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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#221

Post by chrisco255 »

elbasti wrote: post #204
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

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.…

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#222

Post by _ot4t »

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#223

Post by biztos »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#224

Post by topaz0 »

bombcar wrote: post #167

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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#225

Post by merwanedr »

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#226

Post by mstipetic »

runako wrote: post #147
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

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 sh…

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?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#227

Post by intergalplan »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #162
fsociety wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#228

Post by elbasti »

chrisco255 wrote: post #221
elbasti wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

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.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#230

Post by bkirkby »

arua442 wrote: post #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.

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.
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