I decided to stop working on Mighty • Hacker News Board

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#251

Post by SergeAx » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

I am very skeptical by my nature, and see it more as a negative trait. But there are moments when I want to shout from the top of my lungs: "Who in their right mind gonna use it, not talking about buying it?!". I remember two such cases: that voice rooms app, where people gathered and talked about themselves and of course crypto tokens, and this remotely running browser for $30/month.

I beleive, by the way, that the idea of a fast browser for cheap devices came to founder after reading story about Browserling, QA multibrowser suite, going viral in India, where people with $20 phones were able to use WhatsApp webapp via Browserling free plan (HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103235). Coincidentially, I heard that voice room app (I am not being sarcastic here, I really forgot it's name and don't think it's worth googling) also became succesfull in India.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#252

Post by Cyberdog » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

IceWreck wrote: post #119

Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me. And the few people who really had that usecase could just use a lightweight container running chromium + guacamole on a nearby server. Okay I'm sure Mighty used cool tech to make it faster than just that (idk how it worked but maybe they were transmitting changed HTML) but at its c…

> Called it here back when it launched. Streaming video of a slightly more powerful browser in a browser (electron) never made sense to me.

Wait, the client was an Electron app? Are you serious?

If so, this just goes from a poorly-executed idea to an outright fraud.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#253

Post by svnt » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #61

talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

I love the vitamin vs painkiller discussion. The basic premise is: don’t build a vitamin, build a painkiller because it’s solves a real problem and people will be willing to pay for it. First of all the analogy fails in the real world. The vitamin market is huge. People pay lots of money to buy vitamins. Second, the transition is not clear. It’s hard to draw a line line and say now this vitamin turned into a painkill…

The reason it’s breaking down is you’re using it out of context — at least in my understanding. It is primarily a B2B analogy, and you’re talking about consumer tech.

In B2B people buy painkillers because then they don’t have to do that painful part of their job. They rarely buy vitamins (although some do) because those might require them to do more.

It’s fundamentally about outsourcing/automating your own functions.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#254

Post by stephc_int13 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

phphphphp wrote: post #237

stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.

Predicting failure is easy, though, because most things fail: you can predict everything will fail and be right 90%+ of the time. The venture capital model operates on that understanding: most things will fail, but in taking a chance on lots of things that will probably fail, you're exposed to the very small number of things that will succeed in a meaningful way. Success is the aberration, and being able to identify…

Nah, predicting failure or success is exactly the same thing.

VCs don't simply predict success and bet; they use their power to make it happen or crush it.

Overall, I have a very low confidence level in most of the stories told by VCs about themselves, and I am not sure about their positive influence in the economy or technology.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#255

Post by svnt » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #233

wmf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't cloud compute always been far more expensive than local hardware? I don't see any arbitrage opportunity here. Twenty years ago VDI wanted to replace desktop PCs with VMware ($$$) running on quad-socket servers ($$$) with fibre channel SAN storage ($$$). I didn't understand the economics then and I don't today.

The idea is predicated on economies of scale and low utilization rates typical of local hardware. The success of AWS and Azure show it can be done. (You do have to avoid replacing cheap commodity desktops with exotic bleeding edge servers, it’s hard to make up for that)

Which means that if Mighty survived the M1 it would have been dead anyway (probably in not more than a few months) by Azure and AWS offering it once Mighty proved the market.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#256

Post by ceres » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

yubiox wrote: post #246

Is there anything like this that I can run myself? My phone does not load some pages well and I would like to browser stream from my own server.

I think kasmweb (kasmweb.com) has this. They claim it’s open source but I think it’s more “source available”

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#257

Post by NotYourLawyer » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:10 PM UTC

stephc_int13 wrote: post #166

Suhail blocked me on Twitter some time ago as I was a bit vocal in my opposition to the core idea behind this app. I think it was already dead at the time and the criticism got under his skin. I wish there was a way to make money by shorting bad ideas. I think I could easily fund a few companies by doing that on weekends.

You can’t short bad ideas directly. But you can (or could until recently) make money off them by coming up with them and pitching them to VCs yourself. That’s kind of like shorting.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#258

Post by bitwize » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance. I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't. If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related, o…

People complained about the amount of RAM NeWS apps took up, too. In retrospect we realized NeWS was a missed opportunity to revolutionize networked-app UI.

Electron is the dream of NeWS for current-era hardware and software. In the future we won't even blink at the space it takes up.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#259

Post by modeless » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #145

modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

The product, "compute pixels on powerful machine -> render on thin client", makes much more sense if you don't try to monetize by being a cloud landlord, but you let the users own that powerful machine, make money through hardware, and help them with the software, make money through support, no subscriptions, no rent-seeking. Think at the level of a family: 2 parents, 2 children which means: 4 smartphones, 2÷3 laptop…

I think something like this could make sense as a place to run large machine learning models locally. I don't need a server to run my browser or my apps, they run just fine locally. But a server to run large language models, Stable Diffusion, Whisper voice recognition, etc would be useful, as these types of models can run much faster at higher quality on a beefy GPU than they ever will on a phone.

The endgame of these models is an agent that knows practically everything about me and can perform tasks on my behalf, which I would really prefer to live in my house running on hardware I own, rather than in a data center under someone else's control.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#260

Post by Entinel » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 9:12 PM UTC

gnabgib wrote: post #198

Entinel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a degree yes but acting like anything that uses <500MB of RAM is a disaster goes beyond what is a reasonable concern in my opinion.

I think you got your greater than sign the wrong way around? Consider a lot of non-tech people don't constantly upgrade, and still rock 4GB systems, at least an eighth of that resource is a big ask for a sloppy app (unless it is the only app they use on the device).

Yeah my sign is the wrong way. My bad.