Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#151

Post by jgalt212 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #100

wildermuthn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#152

Post by yifanl » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#153

Post by hoppyhoppy2 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #30

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

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.

We have a game streaming service from Google, too (Stadia)... which is apparently struggling.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#154

Post by meheleventyone » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #30

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

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.

> 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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#155

Post by lbacaj » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #132

lbacaj wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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 distribute…

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).

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#156

Post by aazaa » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#157

Post by cmiles74 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #100

wildermuthn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#158

Post by vgchh » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#159

Post by stephc_int13 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

dotdotdotdot wrote: post #149

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…

> 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…

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)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#160

Post by bombcar » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:58 PM UTC

entee wrote: post #56

fendy3002 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Among…

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.

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!