculated based on that assumption.
| And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the
| wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that
| droplet transmission seems to be the better model.
|
| So close but so far.
|
| At a minimum please give https://www.thelancet.com/journa
| ls/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... a read. The real story is
| that SARS-2 does spread through aerosols whereas droplet
| transmission is pure unproven dogma. The paper I linked
| goes into some reasons why that is the case (for ex the
| fact that transmission is more likely close to someone
| doesn't actually provide strong evidence for droplet
| xmission)
|
| EDIT: I should add that even if it were primarily droplet
| transmission - which I very much doubt - masking would
| likely still fail for the stated goal (source control) in
| a community setting due to improper usage. And improper
| usage doesn't just mean "the mask is below your nose", it
| means "you're not changing out the mask the _moment_ it
| gets damp ", "you're touching your mask with unwashed
| hands", "you're touching your hands with unwashed mask",
| "you're standing closer to your conversational partner to
| compensate for the fact that masks muffle hearing"
| (<--this last one isn't "improper usage" so much as an
| inevitable result but I digress). And this is all without
| discussing any of the various negatives of mask-wearing
| that it's become trendy to pretend literally don't exist.
|
| But to your point, you already correctly hinted at the
| fact that if aerosol transmission is the dominant
| transmission mode, then masks don't work even in theory,
| let alone in practice.
| diyseguy wrote:
| The problem is they lost all credibility with the public
| for that very obvious deception.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Which deception? I did not indicate one in my post so
| reference to " _that_ very obvious deception " is not
| clear to me.
|
| note: "Evolving understanding/new facts" or
| "new/differing priorities" are not the same as
| "deception" to me. e.g.:
|
| * Thinking A and Saying A; then changing mind and
| Thinking B and Saying B; are not a deception
|
| * Saying "Because of X, A"; then later "Because of Y, B",
| because Y became more important than X, is also not
| deception to me
|
| * Thinking A but Saying B is a deception to me (for
| reasons and intents that I may or may not agree with)
| ziml77 wrote:
| I'm with you. To me, it was pretty clear why they were
| making recommendations in the way that they did. There
| was no secret about why they wanted to limit the supply
| of masks going to the public at the start of the
| pandemic. They didn't know for sure how it spread, but
| they did know that the most important places to have
| masks were the hospitals. You need to be extraordinarily
| cautious there because every hospital worker that gets
| sick reduces the number of people available to deal with
| patients (and adds another patient). There was also
| concern about face touching if people not used to masks
| started wearing them, but I only recall seeing that being
| a concern when it came to sending children to school with
| masks.
|
| Once the mask supply was able to meet demand and after
| they were reasonably certain it would protect against the
| spread of the virus, they adjusted their recommendations
| accordingly.
|
| None of that is deceptive.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 98% of people I talk to don't understand that surgical
| mask / cloth mask will do extremely poor job of protecting
| them
|
| This was the line for a while, but since we now know that
| it's an airborne infection that basically accumulates when
| you're in close proximity to someone infected until it
| reaches a critical point where it can grow faster than your
| body can fight it off, the mask is the only thing that's
| slowing it down.
|
| Masks (and good ventilation) are about the only thing that
| protects you - social distancing means nothing because
| coronavirus isn't confined to the larger droplets we
| thought it was. Mask-wearing seems to result in less-
| serious infections even when you catch it because your
| initial infection was likely by less virus.
|
| edit: I think there was an official reluctance to admit
| that it was completely airborne because the constant
| attempts to reopen businesses (like restaurants) would have
| been completely thwarted if social distancing (and constant
| surface sterilization) were meaningless.
| adenta wrote:
| Imagine not having to think about cross browser comparability.
| Customer wants to use internet explorer? Just head to
| ie.example.com, for a mighty version of a given website.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| What happens when Mighty's competitors offer slightly
| different browser emulations and you now have to build your
| web app for Mighty and Weakly and Mediocry as well?
| fossuser wrote:
| > " People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is
| infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and
| also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client
| inside thin client)"
|
| This is the kind of asymmetric dismissal he's talking about,
| and it's not very good.
|
| Dangerous? We run everything via cloud services and encrypted
| communication. "Sounds technically ridiculous" - so did
| probably every modern technological idea when it was new "you
| put your database in some other company's servers?!".
|
| You're mostly proving PG's point.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| We can still create and run programs on our computers. This
| is more important than you think.
|
| Delegating power/freedom is dangerous, we're already
| delegating too much.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah I mean I'm with you - I like local control and I think
| Urbit is cool because of this.
|
| That said, the potential for mighty is real and dismissing
| it for these reasons is dumb. The same logic would have
| also dismissed nearly all modern wildly successful tech
| companies.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| From a privacy perspective alone, it's a terrible idea to
| give a company your browsing data.
|
| That _is_ dangerous and certainly not best practice. The
| critique is valid.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around
| basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple
| different incarnations because it could be huge.
|
| And I mean that in a bad way.
|
| Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still
| own our computers.
|
| I can see how it would start in the corporate world.
| bsedlm wrote:
| It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten
| archiectural principle of the internet which says that the
| "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart,
| the nodes are as dumb as pipes.
|
| Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and
| the clients (leaves) dumb.
| freeopinion wrote:
| I think the "architectural principle of the internet" is
| not what you suggest.
|
| Years ago, I pushed as much work onto the client as
| possible to reduce the workload on my servers. Now, people
| complain if you push too much work onto their phones. They
| want the server to do the heavy lifting so the app can be
| more responsive on their low-powered mobile client.
|
| "The internet" doesn't define how much weight each end of a
| connection should bear. It doesn't really even dictate that
| there are only two ends.
|
| Should a webapp have a braindead REST api with a select,
| insert, update, delete for each table of the underlying db
| model and have the client make 1000 nested calls to the
| server to render the simplest thing? Or should the server
| api be much more sophisticated so that a single api call
| can provide all the information required for the render?
|
| There's no one right answer just because "internet".
| razorfen wrote:
| It's the first I'd heard of this axiom. Can you give an
| example of that in a real architecture?
|
| I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a
| network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals
| are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is
| doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But no one uses that architecture anymore. To the extent
| that you have a terminal on a remote server, you use it
| to configure the server, from your own thick client.
| freeopinion wrote:
| Is it true that chromebooks outsell other laptops?
| dunkelheit wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle
|
| It is not an axiom though, but rather an architectural
| guideline that comes with its own set of trade-offs and
| must be applied judiciously.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This is true from a technical perspective, and this is
| probably why the web is still not perfectly sound from an
| engineering point of view.
|
| But from a business perspective, there is huge value in
| dumb clients (not for the end-user)
| vidarh wrote:
| There's an ongoing tension here between software getting
| complex enough to be slow and people wanting to move
| computation to servers.
|
| The problem with that, of course, is that the clients
| inevitably gets faster, and cheaper, and software gets
| pushed to the leaves again.
|
| We're carrying around what used to be super computers.
|
| This is also why I would be very cautious about investing
| in something that bets on offloading computation from
| clients: If you time it right, it could be huge for a
| while, but you're betting against advances in the speed and
| cost of computation. The same advances you'll rely on to
| scale and drive down costs.
|
| As such it feels to me like they're playing a game of
| musical chairs.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Yes, this is a seemingly never-ending cycle.
|
| 1. Software is too heavy, let's push it on the server 2.
| Dumb client gets faster 3. Servers cost money, let's use
| the unused CPU cycles on the client 4. Bloatware happens,
| go back to 1.
| gwright wrote:
| I think you are leaving out the data story. It is very
| difficult to push data to the edges, you can easily run
| into volume or consistency problems.
|
| No surprise that this means that there is no single
| solution. Complexity sometimes makes sense at the edges
| and sometimes make sense in the core. It just depends.
|
| I think we have a lot to learn about building systems
| that give us the flexibility to move things around as
| needed. Plan 9 was interesting from that point of view
| because it gave a way for edge resources and core
| resources to be composed via 9P at any place in the
| network.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't buy that data is a technical problem. It's a
| business problem in as much as holding users data hostage
| is central to a lot of business plan. All of the data in
| my Google account, for example, fits on a microsd card.
| Of course I want backups of it, and so I don't want to
| actually store it on a single microsd card, but the point
| is that this doesn't require much logic at the core. You
| can push processing to the edge while using a storage
| service. But you can push storage services _towards the
| edge_ too. For a lot of data we already employ near
| write-once for the core of the data, which is ideally
| suited for synchronisation schemes over fully connected
| centralised storage. Your e-mail, and things like Google
| Photos are good examples.
|
| Consistency is less of a challenge than it might seem.
| It's a challenge if you're frequently disconnected from
| the network for extensive periods of time and might
| access _and modify_ data from multiple disconnected
| devices in that period (note _modify_ , not augment and
| create something new, which is easy to accommodate). But
| supporting that is very different from supporting mostly-
| local computation.
| bewo001 wrote:
| If you have to manage 100s of devices, you prefer thin
| clients. As a user, you want control over your device and
| rich functionality. Dumb clients usually give you dumb
| services.
|
| I thought we have moved past thin clients and moved on to
| centrally managed software, either in the form of javascript
| web apps or as apps from an app store.
| breck wrote:
| Mighty is such an obviously good idea, and if you've spent
| decades on the cutting edge of the web you'd understand why.
| People's demands for more powerful web apps are for all intents
| and purposes _infinite_ , and it is much more pleasant as a
| developer to develop once, run anywhere, than to develop an app
| for low powered clients and a different one for high powered
| ones.
| intergalplan wrote:
| For me, the question becomes--if we must write applications
| to one target that's going to run on a server anyway--why oh
| why must it be web tech? The whole appeal of applications
| (not documents) in the browser was that they were (kinda,
| sorta) able to run on any platform. If your target is one
| browser on one OS, and you're writing an actual _application_
| , why would you subject yourself, your developers, and your
| product quality to an HTML + JS UI?
| breck wrote:
| Write once run on billions of clients but scale to
| supercomputering power.
| username90 wrote:
| That will never happen. A large majority of people will never
| have mighty since it is expensive, webapps will continue to
| be built to render locally.
|
| People already have a lot of power in their machines for
| their non-web apps, and it is enough to run web apps as well.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Define "powerful".
|
| I'm rocking a 8 year old laptop. I also use NoScript, which
| means I'm pretty aware of what code webpages are actually
| running on my computer.
