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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#261

Post by bewo001 »

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.

If you have to manage 100s of devices, you prefer thin clients. As a user, you want control over your device and rich functionality. Dumb clients usually give you dumb services.

I thought we have moved past thin clients and moved on to centrally managed software, either in the form of javascript web apps or as apps from an app store.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#262

Post by marvin »

de_keyboard wrote: post #127

I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom. However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest. This kind of black and white thinking is pervasive in PG essays, and always lead to a cute conclusion. You can…

That two domain experts disagree on a radical idea is irrelevant, if the one presenting the radical idea turns out to be right. There are no points given out for merely participating.

This happens all the time. And the most interesting ideas are rejected by almost everyone, except the tiny minority that happens to be positioned to understand the change. So you can’t make predictions by tallying up expert votes either.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#263

Post by chrisco255 »

fallingknife wrote: post #65
bob33212 wrote: post #50

This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin. 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progressi…

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.

Andreas Antonopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, any of the core devs at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, anyone who has studied blockchain and cryptographic currency systems for the past 10 years, etc. Keep the wool over your eyes.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#264

Post by ta_ca »

antipauline wrote: post #48

Why are you all upvoting this shit? Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact. You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.

pg is one of the people introduced me to lisp and i think lisp is the greatest idea in computer science. so his ideas have some weight for me, but lately the disconnect is quite unbearable. he is again picking the wrong side in history.

will these supervillians ever stop? nothing less than world-domination is enough.

microsoft tried to own everything about computing, they largly succeeded. they even infiltrated schools and still every pc is sold with windows-preinstalled.

then came google/facebook/apple... and they all want to own the entire internet.

unity wants the entire gaming/gamedev/computer-graphics. i am sure there are schools out there have unity classes, just unbelievable. "unity-developer" is the norm in job titles now, and i have never once heard "photoshop-artist" in the title of a job description.

this particular case is no exception.

ok, most logical conclusion is i too am envious.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#265

Post by intergalplan »

nottorp wrote: post #184

If this is about Mighty, the bad parts of it aren't technical. - Even with today's concentration of information, there are several independent information sources left... and they want us to access them from a single point of failure? - Who pays for this and how? How do I install my own ad blockers and anti tracking extensions on Mighty? Am I supposed to just trust them that they won't sell my advertising profile? -…

Exactly. The tech is farcical (surely even a proponent of them can see that?) but that's not really Mighty's fault.

It's bad because their strongest viable business plays seem to all involve leveraging their access to people's browsers in not-so-nice ways.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#266

Post by chrisco255 »

kstenerud wrote: post #34

The thing is, most crazy new ideas are just that: crazy. For every great new invention there is the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil. It's very difficult to differentiate between an innovative idea and claptrap. Genius is difficult to recognise because it takes a genius to develop the idea in the first place.

> the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil.

I think you are being overly pessimistic by several orders of magnitude.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#267

Post by Pxtl »

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'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people.

No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#268

Post by stephc_int13 »

vidarh wrote: post #246
bsedlm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's an ongoing tension here between software getting complex enough to be slow and people wanting to move computation to servers. The problem with that, of course, is that the clients inevitably gets faster, and cheaper, and software gets pushed to the leaves again. We're carrying around what used to be super computers. This is also why I would be very cautious about investing in something that bets on offloading…

Yes, this is a seemingly never-ending cycle.

1. Software is too heavy, let's push it on the server 2. Dumb client gets faster 3. Servers cost money, let's use the unused CPU cycles on the client 4. Bloatware happens, go back to 1.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#269

Post by thisisbrians »

borski wrote: post #211
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…

That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles. But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive foun…

This. I started my company in my early 20s and had no clue how much work it would be due to my own naïveté. Indeed, we broke the problems down and worked through them one-by-one until we had a functioning business model. On the one hand, it would be a lot harder to start over knowing what I know now about how much work it takes. On the other, it would be a lot easier because I got a lot better at problem solving and decision making.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#270

Post by suhail »

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…

He might also be talking about many more ideas too: Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible. You can criticize him for having skin in the game but you could equally commend him too: he puts his money where his mouth is.
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