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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#231

Post by schmorptron »

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.

Geforce now or even renting an entire computer with shadow is for graphics performance, and is not 30 bucks a month. You also won't be entering any sensitive data while playing games. I think it's a cool thing they've done, but it requires you to put full trust into them as a company.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#232

Post by chrisco255 »

tlb wrote: post #215
CJefferson wrote: post #6

This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.". I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of the main poin…

The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure. But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big paradigm shift. A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history. Would you have invested time in solving Schrodinger’s weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you have invested time in public key cryptography…

> A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history.

Everyone assumes they would always have been on the right side of history. It's basically impossible to know what you would have been like had you been born in those times. Better is to back-test your rule against paradigm shifts that have occurred in your own lifetime. What are some ideas you dismissed that turned out to work? What are some products or projects you have a revulsion against that are still succeeding years later? What caused you to reject them? What did you miss?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#234

Post by easton »

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.…

You can probably buy them a VDI desktop for $20 per month (Amazon Workspaces and Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure are in this ballpark) and run Chrome on that. Especially with WVD, there are thin clients made specifically for it (or you can just use an RDP client on any OS).

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#235

Post by hardwaregeek »

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…

Maybe this is a terrible stance but if the idea pisses off Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, I wouldn't take that as a bad sign. jblow and Casey are brilliant programmers and I mean them no disrespect, but their philosophies are certainly in the vein of prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient. Unfortunately (or not, depends on your view), programmers do not like prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Worse is better and all. If you give them a cheat code to let them use a little more performance, give them a little more headroom, they'll take it. For all the jblows and muratori's in the world, there's a lot more people who don't care about perf and just want to make cool stuff. For better or worse.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#236

Post by stephc_int13 »

intergalplan wrote: post #227
stephc_int13 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They simply didn't reveal the business model yet.

The $50 subscription is to avoid flooding their servers while testing the software.

This product will likely starts as a corporate malware but once the beta is over and their tech is really working at scale (more difficult than you might think) they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#237

Post by qshaman »

He is an investor on this “crazy new idea” , I don’t believe him, he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the respect of millions , you don’t see them hyping crappy startups for a few bucks (billions* ) . I do respect the founders , and understand the have worked hard on this project , I just don’t think that just working hard on something makes it good , or whatever Paul Graham says is something I should accept as truth.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#238

Post by 21eleven »

I think there is some evolutionary psychology at play in people's bias against "Crazy New Ideas". A human hunting and gathering on a savanna with a crazy new idea is likely to be killed by a lion or starve. Sure the new ideas sometimes were breakthroughs but the idea-haver's peers likely experienced strong selective pressure to wait until there was good evidence that an idea was unlikely to get one killed before endorsing it and practicing it themselves.

In modern times we should feel more safe to have "Crazy New Ideas", we probably need them to solve many of the problems our world faces today. But we are biased against new ideas since our brains have evolved to see them associated with negative outcomes like death by lion or exile from the tribe. There is a lower risk of death by big cat today so people should feel more willing to have an celebrate new ideas.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#239

Post by baud147258 »

merwanedr wrote: post #225

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…

> Mighty is a better Chrome

yes, it's better in the sense that the privacy issues are even better; well, worse in the viewpoint of the user, but since when VCs cared about it?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#240

Post by te_chris »

merwanedr wrote: post #225

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…

Mighty isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.
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