|
| What I've seen is that the things that make it really chug
| have very little to do with how much actual functionality the
| website has. Beautiful CSS animations usually aren't too bad,
| either, even on my old computer. The real performance hogs
| tend to be things like scrolljacking, telemetry, and dynamic
| ad placement.
|
| The interesting outlier here is gmail. Gmail fascinates me,
| because it keeps getting slower and slower, without, as far
| as I can tell, actually gaining any new capabilities.
| intergalplan wrote:
| Gmail's so bad now that I only use "classic HTML" Gmail in
| the browser, and native clients (Apple's Mail, for
| example). I have _no idea_ how they managed to make a
| relatively simple "web app" so huge and heavy. You could
| add all of full-fat Gmail's features to "classic HTML"
| Gmail for very little cost in bundle size and active
| resource use--though the result might not be an "app" in
| many folks' opinions, I guess. I just know navigating
| classic Gmail, with its "bad" full-page loads, is way
| faster than the "efficient" AJAX-style crap on normal
| Gmail.
|
| Mobile Gmail's not just heavy--it's broken. Whatever
| stupid, misguided bullshit they're doing with scrolling
| makes it register clicks where they weren't intended if I'm
| not _super_ careful.
| breck wrote:
| > powerful
|
| I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a
| browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and
| share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant.
|
| In the non-multiomics world I also make browser based data
| visualization software (most recently worked on this, for
| example: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-
| explorer). I want to load up 500GB and facet on multiple
| dimensions and then share the link and have it all run
| instantly.
|
| I'm not talking about Gmail and Text editors here. M1s
| solved that.
| aniforprez wrote:
| > I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in
| a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params,
| and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be
| instant.
|
| But why? Wouldn't you be better suited writing a native
| application that would do this better? This seems like
| you're building a problem for this solution. Most people
| use a browser for Gmail and to read news. Your example
| already works really well on the browser on my phone
| breck wrote:
| > But why?
|
| Because cancer is incredibly complicated and requires
| incredible amounts of data, analysis, and
| *collaboration*.
| aniforprez wrote:
| The "but why" question was not pointed at visualizing 1TB
| of single cell RNA sequence data or collaboration. It was
| pointed at why you'd want to do it in a browser? Why
| wouldn't you be able to make links and share them from a
| native application that they can then open in their
| application?
|
| Maybe I'm missing something in your problem statement but
| are you downloading all that 1TB in your browser window
| and changing parameters? If yes Mighty has to download
| that data too and considering that each user is
| sequestered, someone you're sharing this with will have
| to download all that too. If you're not and the
| visualization is running somewhere else and the result
| streamed to your system how does Mighty solve that
| problem?
| breck wrote:
| > why you'd want to do it in a browser?
|
| Distribution. There's only 1 magic platform that allows
| you to ship new versions at your own cadence to 100% of
| people.
|
| Developing for just M1s is great, when all your users are
| on M1s.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| This is slightly what I'm thinking, for that particular
| use case.
|
| The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to
| the client strikes me as slightly unhinged. Even if we
| assume you can achieve a sustained transfer rate of one
| gigabit per second, it's going to take over 2 hours to
| get a terabyte shoved down to the client. I'm guessing,
| though, that the actual vizualization is nowhere near one
| terabyte. Data's going to have to be aggregated somehow,
| because no computer monitor can display a terabyte worth
| of information all at once. Even a 4K monitor would fall
| short by many orders of magnitude.
|
| It would be much faster, and, I think, simpler, to keep
| the data on a central server, have it generate the
| visualizations, and push them down to the client.
| aniforprez wrote:
| > The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to
| the client strikes me as slightly unhinged
|
| Yeah which is why I asked for clarification from them
| because it seemed really weird to assert that as a
| positive for the app?
|
| > It would be much faster, and, I think, simpler, to keep
| the data on a central server, have it generate the
| visualizations, and push them down to the client.
|
| Yeah I completely agree but in this case, Mighty would
| have next to no advantage over just loading the
| visualization on your own machine. Hence, again the
| confusion about asserting Mighty as a means to an end
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. I can see Mighty as perhaps being useful as
| a band-aid to deal with someone else's poor, resource-
| hungry design.
|
| But if you're the actual app developer, I'm just not
| seeing a good reason why you would want to deliberately
| incorporate this technology into your design. Why farm
| the sever-side rendering out to a middleman when you
| could just... do server-side rendering?
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how much
| cryptocurrency I can mine on Mighty, especially if they lower
| prices later.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| The theoretical end you describe -- one where we are all just
| writing web applications to run in Mighty - sounds incredible
| but ignores the reality. There will not be 100% or even close
| to 100% adoption of streaming browsing, especially if it
| costs $50(!) a month. And you can imagine everything else
| that will go wrong:
|
| - mighty creates arbitrary APIs that allow more speed so now
| we have yet another build target
|
| - it manages to become successful, so now competitors jump in
| and now we have multiple targets to build for.
|
| - god forbid, competitors offer "free" versions that become
| even more invasive to your browsing
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > Paul Graham is indirectly talking about
|
| I find it strange that for someone that is a relatively immune
| from any real scrutiny, and constantly claiming to be a bold
| thinker, PG is always so coy in his writing.
|
| I would find PG's recent stream of ego driven rants much more
| enjoyable and potentially insightful if he would just say what
| he's really trying to say.
|
| He might be trying to add strength to his arguments by making
| them somehow more general, but since these pieces always seem
| very clearly about a specific bone PG has to pick, the result
| is they read as some of the most cowardly essays I've ever
| encountered.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| He is trying to build a stronger case by using an elaborate
| straw man argument.
|
| Turns out to be quite transparent and poor.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Maybe this is a terrible stance but if the idea pisses off
| Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, I wouldn't take that as a bad
| sign. jblow and Casey are brilliant programmers and I mean them
| no disrespect, but their philosophies are certainly in the vein
| of prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Namely you
| should write code that is fast and efficient. Unfortunately (or
| not, depends on your view), programmers do not like
| prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Worse is better
| and all. If you give them a cheat code to let them use a little
| more performance, give them a little more headroom, they'll
| take it. For all the jblows and muratori's in the world,
| there's a lot more people who don't care about perf and just
| want to make cool stuff. For better or worse.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| This is related to programmers tribes.
|
| Casey and Jon and from the engineering tribe. The cool stuff
| tribe is what I call the business oriented tribe.
|
| But I think you're missing the point.
|
| The technical merits of Mighty is a secondary problem.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Could you expand on what I'm missing? I'd love to hear your
| analysis (not sarcastic, would love to hear other people's
| thoughts)
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| Obviously not the parent commenter, but I'll give this a
| shot. I think that Jon and Casey's (and those of like
| mind) are not commenting on Mighty as a piece of
| individual tech, but commenting on the fact that Mighty
| as a product could even be in a position to exist.
|
| I am most likely to phrase the general position (which I
| think Jon and Casey would support) put forth as follows:
| the problem a service like Mighty is trying to solve ONLY
| exists because the standards and practices of modern
| software development is fundamentally broken.
|
| You even touch on this in your GP post about devs taking
| the shortcuts to 'making something cool'. As the parent
| post calls it, the cool stuff tribe are those developers
| who will use available cheat code because they expect
| that doing so is acceptable.
|
| Your GP post seems to try and counter the Jon and Casey
| position by saying that because developers just want to
| make things that they will and there is no concern for
| any impacts these accumulating decisions may have. I
| think the 'you're missing the point' comment derives from
| here. You seem to be saying that Jon and Casey's position
| is not palatable to devs because those devs are not
| concerned with performance and don't like to be told to
| consider such aspects of the things they make. But, J&C's
| point is that if the standards for developing software
| were not so broken then the position of the cheat code
| using devs would be uniformly decried as substandard and
| unacceptable. In a world where development standards were
| in line with J&C's views Mighty would not be in a
| position to be a viable product because using the web via
| a native browser accessing properly developed web content
| would be a pain free and perform any experience.
| throwkeep wrote:
| "For all the jblows and muratori's in the world, there's a
| lot more people who don't care about perf and just want to
| make cool stuff. For better or worse."
|
| And that it's mostly people who don't care about this on
| deeper level are why we have such a bloated ecosystem. Layers
| of bad code stacked on layers of bad code.
|
| If there were more jblows and muratori's in the world, Mighty
| would have no reason to exist. The web would already be
| performant. That PaulG is bullish on Mighty strikes me as a
| pessimistic view and a bet that the underlying problem won't
| be solved.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Yeah I mean I'm not saying it's a good thing that Mighty
| exists or that it might succeed. I'm just saying that we
| shouldn't take pithy Twitter replies as evidence it'll
| fail.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| > Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient
|
| I don't think this is accurate. I watched a talk with
| Jonathan Blow recently and he went on for quite a while
| railing against premature optimization.
|
| https://youtu.be/JjDsP5n2kSM?t=561
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Perhaps he is indirectly talking about Mighty. We could still
| consider what he says here on its own merits.
| fsociety wrote:
| Not to mention the privacy concerns of allowing someone else's
| machine to proxy all of your web requests.
| xfer wrote:
| This doesn't look like an end-user product, so it's mostly
| can you trust/audit the company? Most of them are already
| using aws to host their data.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Yeah, that's the point, this is why this "tech" is not what
| we want/need.
| intergalplan wrote:
| I have trouble seeing how it's going to find a sustainable
| market _except_ as business spyware /leak-prevention. Which
| is _yet another_ reason I 'm not a fan of the idea. In that
| capacity it may actually manage to survive and even thrive,
| but I'm not going to be happy about it.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| They simply didn't reveal the business model yet.
|
| The $50 subscription is to avoid flooding their servers
| while testing the software.
|
| This product will likely starts as a corporate malware
| but once the beta is over and their tech is really
| working at scale (more difficult than you might think)
| they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.
| intergalplan wrote:
| > This product will likely starts as a corporate malware
| but once the beta is over and their tech is really
| working at scale (more difficult than you might think)
| they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.
|
| So you think it _is_ a dragnet-surveillance get-acquired-
| for-our-data play, longer term? That 's even worse, if
| so.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| In short, yes. But being acquired is probably only seen
| as a salvage plan at this stage.
| username90 wrote:
| > they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.
|
| They wont give away this for free:
|
| > Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-
| art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz.
|
| People would mine bitcoins with it. Not to mention they'd
| be footing more than all of youtubes bandwidth costs if
| this gets popular.
| aniforprez wrote:
| My IMMEDIATE reaction to this was someone is gonna pay
| $50 a month to possibly make more money than that mining
| cryptos on the browser. JS crypto miners are already
| there now they just need to pay some numpty to run a
| browser somewhere with more resources. They're even
| offering GPU-level processing!
