Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#281

Post by intergalplan » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #260

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.

For me, the question becomes—if we must write applications to one target that's going to run on a server anyway—why oh why must it be web tech? The whole appeal of applications (not documents) in the browser was that they were (kinda, sorta) able to run on any platform. If your target is one browser on one OS, and you're writing an actual application, why would you subject yourself, your developers, and your product quality to an HTML + JS UI?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#282

Post by username90 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:23 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #260

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.

That will never happen. A large majority of people will never have mighty since it is expensive, webapps will continue to be built to render locally.

People already have a lot of power in their machines for their non-web apps, and it is enough to run web apps as well.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#283

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:23 PM UTC

walleeee wrote: post #213

UncleMeat wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally know an unusual number of historians of science for a software engineer. If PG approached them with an open mind, I'm very confident that they'd love to talk to him. Historians do history because they love their topic so much that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and low pay. They want nothing more than to talk about the things they study.

> Historians do history because they love their topic so much that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and low pay. Yes, incidentally people like this are probably not easily swayed by the minimally researched thoughts of a venture capitalist I hope he talks to some historians but I fear he may intuit this and avoid it, consciously or not I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their work with…

> I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their work with engineers!

They do! There are growing collaborative projects between the humanities and software all over the place today.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#284

Post by lostcolony » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

lbacaj wrote: post #155

lostcolony wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As of November last year (let alone anything since re: distribution), US governmental agencies paid $2.5 billion to Moderna to develop the vaccine and buy doses (and there already had been work done by Moderna on mRNA vaccines). As of July last year (again, let alone anything since), US governmental agencies had paid Pfizer $1.95 billion. So, basically, the government spent billions for something they then distribute…

The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set. Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism? Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country. Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got…

>> 'at whatever market rate they/the market set'

Really? I would have expected something a bit higher than $20-$25 a dose, given the limited supply (it was pure research at the time), and COVID was decimating the country (so extremely high demand). I mean, a single dose of insulin, requiring no research, and no protective IP, and costing cents to produce, will run you or an insurance company hundreds of dollars. Given the huge demand, and the non-existent supply at that time, there is -nothing- in the market that would have capped the price for the vaccine at $20-25, except either human good will (which is not a market factor; again, see insulin), or the very real threat of government action.

>> At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country

And voting Republican is what Democracy means to plenty of people living in the US. If we actually go to what the dictionary definition of socialism is, rather than a particular interpretation or lived experience of something called it, it's "(a political system wherein) the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole".

The governmental decision to offer something for free to everyone is a socialist one; the use of government regulation as an implicit threat to pay what is reasonable to offset cost, rather than what the market could dictate, also speaks to socialism. Yes, it was a private company that produced it, but both the exchange and the bulk of its distribution are very much being carried out by government, and even where not, are being very tightly regulated by government. All of that in response to community need and desire, not merely the strictures of the market (which otherwise would have seen a major profit opportunity).

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#285

Post by mumblemumble » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #260

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.

Define "powerful".

I'm rocking a 8 year old laptop. I also use NoScript, which means I'm pretty aware of what code webpages are actually running on my computer.

What I've seen is that the things that make it really chug have very little to do with how much actual functionality the website has. Beautiful CSS animations usually aren't too bad, either, even on my old computer. The real performance hogs tend to be things like scrolljacking, telemetry, and dynamic ad placement.

The interesting outlier here is gmail. Gmail fascinates me, because it keeps getting slower and slower, without, as far as I can tell, actually gaining any new capabilities.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#286

Post by nomel » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

IAmLiterallyAB wrote: post #94

pantulis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.

> E2E encryption How on earth would that work for their product? They need to access the data so they can render it.

Surely that could happen client side.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#287

Post by alonmower » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

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.

He puts his mouth where his money is*

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#288

Post by marvin » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

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…

Maybe they’ll do that someday. Bootstrap to there, and then switch around and save us all the hassle of writing webapps.

That would make this comment thread look more hilarious than «less space than a Nomad, no wireless».

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#289

Post by dclowd9901 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:29 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #260

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.

The theoretical end you describe — one where we are all just writing web applications to run in Mighty - sounds incredible but ignores the reality. There will not be 100% or even close to 100% adoption of streaming browsing, especially if it costs $50(!) a month. And you can imagine everything else that will go wrong:

- mighty creates arbitrary APIs that allow more speed so now we have yet another build target

- it manages to become successful, so now competitors jump in and now we have multiple targets to build for.

- god forbid, competitors offer “free” versions that become even more invasive to your browsing

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#290

Post by 9erdelta » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:30 PM UTC

> Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.

Funny how he says this but then later goes on to mention Darwin. Perhaps we could say part of the natural selection of new "big things" is if they (both the ideas and the people) survive the early dismissiveness and criticism. I would welcome criticism from highly experienced and conservative people, because if you can respond meaningfully and survive - you're probably on to something.