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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#251

Post by fallingknife »

nomadiccoder wrote: post #114
fallingknife wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who exactly is a "domain expert" in bitcoin? The whole thing was created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago, and all of the so called "domain experts" are johnny come latelys who smelled a quick buck.

The whole thing was not created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago. The building blocks used in bitcoin have been around for many years before this in things like hashcash. Furthermore distributed consensus is a topic researched for decades. The term cryptocurrency uses crypto as a base which has been researched for centuries. Bitcoin is a novel constuction around crypto primatives relying on economic incentive t…

In terms of the tech, yes. But that doesn't give you any insight into the market, which is what the comment I was replying to was talking about.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#252

Post by detaro »

lghh wrote: post #242
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 don't understand how Jonathan Blow of all people, figurehead behind several great video games that would have been impossible to run on a supercomputer 25 years ago, could possible have this take.

He is very much in the church of hand-optimized low-level programming and anything that abstracts over that being where computing is going wrong.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#253

Post by HDMI_Cable »

_ot4t wrote: post #222

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 nove…

Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was at least some recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#254

Post by unstatusthequo »

SingAlong wrote: post #164
kumarvvr wrote: post #96

Off Topic : The site is sending a GET request to http://np.lexity.com/embed/YA/fa27bb6ce937aea400cc8e5f11aa42... every 5 seconds. Anyone have any idea what it is? Note : The address keeps changing for every request. Edit2 : Is it only on my PC, or are others also able to see it?

I see those requests too but my adblocker takes care of it. Lexity.com looks like a Yahoo service and maybe this is the analytics being collected. AFAIK pg's site is still hosted on Yahoo.

Sometimes crazy ideas like SSL aren’t so crazy. I wonder if the HTTPS failure is due to the Yahoo part of this?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#255

Post by drcongo »

elcapitan wrote: post #250
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…

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game That sounds like an odd use of "skin in the game". "Skin in the game" would be if that thing failed and then he gets skinned, basically. Being invested in something with potentially lots of upside and worst case a bit of lost investment isn't like that.

No, it literally means "being invested in something" regardless of the rest.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#256

Post by merwanedr »

easton wrote: post #245
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's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applicati…

Why doesn't Heroku simply give you a linux instance to do whatever you want like you'd do with EC2? Because it's easier for end users to deal with something that has a higher level of abstraction. Mighty is addressing an existing problem with a complex technology that seems simple on the surface.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#257

Post by intergalplan »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #236
intergalplan wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

So you think it is a dragnet-surveillance get-acquired-for-our-data play, longer term? That's even worse, if so.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#258

Post by _jjca »

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #253
_ot4t wrote: post #222

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 nove…

Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was at least some recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.

Indeed they are recompiling Chromium but that doesn't make it any more exciting tbh.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#259

Post by 55555 »

dmitriid wrote: post #182
BurningFrog wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs. At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used. And when I use it, I doubt average load is over 25%. So the Mighty model has a 20x utilization advantage by those numbers. That should easily support twice the peak CPU power for me when I need it. Another thing is that the Mighty CPUs will (presumably) be upgraded continuously, while my laptop CPU gets no faster after purchas…

>The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs. It's not. It's literally spinning up a VM in the cloud to run Chrome and stream a video to you > At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used. Yes, but Mighty isn't running (and will never run) on your computer.

Wow you are really not understanding the comment you are replying to. He's discussing the business model.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#260

Post by breck »

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…

Mighty is such an obviously good idea, and if you've spent decades on the cutting edge of the web you'd understand why. People's demands for more powerful web apps are for all intents and purposes infinite, and it is much more pleasant as a developer to develop once, run anywhere, than to develop an app for low powered clients and a different one for high powered ones.
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