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| If won't happen overnight, but if they are successful
| with this tech it simply won't make sense to put friction
| in front of it.
| citrusybread wrote:
| hahaha, fuck, I remember ages ago, maybe 2013, when people were
| trying to get me to buy into the "web 2.0" craze -- "Web is the
| future!", "web can scale!", "nobody will install apps!", "your
| stuff will be accessible everywhere!"
|
| funny how they all turned out to be mixed bags. the best part?
| people telling me web apps are "lighter". even back then I knew
| that was a hot load of bullshit.
|
| good to know the other shoe has dropped and we're really going
| full-circle to thin clients/mainframes, but shittier.
| dannyphantom wrote:
| Could perhaps the idea of a thin client inside a thin client
| not be an idea that could be further developed to be of use one
| day?
| heipei wrote:
| I lost a decent amount of respect for pg due to how he keeps
| portraying Mighty like it's gonna change how we use the
| Internet and computers in general. Like, really?
|
| I don't mind Mighty as a product, I don't mind their team,
| their pricing or their slick marketing website. But please,
| call it what it is: A nice and slick Remote Browsing product,
| one of multiple ones. Cloudflare recently launched an RBI
| product with much more humble and honest marketing about where
| it will be useful.
| valine wrote:
| I was critical of Mighty on twitter, but not because I think
| it can't succeed. I don't want it to succeed. The whole
| concept is solving a problem that shouldn't need to be
| solved, ie running bloated web apps on commodity hardware.
| Mighty is essentially subsidizing bad software engineering
| practices and passing that cost onto the end consumer in the
| form of a monthly subscription service. I don't want to pay
| $30 a month so that Adobe can spend less on R&D optimizing
| their web apps.
| heipei wrote:
| I believe it will be a successful business by normal
| measures, but not live up to the hype and vision of its
| founders and investors. I think there will be market for a
| tool, especially with enterprises where people are forced
| to use a particularly slow web-app or need other isolation
| features.
|
| But for other people? Can you imagine Adobe saying "Here is
| our product, now please purchase this third-party cloud
| service to be able to use it." They either improve their
| software or launch their own server-driven app to capture
| those $30. That's my take.
| [deleted]
| suhail wrote:
| He might also be talking about many more ideas too: Dropbox,
| Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all
| seem surprisingly possible. You can criticize him for having
| skin in the game but you could equally commend him too: he puts
| his money where his mouth is.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I think this is other way around. He talks/write to promote
| his ventures.
| blocked_again wrote:
| > Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas
| within YC that all seem surprisingly possible.
|
| Well if you fund 1000s of ideas, some of them are bound to be
| successfull. There is no surprise there. That's basic maths.
| alonmower wrote:
| He puts his mouth where his money is*
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Wasn't this a feature of Amazon's Silk browser?
|
| "The browser uses a split architecture where some of the
| processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage
| loading performance."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Silk, Puffin, Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Maxthon - are all
| predecessors.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Well, this idea of a remote browser has some predecessors
| but the true lineage goes back to VT-80 and mainframes.
| ProAm wrote:
| Opera Mini did it first.
| iscrewyou wrote:
| I was young when that was first announced and privacy
| wasn't as big deal or a concern as it is these days. I
| remember it making the news and me being excited about it
| and noticing how fast everything was. It took a day or two
| for my brain to catch up and ask "this means they have
| access to everything?"
|
| I abandoned it right away.
| dotdotdotdot wrote:
| > People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is
| infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and
| also because it sounds technically ridiculous.
|
| An idea isn't bad if it's valuable and built on ridiculous /
| dumb / silly / simple / old technology. A product should be
| measured on output, not input... in fact I'd go as far as to
| say that we (hackers) should celebrate ideas that deliver
| incredible value with such a simple implementation.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I agree that being ridiculous is not sufficient to discard
| it.
|
| Many things are considered ridiculous or impossible before
| they work.
|
| The main point is that yes it could work and be valuable, but
| not for the end-user. It would be mostly valuable because of
| the transfer of power from the user to the server.
|
| We should know better, we should learn from the lessons of
| the recent past, we should be more careful before giving away
| our freedom (power is highly correlated to individual
| freedom)
| yifanl wrote:
| This domain is frustrating to talk about as a technical person
| because success isn't based on technical soundness, but rather
| popularity.
|
| So any argument I could realistically make against
| $sillyAppThatHasVCBacking will not matter if enough Paul
| Grahams back it and $sillyApp makes itself a moat.
|
| WeWork would be the most prominent example of this; even after
| their 2019/2020 crash, they'll probably come out of the
| pandemic okay compared to its competitors simply because it
| just got big enough.
| Kye wrote:
| The Behind the Bastards series on this was great.
| [deleted]
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| You're right. Prominent unicorn competitors to WeWork filed
| for bankruptcy during the pandemic. One example below
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/a-look-at-how-proptech-
| sta...
| choiway wrote:
| It's funny how this context changes the entire the article. I
| didn't realize that this was related to Mighty and thought it
| was a good "call to arms" for domain experts in non-tech
| industries to disrupt their markets.
| [deleted]
| elcapitan wrote:
| > First, he clearly has too much skin in the game
|
| That sounds like an odd use of "skin in the game". "Skin in the
| game" would be if that thing failed and then he gets skinned,
| basically. Being invested in something with potentially lots of
| upside and worst case a bit of lost investment isn't like that.
| drcongo wrote:
| No, it literally means "being invested in something"
| regardless of the rest.
| elcapitan wrote:
| No it's not regardless of the rest. It implies actual risk.
| Some rich dude losing a dime is not skin in the game,
| unless the phrase is meant as completely meaningless
| masturbation. "Skin" implies an actual impact, otherwise
| it's just "in the game".
| uglygoblin wrote:
| You are making it all about money but things like
| reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the
| game".
| elcapitan wrote:
| Like .. what? Will people spit at him in the streets, if
| the company fails? Will they come with torches and
| pitchforks to his house and yell "it was a bad idea to
| run a browser in the cloud"?
| drcongo wrote:
| It's interesting that you need any of this spelling out,
| especially as you're so irate about a turn of phrase, but
| even the post you're replying to here is politely
| spelling it out for you. Reputation _is_ money when
| you're a VC. You appear to be arguing with yourself and
| making up things to be angry about.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Nope, but I understand it's more convenient to think
| that.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| It's quite illuminating to see the very forum that PG created
| is calling him out on his shortcomings. Almost all the recent
| posts by PG were panned down by HN hivemind and PG seems to
| take no hints from the wisdom of the HN crowd. The case with
| MightyApp is the latest in the saga.
| vgchh wrote:
| - Personally I don't think PG is defending mighty app because
| he has skin in the game. I would think he is at a point where
| he doesn't need to.
|
| - Also IMO we should let mighty app (or for that matter other
| crazy ones) play out. We all know little about the capabilities
| of individuals and what the future holds. So why to ridicule
| and prematurely declare certain death.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| - I disagree about your first point, he is a player and do
| not like losing.
|
| - I would agree with your second point about most tech, but
| this is special, I'd say this is political.
| wraptile wrote:
| Couldn't disagree with you second point more: you shouldn't
| let dangerous tech "play-out". It's much easier to kill
| snakes just as they've hatched. Basically every bad thing
| about web and software in general was born as "play it out"
| and then it grew to big to be killed.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Yes, we should know better, we've seen this story being
| played out a few times.
|
| Delegating power/freedom is always dangerous, especially if
| you're doing it for free.
| Igelau wrote:
| Hold it. I agree with you, but I'm having a language nerd
| moment. This feels like one of those "catch more flies with
| honey than vinegar" things, where although the point is
| made clearly, the metaphor is literally false (vinegar is
| incredibly good bait for catching flies).
|
| > It's much easier to kill snakes just as they've hatched.
|
| Aren't a ton of itty bitty snakes going to be harder to
| kill than one big snake? I've never tried to kill snakes of
| any age myself, so I could be _way_ off.
| nojs wrote:
| I wish he would say this in the post!
| Igelau wrote:
| Then he'd have to face specific arguments. This way it looks
| like it's some general wisdom, and anyone who isn't
| enthusiastic about Mighty App can be painted as the unsavory
| characters he invents. How easily this army of strawmen is
| burnt to a crisp!
|
| The Jealous Nerd:
|
| > One reason they do it is envy
|
| The Hipster:
|
| > it's an easy way to seem sophisticated
|
| The Dark Ages Inquisitor:
|
| > Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen
|
| The Luddites and Sheep:
|
| > the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm
|
| This replies to none of the legitimate criticism, and manages
| to be _more dismissive_ by filing everything under "crabs in
| a bucket, extra salty".
| john_minsk wrote:
| So during their onboarding process they have a survey about
| your usage patterns. One of the questions is about speed of
| switching between tabs and one of the answers is "Tabs are
| switched very fast (<1 sec)"
|
| I'm sorry, but 1 sec is not fast...
| demygale wrote:
| Does Thiel count as reasonable?
| Y_Y wrote:
| I was hoping he was going to provide a list of examples.
| mindfulplay wrote:
| This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app.
|
| To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'.
| The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel
| revolutionary app.
|
| I was hoping it was really something clever like what the
| Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope.
|
| It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together
| existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple
| security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is
| some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized
| here.
|
| There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the
| website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something
| of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show
| admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running
| just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an
| Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a
| CS401 style project.
|
| This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping
| together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation'
| being the funding system or creatively working around
| regulatory/legal hurdles.
|
| I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even
| a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a
| so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage
| behind legal paperwork).
|
| It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound,
| innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies.
|
| These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among
| VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a
| problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that
| work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically
| demotivated but financially motivated group.
|
| I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was
| promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments
| as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here.
|
| Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda
| school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is
| going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for
| the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially
| sound and inspiring companies.
| klaudius wrote:
| Paul Graham addressed this in his previous essay "How People
| Get Rich Now": The best way to envision what
| happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on top.
| Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around
| the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able
| to punch right through the middle. The edges of
| the pond were pure tech: companies that actually described
| themselves as being in the electronics or software business.
