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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#161

Post by lioeters »

kumarvvr wrote: post #96

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?

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#162

Post by stephc_int13 »

fsociety wrote: post #138
stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

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, bu…

Not to mention the privacy concerns of allowing someone else’s machine to proxy all of your web requests.

Yeah, that's the point, this is why this "tech" is not what we want/need.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#163

Post by bombcar »

srckinase123 wrote: post #112

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"?

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".

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#164

Post by SingAlong »

kumarvvr wrote: post #96

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?

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#165

Post by stephc_int13 »

vgchh wrote: post #158
stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

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, bu…

- 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.

- 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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#167

Post by bombcar »

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#168

Post by adenta »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #89

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, bu…

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#169

Post by twobitshifter »

wildermuthn wrote: post #81
bestinterest wrote: post #4

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

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…

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#170

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #109
gman83 wrote: post #80

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.

This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.

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.

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