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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

141–150 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#141
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

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#142

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…

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#144

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

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#145

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 initi…

> 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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#146

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…

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

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#147

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

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#148
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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#149

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…

> 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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#150

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…

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

Opera Mini did it first.
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