| When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you
| meant. But now startups are punching right through the middle
| of the ice crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and
| TV networks and car companies.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| That "pond" metaphor only works if anyone and everyone
| getting rich anywhere in the world all happen to be doing so
| at the companies that are popular topics of conversation
| within the Valley bubble.
|
| Otherwise, what the fuck is he even going on about?
| roymurdock wrote:
| The VCs are just following the money. We're at the tail end of
| the economic boom brought on by computers. Until we have
| another paradigm-shifting scientific discovery, computers will
| be used to more efficiently match up existing assets (AirBnB)
| while serving ads and content that decays our social
| bonds/infrastructure (Facebook).
|
| If there was less money in the system a lot of these quasi-
| innovative companies would die, or not even get off the ground.
| But there is tons and it is leading to the misallocation of a
| great amount of time, energy, and intelligence - at the cost of
| future generation's standard of living.
| Sanzig wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: the use of "tech" or "high tech" to describe
| many of today's tech companies is a misnomer.
|
| For me, a tech company is a company that leverages advances in
| applied sciences and mathematics (computer science included) to
| create new, innovative solutions.
|
| While there are certainly companies that are innovating in
| fundamental technologies and making that a cornerstone of their
| businesses, the vast majority of tech companies are little more
| than conventional businesses with some digital business
| automation plumbing. Innovative business models are still
| innovation - don't get me wrong - but they're not _technology_
| innovation.
|
| It made sense to call e-business "tech" companies when the web
| was fresh and new and everyone was innovating, but these days,
| very few are pushing the envelope on the technology side. It's
| pretty well accepted that any business needs electronic
| technologies to work now: at what point do we stop calling
| every company that builds an app tied to a database a "tech"
| company and just call them an "[insert vertical here]
| business"?
| franga2000 wrote:
| I definitely agree, but with one exception: a fair amount of
| these companies have reached such a scale that they actually
| have to invent or at least develop new tech in order to run
| their business. Facebook and Twitter, for example, aren't
| primarily "tech" companies, but because they operate at such
| an insane scale, they regularly develop new tech that allows
| them to continue and grow. So the tech part is more or less
| vertical integration - not their primary business, but also
| definitely not negligible in terms of innovation.
| Sanzig wrote:
| I guess the question is: how close does technology R&D need
| to be to the core business to be a "tech" company? I don't
| have a good answer. Major automakers dump tons of money
| into R&D, but we'd never call them tech companies.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and
| then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong,
| but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was _at least_ some
| recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.
| mindfulplay wrote:
| Indeed they are recompiling Chromium but that doesn't make it
| any more exciting tbh.
| geebee wrote:
| Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in.
|
| I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when
| it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when
| technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea,
| seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the
| blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't
| understand or considers very cumbersome.
|
| The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and
| use a rendering tool to view it?
|
| Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page?
|
| Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?
|
| social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and
| use RSS?
|
| youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for
| search?
|
| twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version
| of what we can already do??
|
| Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things,
| because I failed to understand how removing small bits of
| friction can cause a technology to explode.
|
| Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming
| to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it,
| all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both
| good and pretty damn awful.
| c01n wrote:
| The problem is that success in Silicon Valley means how much
| money you can make from a product and not about how the product
| improves the lives of the users in a balanced and morally
| acceptable way. Is it really successful to disregard user
| privacy and capitalize on their lack of knowledge, or to build
| unsustainable tech on top of already unsustainable tech rather
| then fixing the real issues.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| This is just cargo culting the Dropbox "you could just use FTP"
| comment.
| emrah wrote:
| Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge
| and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean
| or it's a bust.
| tjs8rj wrote:
| I'm not convinced that's a good rule of thumb at all, because
| there's so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and
| many where it doesn't apply but the tech was revolutionary.
|
| Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced
| tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it
| gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made
| existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was
| right for it to appear.
|
| Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I
| think Vimeo?). Facebook was just "cool MySpace", blogs were
| personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these
| just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right
| way.
|
| My point is: without looking at the technology at all or
| knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what
| "revolutionary product" would suddenly become the next big
| thing simply with perfect information about the market and how
| it will shift at each step.
|
| You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in
| the universe to launch spaghetti, but the "revolutionary"
| nature of your invention doesn't matter at all because there's
| no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti
| enthusiasts suggest "why don't you just build your own
| spaghetti railgun?".
|
| Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those
| markets and are worth nothing alone.
|
| Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary
| (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact,
| because amazing product with no market isn't revolutionary) is
| very hard because even if you know the initial market, you
| won't know how things change.
|
| I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary
| products is to really know the initial customer and early
| market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns
| broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly
| keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market
| - which means we've just re-derived the lean startup process.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I think the big thing about these innovations was that the
| nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for
| specific implementations of them after the network effect
| kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But
| now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making
| billions with advertising.
|
| We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social
| media platform where most of the interesting people
| (including our friends) are on.
| tacocataco wrote:
| I just wish social media platforms had adviasarial
| integration like telephone companies were forced to do.
|
| Let the platforms compete on UX and data handling policies.
|
| That way, the interesting people on one platform aren't
| gated away from the interesting people on others.
| mettamage wrote:
| To summarize: one can't predict user adoption. If they can,
| I'd encourage them to start the required companies in order
| to capture it.
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| u r talking about the small changes that can be disruptive.
| This is different than the crazy ideas mentioned in the
| article. Ideas like the earth is round or that a large mass can
| bend light.
|
| I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his
| youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the
| difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!
| swivelmaster wrote:
| > twitter: couldn't you just not?
|
| This is, actually, still true :)
| splithalf wrote:
| In other words, "we were promised flying cars but ..." You
| might as well celebrate stock buybacks.
| dd36 wrote:
| Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think of this as my "Kardashian problem".
|
| I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I
| mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape
| -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or
| why it works.
|
| This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and
| they obviously totally grok how their market works.
|
| This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-
| market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians
| understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am
| not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how
| their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching
| these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from
| mass-market ideas.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market
| ignoramous wrote:
| The celebrity market (or showbiz in general) is poised to
| be disrupted by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as the
| gatekeepers (production and distribution houses) have been
| effectively thrown off from their perch.
| shard wrote:
| The other replies to your comment don't seem to address your
| fundamental point that the Kardashians and their kind are in
| a different category than other celebrities. Their skills are
| not acting or singing or sports, but rather generating news
| to keep themselves in the headlines. I don't really recall
| this being a category until the start of reality TV, and even
| then it was short-lived after the shows ended. It wasn't
| until Paris Hilton that I was really aware of how powerful
| this category can be, and others have figured out the formula
| as well, leading to the Kardashians and other influencers.
| The successful ones have the social intelligence to know how
| and what kind of outrageous or salacious news to generate to
| attract people who like to feel envy, indignation, and a
| sense of superiority to famous people to watch their antics,
| and thus feed the hype machine that keeps them in the
| spotlight and allows them to reap the rewards of that
| spotlight.
| corybrown wrote:
| Yes, this is something the 45th US president did quite well
| regextegrity wrote:
| I think your problem is treating the success of the
| Kardashians as deterministic
| aj7 wrote:
| Pornography for women works completely differently than
| pornography for men.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Can you expand on the idea that the Kardashians produce
| pornography for women? Sounds like it could explain why I
| don't get it!
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I don't know if I would call it "pornography for women"
| but in my experience women tend to be more interested in
| social dynamics. e.g. Who said what to whom and why, X is
| fighting with Y because of Z and J is siding X instead of
| K, and so on.
|
| These shows tend to be about groups of characters
| engaging in what you might call social or political
| struggles. Tensions, drama, conflict, emotions, and so
| on. Reality shows like the Kardashians are a distillation
| of these aspects and create something that is sweet like
| sugar to people who are disposed to enjoy that flavor.
|
| I think a lot of people judge reality TV shows without
| watching them and kind of look down on them. If you don't
| have the taste for something it's easy to look down on
| it. For example, lots of people look down on Star Trek,
| which I loved when I was younger and still do. If I had
| to answer why I liked Star Trek, it's because I like to
| imagine myself as Captain Picard and figure out what I
| would do if I were faced with the given moral dilemma of
| the week. If my fantasy preferences tended towards "How
| would I handle the handsome jerk my sister is dating
| while I myself am a beautiful billionaire?" then I would
| watch different shows.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| You should clearly not enter a market you do not understand,
| because you'll probably lead you to bring a knife to a
| gunfight.
|
| But your conclusion about mass-market is too broad, this is
| not a single thing and can really depend on your definition
| and perspective.
|
| Apple devices can be considered mass-market or niche.
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| "twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse
| version of what we can already do??"
|
| This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good
| product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving
| lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it
| became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it _could_ be.
| By the time it became clear that all the things it could be
| were _bad_ , it was too late: too many people were on the
| platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going
| indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is
| a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.
| theonionknight wrote:
| I also disagree. Twitter has plenty of issues, that I'll
| grant, but being entirely run on FOMO? Plenty of domain
| experts in niche areas have twitter accounts, I've been able
| to learn a ton I otherwise wouldn't have without Twitter's
| platform.
| newbie2020 wrote:
| Twitter, while poorly run at the moment, is one of the best
| platforms on the web for spreading information. I hope it
| never dies
| wombatpm wrote:
| Twitter deserves a full time CEO
| graeme wrote:
| I learned of the true magnitude of the pandemic _weeks_
| before the rest of the world, thanks to twitter.
|
| There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely
| surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or
| previously.
| [deleted]
| aerosmile wrote:
| Nonsense. There's no such thing as a "gravitational pull"
| that's all "frosting." If that were to be the case, you would
| see startups investing in Superbowl ads or sponsoring the
| Olympics. If it worked, there's enough VC money around to
| make it happen.
|
| MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention
| highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it
| wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| I'm curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment
| about Dropbox.
| geebee wrote:
| No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
|
| Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a
| household name.
| mdoms wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| graeme wrote:
| Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn't
| put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in
| Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a
| fast computer, but I'd still like to try, as there is room for
| surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all
| manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc
|
| This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious
| potential and In don't know why people are so dismissive. If it
| improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade
| costs, every business will want this.
| solosoyokaze wrote:
| People are dismissive not because of the technology or "you
| could just do that with a shell script" reasons. They're
| dismissive because it's security and privacy worst practice
| to give this data to a third party. Mighty may be an
| incredible feat of engineering for all I know, but I would
| tell everyone I know to avoid it because it's a bad idea to
| hand over your browsing data.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to
| stop people from reading HN, every business would want it
| because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for
| those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would
| continue on ignorant of it as it always has.
