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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#271

Post by marvin »

chrisco255 wrote: post #232
tlb wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an excellent point, and I think this comment thread would have much less negativity if everyone asked themselves this question.

But then they’d have to own up to the nauseating idea of callously dismissing some truly spectacular sea changes, such as failing to buy 1000 Bitcoins for a few dollars in 2009. I think most people are too full of envy to do that.

How many can honestly say they kept an open mind to the handful of such paradigm shifts we’ve experienced in the last 20 years?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#272

Post by qshaman »

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…

This is so common in SV, you are just being arrogant and salty in general, because people are showing how dumb, privacy unfriendly, and dangerous this product is, it has nothing to do with envy. Using Dropbox as an example is even worst, thats like saying "X celebrity is famous and smoke weed, then if I smoke weed, I will be famous". PG is clearly biased and he is just trying to get a return on his investment, thats all, and if he needs to hype this product to make money he will. People are not dummies, if the product is meant for the general public and not the HN crowd, then start a Google Ads campaign, or get in the Tonight Show or something.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#273

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#274

Post by borski »

thisisbrians wrote: post #269
borski wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I have absolutely less than zero interest in starting my last company again. That was hard, and I had no idea all of the problems I was going to run into.

I'm super excited to start my next thing, though, which is surely going to be way easier! ;)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#275

Post by intergalplan »

UncleMeat wrote: post #110

I really wish PG would actually talk to some historians. History of Science is an extremely deep field with tons of professionals who have spent their lives studying this material. His overview is shallow. The only history book he cites is from fifty years ago ! It is so frustrating. There is this huge wealth of content available and a large group of people who'd want nothing more to be able to share what they know a…

Being actually-correct about one's historical analogies and still making them work (or even finding that they don't! Gasp!) is harder than repeating "common knowledge" tales or fudging things to fit your narrative while writing with the same bold voice you would if you were actually-correct.

Not to pick just on PG—that's more common than not, really.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#276

Post by NikolaNovak »

dunkelheit wrote: post #190
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 to be credibly neutral about it. I think this is a general and important point (and sadly not at all discussed in his post). When an expert publicly says something that seems wrong, my default explanation is that they have a vested interest that consciously or unconsciously forces them to consider the implications of what they say and alter the message accordingly. Re…

>>"Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant."

I agree with your general point, but my interpretation of those events has additional axis:

1. Masks are in shortage, and may not protect you, and public doesn't know how to use them and will probably do more harm than help by reusing and handling and touching their masks

Then as time passed and we learned more

2. This is getting bad; even if masks don't save the person wearing them, if it helps others, we are at a point where we need all the help we can get. Please wear masks to help slow the overall spread.

While there's definitely part of the complex factoring of the recommendation that masks became more abundant, I feel initial message was "Crappy masks won't save you" and later message "Crappy masks won't save you, but may save others from yourself"

98% of people I talk to don't understand that surgical mask / cloth mask will do extremely poor job of protecting them; but may protect others. (it also adds an axis of complexity for those who don't want to wear masks because they feel they have the right not to protect themselves, because that's not what mainstream masks are for; it's not about wearing a helmet or not to protect your own head; it's about protecting heads of those around you)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#277

Post by suhail »

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…

Linux has low market share, Apple won't let you on non-Apple hardware, and Windows has high fees to license in that way.

The only path is the browser and most desktop apps are web apps.

Feel free to read my post that goes deeper about our thinking: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#278

Post by iscrewyou »

ProAm wrote: post #150
cmiles74 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't this a feature of Amazon's Silk browser? "The browser uses a split architecture where some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage loading performance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk

Opera Mini did it first.

I was young when that was first announced and privacy wasn't as big deal or a concern as it is these days. I remember it making the news and me being excited about it and noticing how fast everything was. It took a day or two for my brain to catch up and ask "this means they have access to everything?"

I abandoned it right away.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#279

Post by stephc_int13 »

suhail wrote: post #270
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.

I think this is other way around. He talks/write to promote his ventures.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#280

Post by mbesto »

wildermuthn wrote: post #81
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

It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity. I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an…

> It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

His arguments are too vague to specifically defend Mighty. You can insert any technology and his arguments are neither valid or invalid.

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