Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#191

Post by dmitriid » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

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…

> 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?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#192

Post by bsedlm » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

stephc_int13 wrote: post #107

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 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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#193

Post by wraptile » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#194

Post by dralley » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #177

>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 so…

It's technological manifest destiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=36m48s

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#195

Post by stephc_int13 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

twobitshifter wrote: post #179

cmiles74 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Silk, Puffin, Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Maxthon - are all predecessors.

Well, this idea of a remote browser has some predecessors but the true lineage goes back to VT-80 and mainframes.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#196

Post by zanellato19 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

gustavo-fring wrote: post #39

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…

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#197

Post by walleeee » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

anatoly wrote: post #125

UncleMeat wrote: post #110

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 a…

You should use this opportunity to recommend an especially high-quality introduction/overview of modern history of science, approachable by a curious outsider.

Philosophy of Science: the Central Issues (Curd, Cover, & Pincock) is a decent although limited aggregation

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#198

Post by tutfbhuf » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#199

Post by xfer » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#200

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

walleeee wrote: post #187

UncleMeat wrote: post #110

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 a…

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

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.