|
| But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean
| up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC.
| They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're
| Gandalf.
|
| We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know
| how I know they fuck around with rankings?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309
|
| This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30
| minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this
| thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of
| Graham.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196
|
| This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also
| completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.
| [deleted]
| themdangrules wrote:
| I would login to my other account if I hadn't thrown the
| password away.
|
| Persecuted? No. Pretty damn aware of the many times that
| people immediately downvoted every comment of mine they
| could? Yes. I'm a bog boy, I don't care about Internet
| points, but I also don't enjoy spending my days with
| people so petty and small. Grown, professional adults no
| less. If I feel persecuted, maybe it's because I like a
| lot of HNers know what bullying feels like. Feels like
| bullying. This applies to myself as well, but just
| because people have bullied you doesn't mean you aren't
| also a bully. You might even be more likely to be that
| because of learned behavior. HN is full of
| psuedointellectual high brow bullies. Not to smear all
| you fine people. It's not everyone, just an uncomfortable
| percentage.
|
| What proof would you accept? I mean in the second one,
| you can literally see where dang has detached it, without
| a reason as to why. In a topic discussing politics and
| tribalism. There will be no proof of it, there's nothing
| to prove, but if that isn't evidence of moderator
| intervention (without transparency, no less), what is?
|
| This is why even for all that I've learned form HN over
| the years (would love to not read it at all), I hate the
| discussion. It's so toxic. I'm getting probably rightly
| moderated but HN is full of people being ugly to each
| other on an hourly basis. I'm part of the demographic
| that should most appreciate HN, I can't imagine how
| people that aren't feel.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?
| gitrog wrote:
| They're his posts?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Oh, of course. Thanks.
| catears wrote:
| This is something I have thought about before when it comes to
| Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say.
|
| While there is some truth to that statement, the real
| "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and
| collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share
| and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as
| possible.
|
| I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some
| spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies
| which already existed but now with a great UX around it.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| I absolutely agree with you that you can get insane mileage
| from improving the basic UIs of almost everything. It's sad how
| little attention we give to this stuff. I think that's what
| Jobs got and his imitators only imitate...a genuine concern for
| the user.
|
| edited by me for content
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how
| many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you
| compared to comments.
|
| It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say.
| What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We
| are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide
| pedantry, no?
|
| We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky
| business speak when we hit any rough patches?
|
| Is this too mean to change the world? I see it's flagged now.
| Good, gooood. dang and company and YCs alums and all you
| groupies close ranks and edit, shuffle, and remove posts and
| people when they talk a little too different from you. That's
| why this place is a dead echo chamber composed of 90% males
| of the same demographics.
| adwn wrote:
| > _I 'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and
| see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will
| get you compared to comments._
|
| You're getting downvoted and flagged not because you're
| saying "factually correct stuff", but because your post is
| full of incoherent rambling and baseless accusations -
| before you edited and completely changed it, that is.
|
| And for the record, I'm not a fan of Paul Graham, far from
| it.
| gustavo-fring wrote:
| What part is baseless? Sorry for the edit, I know that
| it's too critical for dang and HN readers, but I promise,
| having been on Reddit since the summer it came out, that
| it is as accurate as it can be from my perspective.
|
| You call it rambling because you don't agree with it.
| dang wrote:
| Posting something trollish, then replacing it with
| reasonable text and saying it was "too critical for dang
| and HN readers" is an abusive trick. You even smeared
| someone as being responsible for someone else's death.
| That's just vicious.
|
| I'm not sure what to do. This is easily a bannable
| offence. You can't post things to HN like your original
| comment, which was horrible. Editing in so misleading and
| nasty a way is also egregious. Even the posts you left
| up, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185
| and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 are
| egregious, and the latter is a shameful personal attack
| to boot.
|
| On the other hand, I can give you the benefit of the
| doubt in a couple of ways: everyone goes on tilt
| sometimes, and most of us post things that we have reason
| to feel ashamed of later. Since we try to err on the side
| of giving people second chances, I'm not going to ban you
| for all of this. But please clean up your act if you want
| to keep posting to HN. We're trying against the odds to
| have an internet forum that hovers at least an inch or
| two above the bottom of the barrel, and behavior like
| you've contributed here just pushes it all the way down.
|
| HN commenters need to at least try to follow the rules:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| Regardless of what you feel you owe pg or YC or HN mods
| or me personally, you owe this community much, much
| better if you're participating in it.
| dang wrote:
| The GP comment was originally extremely trollish, which was
| obviously why it got downvoted and flagged. The commenter
| later replaced it with something completely anodyne, making
| the original responses seem unreasonable. That's abusive.
| I've responded in more detail below:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066921.
| tlogan wrote:
| There are two types ideas:
|
| 1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki,
| youtube, dropbox, etc.)
|
| 2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and
| just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you
| wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones)
|
| The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how
| crazy they are. But they will make some money.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > It's when technical people look at what seems like a
| groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you
| just _____"
|
| Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies
| mgranados wrote:
| Good heuristic.
| kabes wrote:
| It would only be a good heuristic if the same thing isn't
| being said about actual bad, failed ideas. But I'm pretty
| sure you can find similar "can't you just" remarks for those.
| qshaman wrote:
| This argument have been attempted already, you can also take
| Juicero, "can you just squeeze the bad yourself?" , and was
| indeed a dumb idea. This "crazy idea" is not removing any
| friction to regular people, regular people browse youtube, or
| instagram, tik tok, etc... this is targeted to techies, look at
| the homepage, people who are pointing out the "crazy new idea"
| , is neither crazy, new, or good at all, are the target of this
| product. Just because some successful companies had bad
| feedback in the beginning, doesn't imply "you missed it" or
| their product will become the next thing. The HN crowd of today
| is also not the same as the crowd back then(dropbox founder
| comment fiesta...).
| allenu wrote:
| I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the
| examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking
| at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation,
| especially in retrospect.
|
| the web: I was a teen when people started using local
| "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most
| people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view
| content somebody on the other side of the world put up
|
| blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say
| "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that
| what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from
| just your own web page and easy styling
|
| wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit
| the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's
| not something you could just do with "updating a web page"
|
| youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for
| free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff
| in the early days.
|
| Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth
| paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do
| more easily that we couldn't before?"
| geebee wrote:
| I agree. These are examples of things I initially dismissed,
| in part because I thought didn't see how they addressed the
| minor factors that were holding back a sudden and widespread
| adoption. And yeah, I think there is a technical element to
| this and I do recall technical people puzzled about how
| popular web pages in a browser had become (seeing it as an
| unusually limited interface).
|
| Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual
| perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose
| the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were
| both technical but capable of seeing things outside that
| narrow lense.
|
| Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned
| incorrectly about!
|
| EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write
| "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all
| alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready
| to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common
| tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have
| written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...
| munk-a wrote:
| For blogs in particular - this came after both geocities and
| livejournal. Folks had the ability to host their own websites
| with relative ease and to write a post history that other
| folks could subscribe and comment on. Blogging as a verb and
| Blogs as a noun really came into their own when folks decided
| that this sort of journal was a common enough task (and
| shared hosts like live journal lacked enough features) that
| software to easily throw together a stream of articles had
| common value.
|
| That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is
| off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web
| but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the
| context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite
| a fair bit.
| allenu wrote:
| I think you're right about the timeline. I do remember
| livejournal being around before Blogger, which is around
| when "blogging" became a term.
|
| I remember getting into a few people's web-based online
| diaries in the late '90s and definitely some folks used
| geocities to host their journals. I remember using it
| myself to post whatever nonsense I was doing to share with
| friends.
| btbuildem wrote:
| That's just the realization that opinions of technical people
| don't really matter that much. They don't add up to a critical
| mass that puts enough buck in the game to make it bang.
| dvt wrote:
| > It's when technical people look at what seems like a
| groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you
| just _____", were the blank is filled with something a
| nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very
| cumbersome.
|
| This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty
| much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the
| BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some
| universal axiom.
|
| I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty
| because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs
| and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!
| simonh wrote:
| It's not hindsight bias if you think it's face smackingly
| obvious at the time.
|
| I agree there's still a conundrum here, why is something
| obviously one way to some very smart people like BrandonM
| while the exact opposite seems just as obvious to other
| people. I suspect it's more about what people value than what
| they know technically.
| villasv wrote:
| > pretty much the definition of hindsight bias
|
| This. The antidote is to revisit examples of "couldn't you
| just X" where X indeed prevailed. There are even instances
| where superseding technology was actually better, but it was
| too late to replace X.
|
| My favorite example is Iridium (and the whole satellite
| internet industry so far, let's see what will happen with
| Starlink). It's one thing to remove friction, but only if the
| new cost structure is still favorable.
|
| Disruption doesn't happen because new tech is better/cooler,
| it happens when it introduces competitive advantage.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?
| easton wrote:
| This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| KineticLensman wrote:
| "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system
| yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account,
| mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or
| CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this
| FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."
| MsMowz wrote:
| When Drew Houston first posted Dropbox on HN, BrandonM had
| the top comment that doubted its viability/usefulness as a
| product. It's been the topic of a lot of discussion since
| then, including between the two themselves.
|
| >I have a few qualms with this app:
|
| >1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system
| yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account...
|
| From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| dang wrote:
| Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a
| little every time I see this brought up, especially when
| the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that
| this is a real person. He also happens to be a first-class
| HN contributor, and has been for many years. It's sort of
| the equivalent of pointing at the neighbor when he walks
| down the street.
|
| I realize it's internet fun to point large neon arrows at
| people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the
| truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately
| and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.
|
| When he wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he
| didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application.
| (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC _App_ "). He wasn't
| being a petty nitpicker or "quipping"--he was earnestly
| trying to help them, and you can see in how sweetly he
| replied to Drew's response that he genuinely wanted them to
| succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy
| new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be much
| healthier if that were the case, and actually the current
| thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.
|
| Moreover, although the criticisms he was raising turned out
| not to be problems in hindsight, they were quite on point
| in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely
| derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem, which only
| technical users would ever care about and (as the comment
| pointed out) technical users could already roll their own
| solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a
| famous blog post, and even YC funded Dropbox because they
| believed in Drew, not the idea.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
| [deleted]
| jasode wrote:
| _> , but the truth is that people aren't reading that
| comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight
| fallacy here._
|
| I appreciate your defense of that comment as it made me
| re-read it as charitably as possible.
|
| That said, I think you're still overlooking _some_ of the
| reasons that cause the eyerolling of it that 's separate
| from hindsight bias.
|
| First was the _" quite trivially"_ phrase in the comment.
| That type of verbiage automatically triggers the
| perception of haughtiness. Imagine if someone did a Show
| HN of a new webcam security doorbell and a commenter
| said, _" , you can already build such a system yourself
| _quite trivially_ by getting some components from DigiKey
| and soldering them yourself"_. Can you see how that
| sounds really dismissive?
|
| Second, it was overlooking the idea that the YC
| app(lication)s are not intended to create products for
| Linux power users like BrandonM who _can_ string together
| curlftpfs with CVS /SVN.
|
| So for him to avoid that comment required stepping
| outside himself to see the perspective of non-techies. He
| could still dismiss Dropbox... but for different reasons
| related to _not meeting needs of the end user mass
| market_ rather than purely base an opinion off his
| personal skillset.
| dang wrote:
| I don't entirely disagree but even with all of that, it's
| not a great example of what pg used to call a middlebrow
| dismissal, especially when there are so many millions of
| worse examples. "Quite trivially" sounds terrible out of
| context, but (a) he scoped it to _Linux_ users, (b) it 's
| clear from the downstream reply that he was speaking from
| experience, and (c) he immediately agreed with Drew that
| even that solution had drawbacks and thanked him for the
| technical correction. That's the behavior of someone
| making good conversation, not someone being haughty. A
| haughty dismisser would have seized the opportunity to up
| the snark.
|
| > _it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s
| are not intended to create products for Linux power
| users_
|
| I don't think that's an accurate reading. His Linux point
| was only one of three, and the other two were about the
| mass market. Given that he had implemented the Linux
| solution himself, I think the fact that he led with that
| point was probably more out of geeky exuberance than
| overlooking non-technical users.
|
| It seems to me that in the context of 2007 all three of
| those points could easily have popped up in Dropbox's YC
| interview. Don't forget that back then, YC would
| sometimes fund a startup even though they _didn 't_ much
| believe in the idea (Airbnb famously so), because of the
| personal impression made by the founders. That's still
| the case today, but it was the case back then as well :)
| jasode wrote:
| _> That 's the behavior of _someone_ making good
| conversation, not someone being haughty._
|
| I meant to focus on the _text 's tone sounding haughty_
| rather than accuse the _person being haughty_.
|
| Let me try to explain another way to emphasize the text
| aspect: that _particular sentence in isolation_ is what
| is quoted on the internet outside of HN:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+
| suc...
|
| https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+su
| ch+...
|
| The "quite trivially" may only be scoped to one bullet
| point and may be unfairly weighted when looking at his
| followup thoughtful conversation -- but it also elevated
| it legendary HN lore.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but if you read the text as a whole, it's not true
| that it's haughty. That it sounds haughty when quoted
| selectively is the internet's fault, not the commenter's.
| At most he can be accused of (a) not pre-emptively
| bulletproofing his text against selective quotation, and
| (b) not knowing the future. And (a) reduces to (b).
|
| I take your point about lore, and on that level it's just
| good fun.
|
| p.s. Also, nice use of the word 'haughty'. We need those
| good English words.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| > but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!
|
| Well, not exactly. There's plenty of people who have been
| successful at, frankly horrible things.
|
| I count this kind of "not your computer, ours" rent seeking
| change as "bad if successful".
| dvt wrote:
| I don't really buy this. A lot of complaints are about the
| privacy of the whole ordeal. That's kind of moot
| considering Google has access to all of my banking emails,
| Dropbox has access to all of my invoices, Apple has access
| to all of my photos, and Equifax already leaked my SSN
| years ago.
|
| Most of my life _already_ doesn 't happen on my personal
| locked-down device.
| suhail wrote:
| Fwiw, unlike the examples above, we have permission to
| your data (if you give it to us) but we don't own or
| control any of it. We don't store it elsewhere. We don't
| sell it to the highest bidder. We don't mine it for some
| other purpose.
|
| Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's
| our only business model.
|
| I think we can improve privacy and security for most
| users who have trouble managing it. For instance, we can
| patch Chrome zero-days (many have occurred this year) a
| lot faster for everyone.
|
| What we offer today is a faster way to use applications
| that do own your data so you can be much more productive
| and hopefully enable a new set of applications never
| before possible.
|
| We help improve decentralization of the web over
| duopolies like Apple/Windows. We make the browser more
| powerful, not less.
|
| We improve the market share of Linux as a consumer
| computing OS as it underlies our tech.
|
| In time, we might be open to people owning their own
| hardware and running Mighty on it but I think a lot of
| people will prefer we make it "just work" for now. I
| don't view either world as mutually exclusive.
|
| If there's an opportunity to research making things
| trustless, we'll work on that.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| I dont have an issue with this specific case, more the
| industry shift to rent seeking. Cars have subscriptions.
| Next your thin client hardware needs to pay rent to work.
| It is a slippery slope and claiming virtue doesnt
| decrease the gradient.
|
| Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be
| evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power
| play pure and simple.
|
| The rest is classic SV/startup window dressing to get the
| job done and an obvious dress up at that.
| defaultname wrote:
| Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged
| to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing
| the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted
| it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a
| good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and
| grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its
| early days.
|
| I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it
| probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.
|
| There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting
| technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen
| to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that
| proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of
| products in the technology space first saw success among the
| most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is
| doomed to failure.
|
| [1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point
| out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore
| is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't
| have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount
| of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.
| pjmorris wrote:
| This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished
| but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is
| almost certainly right. When he states that something is
| impossible, he is very probably wrong.
|
| Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the
| possible is to venture a little way past them into the
| impossible.
|
| Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is
| indistinguishable from magic.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| New Ideas aren't crazy. Crazy Ideas are crazy. That's why people
| say it won't work, because it _sounds crazy_. It sounds crazy
| because the person proposing it hasn 't made a good enough case
| for it.
|
| Getting people to agree with a new idea is about _salesmanship_.
| If people think your idea is crazy, you suck at sales. Coffee 's
| for closers.
| rogers18445 wrote:
| The Mighty App will either die or become a privacy nightmare.
| Because a browser can run arbitrary compute it will be abused,
| and if they don't want to die they will have to spy on what their
| users are doing to find abuse.
| rikroots wrote:
| The alternative, of course, is when a plausible person expresses
| an implausible-sounding idea which turns out to be, well, wrong.
| For instance when Noam Chomsky presented his theory of Universal
| Grammar[1] which managed to impede and derail the study of
| linguistics for decades[2].
|
| [1] - This is my own personal opinion supported by no evidence
| whatsoever.
|
| [2] - Again, an outrageously subjective statement without an
| ounce of evidence to support it.
| blululu wrote:
| Chomsky's followers are not as powerful as they used to be so
| you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a
| linguist. That said, this objection does not directly
| contradict Graham's point. There are issues with Chomsky's
| theories, but they are non-obvious and we learned a lot along
| the way. Would it have been reasonable to have dismissed these
| theories out of hand? Maybe but we false positives and false
| negatives exist as a trade off, and we would miss things if we
| try to lower our false positive rate too aggressively.
| jimhi wrote:
| In the realm of entrepreneurship, I think domain experts who also
| risk tons of their cash on crazy ideas should be looked at even
| closer.
|
| Y Combinator and Tesla were seen as stupid and crazy for a long
| time. Meanwhile I've seen a lot of domain expert entrepreneurs do
| really crazy things that lead nowhere when it's VC money instead
| of theirs.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| There are too many factors that'll decide whether it'll be
| success or not. I believe timings and luck are often
| overlooked.
|
| iPhone certainly not the first touch screen display, Microsoft
| did have one, I believe. However Apple's timing was perfect,
| there was increasing adaptation of wifi connectivity and 3g,
| making it able to browse anywhere. Of course smoother interface
| and beautiful design also contribute big.
|
| AmongUs was lucky they got advertisement from streamer, at
| perfect timing that was (is) pandemic and lockdowns.
|
| Tesla can be considered crazy because they try to emerge with
| unknown product, with unknown market and unknown possibility of
| success. If we look at the past, Apple's iPhone was crazy too,
| because it was new product, with unknown market.
| entee wrote:
| The first iPhone famously only had 2G cellular internet. At
| the time 3G phones were not ubiquitous but were readily
| available (had one as a mid priced Nokia flip phone), so I've
| always thought this was a fascinating aspect of the iPhone
| story. I bet the decision was made to go forward despite the
| product being slightly hobbled precisely because of timing.
| bombcar wrote:
| The iPhone was an iPod that could make phone calls in an
| era when phones didn't do much beyond making phone calls.
|
| So it was a no-brainer for those already carrying an iPod
| and a phone, even if it didn't do anything beyond being an
| iPod that could receive calls and texts!
| SigmundA wrote:
| "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply
| that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at
| Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright
| brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -Sagan
| atldev wrote:
| > They also vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them,
| making our standards for new ideas impossibly high.
|
| I enjoy this style of writing. Seemingly simple but packs a lot
| of meaning (like JoelOnSoftware back in the day).
| aazaa wrote:
| As an intern I once attended an internal Innovation Symposium
| hosted by the company I was working for.
|
| Most of the speakers talked in glowing terms about innovation,
| how good it was, and how welcomed it was.
|
| But one speaker didn't. He said: "You'll know you're being
| innovative because you'll feel uncomfortable about your idea."
|
| I had never before heard that point of view before, but it
| clicked.
|
| If all of your peers think what you're doing is a good idea,
| maybe it's time to re-evaluate how innovative your ideas really
| are.
|
| The problem with all of this is that immature good ideas look and
| act exactly like crazy ideas. It's hard to find comfort pushing
| on an idea with that fact always in the back of your mind. You
| could find yourself years down the road with nothing to show for
| all that effort.
| aparsons wrote:
| I think a lot of people - dare I say it, even PaulG - are missing
| the point of Mighty (or not putting it into words properly).
|
| Mighty isn't betting on the internet continually getting more
| bloated, or being better than a thick client. Even for a poor
| person working mostly in Figma, buying a decent laptop will be
| much more cost-effective.
|
| What they are really selling is the equivalent of upgrading your
| laptop to a new model while it's still running. Hardware shopping
| is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you
| suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to
| replicate your old workflow and warm the caches.
|
| The two biggest threats to Mighty are Apple/MSFT building
| "snapshot" recoveries in new hardware (almost AMI-like), and real
| adoption of saving bookmarks, history and passwords to the cloud
| by signing in to Chrome (most I know are hesitant). As has always
| been the case in this industry, the hardware is irrelevant.
|
| This isn't game-streaming, where you unlock hardware economies of
| scale because most users play a tiny amount a day on average.
| Your browser is always on.
| wraptile wrote:
| > Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never
| done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one
| arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm
| the caches.
|
| What a luxurious problem to have: would rather swipe my card
| and pay 50$/month than buy a new laptop - ugh!
| boraoztunc wrote:
| I wonder why Chrome's "Reading Mode" is not activated in Paul
| Graham's website. I really get used to read articles in Reader
| Mode, with the same style, background color, font size and
| without any other distracting elements of the page. His website
| font size is 13px, which is pretty small. So I copy+paste to
| Obsidian and read there.
| aa_memon wrote:
| I believe the technology behind Mighty is amazing, the people
| involved are amazing, the experience for it's users will be
| amazing.
|
| I believe the underlying reason for HN's reaction to Mighty has
| almost nothing to do with any of the above. To the contrary, most
| of us probably feel that Mighty will be a raging success. But we
| don't actually like that at all. When I reflect on my own
| thoughts, the reasons my initial reaction is pessimistic are:
|
| 1. If Mighty makes badly designed/architected apps "fast", nobody
| will fix the underlying issues.
|
| 2. The internet will be amazing for the folks that can afford to
| pay $30-$50/month and all others will have to live with a sub-par
| experience because of #1
|
| 3. Some other company will come along and try to subsidize Mighty
| for all those that couldn't afford it but they'll monetize by
| advertising and further personal data collection.
|
| 4. Further lack of control over core software on our personal
| computers.
|
| I fear that one day I'll visit a website with a message saying
| "This website runs best using Mighty".
|
| There were similar sentiments when RSS blogs started moving to
| medium. Medium is amazing! but at some point medium needed to
| introduce a 3 item limit.
|
| More and more of the internet which a lot of us remember as this
| open thing that no one owns is being siloed into privately owned.
| losteric wrote:
| Unfortunately, that timeline probably why Mighty will go big -
| the business model is a trojan horse for a _very_ lucrative
| global surveillance business, which challenges and likely
| surpasses current businesses ( "social media" and "search
| engines").
|
| HN and the tech crowd at large is cynical but also naively
| ethical... missing how ideas can be profitable because we're
| really thinking in terms of bettering society. Exploitation is
| where the real money is at.
| nicebyte wrote:
| medium isn't amazing - it's probably one of the _worst_ ways of
| putting writing on the web. pastebin is better than medium.
| waxman wrote:
| A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a
| lot of virtues is:
|
| When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a
| product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?"
| because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work,
| then what are the implications?"
|
| Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in
| textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this
| replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it
| will be a huge and valuable business."
|
| For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is
| thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives?
| Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more
| obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."
| [deleted]
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Off Topic : The site is sending a GET request to
|
| http://np.lexity.com/embed/YA/fa27bb6ce937aea400cc8e5f11aa42...
|
| every 5 seconds.
|
| Anyone have any idea what it is?
|
| Note : The address keeps changing for every request.
|
| Edit2 : Is it only on my PC, or are others also able to see it?
| SingAlong wrote:
| I see those requests too but my adblocker takes care of it.
|
| Lexity.com looks like a Yahoo service and maybe this is the
| analytics being collected. AFAIK pg's site is still hosted on
| Yahoo.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| Sometimes crazy ideas like SSL aren't so crazy. I wonder if
| the HTTPS failure is due to the Yahoo part of this?
| lioeters wrote:
| I see it too, but my ad blocker prevented the request(s).
|
| A quick search for "lexity.com" shows that it's an analytics
| company.
|
| > Lexity - Apps to help grow your ecommerce business
|
| > Commerce Central is the easiest way to grow your small and
| medium ecommerce businesses. We provide the best real time
| analytics and insights for ecommerce for free, and apps to
| advertize your store through Google, Amazon, Facebook,
| Pinterest and Twitter.
| [deleted]
| de_keyboard wrote:
| I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron
| out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an
| essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted
| wisdom.
|
| However, the main problem I have with with this article is that
| it divides people into domain experts and the rest. This kind of
| black and white thinking is pervasive in PG essays, and always
| lead to a cute conclusion. You can have two domain experts that
| disagree. You can have an idea that spans multiple domains, and
| there are no (or few) experts in all of them. Maybe the Crazy New
| Idea seems brilliant to experts in one domain, but only because
| they don't grasp the others.
| marvin wrote:
| That two domain experts disagree on a radical idea is
| irrelevant, if the one presenting the radical idea turns out to
| be right. There are no points given out for merely
| participating.
|
| This happens all the time. And the most interesting ideas are
| rejected by almost everyone, except the tiny minority that
| happens to be positioned to understand the change. So you can't
| make predictions by tallying up expert votes either.
| npsimons wrote:
| > I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them,
| iron out the kinks and test our understanding.
|
| Criticism is the crucible in which crazy new ideas are forged
| into crazy viable ideas.
|
| > However, the main problem I have with with this article is
| that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.
|
| Let's be honest: in this day and age "the rest" are far too
| vocal and need to STFU on things which they have no knowledge.
| Sure, domain experts can disagree - let them be heard, but the
| know-nothings should be given zero attention.
| dbtc wrote:
| Except for children, who often ask the best questions.
| mcguire wrote:
| Likewise, one of the best, most valuable, things that Albert
| Einstein did was to attack quantum mechanics in every way he
| could.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Getting ideas is easy. Getting ideas other people want to spend
| money or time on is something quite different.
|
| Even if you get an amazing idea, the chances of it being a good
| business are small. In fact, some of the best businesses didn't
| start out with good ideas. Instead, they started out being
| considered stupid, wrong, childish, irrational, useless, too
| easy, too hard, impossible, unethical, unsustainable and we could
| go on.
|
| If you get an idea that turns out to be a great business, chances
| are that others would have told you it's a bad idea you might
| even yourself at times think it's a bad idea and almost give up.
|
| The difference between an idea that looks to be a complete
| failure and one that is wildly successful is often a matter of
| months. On top of that, most businesses fail even if you have a
| stellar team and for many not-so-obvious reasons (more about that
| in the next essay) It's just hard to know if your idea is great
| or not or if it just sounds great. So how do you make sure your
| idea even has a chance of making it? Having worked with hundreds
| of startups, investors, and founders over the years, we decided
| to put together a list of principles that can be used to come up
| with ideas that others want to pay for.
|
| 1. There are 3 categories of ideas that potentially could be
| turned into a business.
|
| Ideas for a solution to a problem
|
| Ideas for fulfilling a need
|
| Ideas that create new demand.
|
| The safest business ideas are solutions to problems. The world is
| filled with problems. Finding the right problem to solve is often
| harder than the actual solution. The questions become more
| important than the answer. The next safest business idea category
| fulfills an existing need but in a better/cheaper way. Whether a
| dating service, an email client or a new type of insurance.
| Finding an underserved market is normally the way in. The
| riskiest, but potentially most fruitful of them all are ideas
| that create new demand. These are products or services no one
| knew they needed before they tried them. Computer games, songs,
| movies, fart apps, and most social networks belong to this group.
| Make sure you know which category you are in.
|
| 2. Questions you can ask yourself or others: "What problem in
| your industry would you pay for someone to solve?" "What annoys
| me that I would be ready to pay for?" "What in my life feels like
| it could be better?" "What are my friends complaining about?"
| "What are my friends excited about?" "What has changed over the
| last 3-5 years?" Ask questions that are open-ended and don't come
| with an obvious solution.
|
| 3. Once you've found an idea to pursue ask yourself: "Are there
| any existing solutions out there?" "How big is the problem/need?"
| "Why hasn't this been solved so far?" "What kind of problem/need
| is it? (i.e. Legislative, technical, financial, etc)" "Do I have
| the skills or knowledge or intuition or perseverance to pursue
| this?" Keep asking questions and don't be afraid of the answer.
| The right questions asked today can save you months or years of
| work down a path that leads nowhere.
|
| 4. Define your competitors much more broadly. You will often be
| asked, "Are there other companies out there doing what you are
| doing?" The answer most of the time will be yes. If you don't
| find anyone, you most likely aren't defining competitors wide
| enough. Oftentimes competitors aren't doing exactly what you are
| doing but are perceived by customers as if they were. If you
| define competition too narrow you risk missing what might be
| inhibiting your growth. If you define too wide then you might
| find potential market places you weren't even thinking about.
|
| 5. Don't be afraid of sharing your ideas with others. In the
| beginning, most great ideas don't look different than bad ones.
| Chances are that even if your idea turns out to be a unicorn, no
| one will notice. In fact, if you are on to something, chances are
| you will often have to pay people to work on it for you.
| Reversely if you get an idea that sounds great and everyone loves
| it, chances are it most likely already exists or it just that, a
| great idea, not a great business. So unless you've found the cure
| for cancer and then probably instead should patent it, don't be
| afraid to share ideas.
|
| 6. Fight for your ideas. Ideas are like newborn babies. Extremely
| fragile in the beginning but with great care and nurturing they
| can turn into amazing mature businesses. Make sure you give your
| idea enough time to grow but not enough to turn into a bad
| teenager.
|
| 7. Choose ideas that keep you motivated. Many early-stage startup
| founders make the mistake of just looking for a good idea rather
| than something they care about. Most ideas aren't going to work
| out, so for most of us, a higher goal is needed. Something that
| makes you want this idea to exist and be successful. Something to
| keep us going when thing's are looking the least likely to
| succeed. A lot can be done with perseverance and grit, make sure
| your idea is worth it. There is a lot more to this than what
| we've covered here but as you can see there is a lot more going
| into ideas than just getting them. So make sure you've spent
| enough time on your idea.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| >" _Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1532 -- but it
| wasn 't till the mid seventeenth century that the balance of
| scientific opinion shifted in its favor._[4]"
| merwanedr wrote:
| HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your
| odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because
| we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not
| constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy.
|
| PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has
| skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have
| achieved and what they could potentially achieve.
|
| I don't understand, it seems so obvious to me. Dropbox started as
| a better FTP, Coinbase is a better Bitcoin wallet, Gmail is a
| better SMTP, Mighty is a better Chrome. All of these products are
| meant for the masses because the core technologies/protocols are
| too complicated or restrictive to directly interact with.
| dunkelheit wrote:
| People always bring Dropbox to these discussions as an example
| of a startup that was dismissed by HN but turned out to be
| huge, but turns out there are examples of the opposite thing
| happening too!
|
| Does anyone remember Color Labs? Go read this thread and marvel
| at the similarities:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463. A stellar team
| backed by top VCs who invested (extraordinary at the time) $41M
| sets out to build a location enabled photo-sharing app. VCs
| tout it as "the next Google". Most of HN is pretty critical
| with some voices advocating caution and saying "let's not be so
| dismissive, maybe there is something more to it". Well, it
| turned out there was nothing more to it.
|
| So no, being dismissed by HN does not automatically mean that
| your idea is good and you will be successful.
| gofreddygo wrote:
| I see this as a pessimism/optimism spectrum. We are on the
| extreme left if we can reliably predict successes and on the
| extreme right if we can reliably predict failures.
|
| As we pick a few datapoints (Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb) and
| we average it out, we are pushed towards the left.
|
| More data we pick (colorlabs for example, and I'm sure many
| others) we are pushed more towards the right.
|
| Most popular article dealing with VC news, startup promotion,
| funding news, valuation bragging, acquisition gossip, startup
| failure reports picks data that push the narrative towards
| the extremes.
|
| My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we
| can't predict shit.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _My instinct says we are squarely around the center where
| we can 't predict shit_
|
| Completely agree. There are a lot of people in this post
| trying to rationalize their own biased opinion on what
| predicts success or failure though.
| gist wrote:
| The essay is really just self serving to keep stoking the YC
| starmaking machinery (see lyrics to 'Free Man in Paris' by
| Joni Mitchell). Keep people dreaming and some of the crazy
| ideas will hit.
|
| People often forget that even Apple (or might not know if
| young) was not wildly successful and almost went bankrupt (or
| close to that) and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.
|
| Also forgotten is that the quality of the execution matters a
| great deal. Dropbox or Coinbase w/o good execution and
| attention to details would not be where they are today. Ditto
| Color Labs with great execution would not work necessarily.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Dropbox got big because iPhone users were so desperate to be
| able to share files between people and desktops that they
| started using it in droves. The desktop users that took it on
| were simply looking for some more storage and it just took
| off from there. There was no reason to pay attention to it
| initially (and still isn't imo) and over in android phone
| land everyone had no reason to either other than to retrieve
| files their friends sent them.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I am really surprised that you didn't choose the more obvious
| line of reasoning, which would be to bring up examples of
| companies that PG predicted to be breakout successes and then
| they failed. PG marveled about Instacart and Flexport well
| before anyone else, including myself (I know members of the
| founding teams in both companies very well, and think very
| highly of them... but even so, I didn't see their companies
| as the type of breakout successes that they became until PG
| made his case for them). The constant hate against PG is
| really starting to get tiring, especially when you see such
| sloppy reasoning. Why judge his reasoning based on what other
| VCs thought? Saying PG = VC industry is a really stunningly
| poor argument IMO.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating
| your odds of success.
|
| The success of a startup depends on many factors and pessimism
| on HN is definitely not one of them. HN is a forum where people
| intellectualize things from their limited point of view. It is
| usually not the primary forum where the founders seek feedback.
| I think HN is a remix of the old slashdot forums with a healthy
| mix of digg + reddit.
| dd36 wrote:
| If they pivot, does that mean the negative feedback was right
| or is it always wrong? What if the feedback precipitates the
| pivot?
|
| I have no idea if Mighty will succeed or not. But I suspect it
| will not succeed as a a $30/mo consumer product. Indeed, I'd
| bet money on it. The companies everyone keeps referencing were
| free products. I got excited about Dropbox. So did my friends.
| No friend has excitedly sent me a link to Mighty.
|
| I'm sure some professionals will pay though. How many and how
| many they need to hit their numbers is another question. They
| can still probably ride the hype machine to an exit.
| [deleted]
| clpwq wrote:
| Interesting metric. The underlying principle is:
|
| "No one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the
| American public."
|
| HN just hasn't internalized it quite yet, so we have the
| counter-indicator.
| justicezyx wrote:
| > PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase
|
| Those are not needing defense. Those are quite mundane
| business.
|
| Dropbox for one, everyone thinks it's useful. The controversial
| part is whether or not it's a good business. Turns out Dropbox
| is not so great a business. I mean, if Dropbox is in China, it
| will be crushed by copycats and die very quickly.
|
| Similarly for coinbase. It's useful. The question was whether
| or not btc and crypto currency will be big enough for coinbase
| to be a great business. Of course, given the success in crypto
| currency, coinbase is a great business.
|
| But neither of these are "crazy new ideas". They are not even
| new ideas...
| baud147258 wrote:
| > Mighty is a better Chrome
|
| yes, it's better in the sense that the privacy issues are even
| better; well, worse in the viewpoint of the user, but since
| when VCs cared about it?
| te_chris wrote:
| Mighty isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-
| service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of
| everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of
| marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.
| the-dude wrote:
| The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's &
| gov's who want just that : centralized control.
| dd36 wrote:
| Yes. Unless they can figure out how to be free to
| consumers.
| ta_ca wrote:
| there are lots of links to casey's twitter account but the real
| gem is[0]. it reads like the famous jurassic park quote: 'Your
| scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,
| they didn't stop to think if they should'
|
| [0]https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441
| easton wrote:
| Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that
| it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big
| to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get
| them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full
| operating system where developers didn't have to target the web
| with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows
| (or Linux)? The entire point of web applications was that they
| didn't require an install and were lighter than their desktop
| counterparts, and now that isn't true, so can't we ditch them?
| suhail wrote:
| Linux has low market share, Apple won't let you on non-Apple
| hardware, and Windows has high fees to license in that way.
|
| The only path is the browser and most desktop apps are web
| apps.
|
| Feel free to read my post that goes deeper about our
| thinking: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-
| invent-the...
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| >most desktop apps are web apps.
|
| Not yet.
| stingrae wrote:
| for the average user, they are.
| boredtofears wrote:
| I'm not sure who the average user is, but everyone I can
| think of in my life that fits that description definitely
| does not have more "web apps as desktop apps" than pure
| desktop apps. Not by a long shot.
| easton wrote:
| Microsoft keeps cutting the cost of licensing Windows for
| VDI though. Microsoft 365 E3 costs $32 a month (when you're
| already probably paying them $15-20 per month, not a bad
| increase) and includes Windows 10 Enterprise licensing for
| VDI. $12 + compute (which we could presume is $30-ish per
| month for a VM similar to the one Mighty ships? depending
| on if you buy the servers vs go to a cloud provider, etc),
| and it seems like you could get there for the cost Mighty
| is charging for Chrome. You'd need a sysadmin to set it all
| up, so a service like Mighty where you could just show it
| you have the correct licenses and get a beefy VM turned up
| would be really nice (Microsoft is working on something,
| but who knows when it'll be out).
|
| I read your article, and the technology sounds interesting.
| I also understand you pivoted from offering a simple VDI
| service, presumably because of licensing (and of course,
| everything I just said goes out the window if Microsoft
| decides to alter the deal). But for the worker who doesn't
| 100% live in web apps (I'm thinking of the legions of
| accountants who have 8GB of RAM tied up in Excel all day
| long) and needs more than their garbage corporate machine
| can handle, I don't see this being enough.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll hold me up as the next
| "Dropbox is just FTP with extra steps!" person. I would be
| fine with that. But maybe, just maybe, once the streaming
| tech is proven (it looks like it is, honestly), reconsider?
| noloblo wrote:
| very valuable is it possible to get beta access @suhail
| granshaw wrote:
| > why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system
| where developers didn't have to target the web with all of
| its oddities
|
| Ahem, that ship has long since sailed. We have an entire
| generation of developers now where all they know is the Web,
| and industry investments, tooling, etc has all shifted in
| that direction
| marvin wrote:
| Maybe they'll do that someday. Bootstrap to there, and then
| switch around and save us all the hassle of writing webapps.
|
| That would make this comment thread look more hilarious than
| <<less space than a Nomad, no wireless>>.
| merwanedr wrote:
| Why doesn't Heroku simply give you a linux instance to do
| whatever you want like you'd do with EC2? Because it's easier
| for end users to deal with something that has a higher level
| of abstraction. Mighty is addressing an existing problem with
| a complex technology that seems simple on the surface.
| qshaman wrote:
| This is so common in SV, you are just being arrogant and salty
| in general, because people are showing how dumb, privacy
| unfriendly, and dangerous this product is, it has nothing to do
| with envy. Using Dropbox as an example is even worst, thats
| like saying "X celebrity is famous and smoke weed, then if I
| smoke weed, I will be famous". PG is clearly biased and he is
| just trying to get a return on his investment, thats all, and
| if he needs to hype this product to make money he will. People
| are not dummies, if the product is meant for the general public
| and not the HN crowd, then start a Google Ads campaign, or get
| in the Tonight Show or something.
| networkimprov wrote:
| Gmail is a better _Eudora /Outlook_, not a better SMTP.
|
| TMTP is a better SMTP. See link in my profile.
| mbesto wrote:
| > HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating
| your odds of success.
|
| It's not. This is survivorship bias from the infamous stories
| about Dropbox, Coinbase, etc. There's plenty of "Show HNs" of
| HNr's criticizing companies that go nowhere. Including one of
| my own!
|
| What you're referring to is effectively called "non consensus
| and right"[0]. The problem with this concept is that it can
| only be verified after the idea is deemed right or wrong.
|
| https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Non-consensus and right is the best framework for making
| investments, since you need non-consensus in order to get a
| cheap price. But for merely estimating the probability that
| something will succeed, consensus (whether positive or
| negative) is probably slightly predictive in that regard, as
| you point out w.r.t. survivor bias.
|
| I do put a lot of stock into Paul's essay, though. If someone
| credible and highly intelligent has some non-consensus
| opinion, it's a good idea to suspend judgement and really
| listen to their reasoning.
| s3r3nity wrote:
| Don't forget my favorite: "Slack is just IRC with clever
| marketing."
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