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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#291

Post by dmitriid »

55555 wrote: post #259
dmitriid wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

And I've responded with the reality of the business model. There's no "CPU sharing" on "my computer". It's a beefy VM in the cloud.

Well, it most likely shares the CPU with other VMs, but that depends on the cloud, and the instance. And since the browser is always open, Mighty will always run that VM, with no sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063554

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#292

Post by gwright »

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…

I think you are leaving out the data story. It is very difficult to push data to the edges, you can easily run into volume or consistency problems.

No surprise that this means that there is no single solution. Complexity sometimes makes sense at the edges and sometimes make sense in the core. It just depends.

I think we have a lot to learn about building systems that give us the flexibility to move things around as needed. Plan 9 was interesting from that point of view because it gave a way for edge resources and core resources to be composed via 9P at any place in the network.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#293

Post by rogers18445 »

The Mighty App will either die or become a privacy nightmare. Because a browser can run arbitrary compute it will be abused, and if they don't want to die they will have to spy on what their users are doing to find abuse.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#294

Post by mbesto »

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…

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

It's not. This is survivorship bias from the infamous stories about Dropbox, Coinbase, etc. There's plenty of "Show HNs" of HNr's criticizing companies that go nowhere. Including one of my own!

What you're referring to is effectively called "non consensus and right"[0]. The problem with this concept is that it can only be verified after the idea is deemed right or wrong.

https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#295

Post by ta_ca »

hooande wrote: post #212
antipauline wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't want to get my usual account banned for expressing such apostate views. They're very protective of their cult leaders round here.

Imagine if people could completely change their idenitites every time they said something. It would make conversation and discourse as we know it impossible. It would make the idea you created an account to express invalid. You can't criticize Paul Graham if he can say "That wasn't me, it was Gaul Praham". If your ideas aren't good enough for you to stay by them with some form of consistent identity, do not express t…

powerfull people can silence you in so many ways. they will always have a platform, you won't.

you also got discourse backwards. you should be judging the arguments presented (which in this case not much), not the persona.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#296

Post by username90 »

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.

> they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

They wont give away this for free:

> Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz.

People would mine bitcoins with it. Not to mention they'd be footing more than all of youtubes bandwidth costs if this gets popular.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#297

Post by elcapitan »

drcongo wrote: post #255
elcapitan wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No it's not regardless of the rest. It implies actual risk. Some rich dude losing a dime is not skin in the game, unless the phrase is meant as completely meaningless masturbation. "Skin" implies an actual impact, otherwise it's just "in the game".

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#298

Post by cptskippy »

arua442 wrote: post #148

I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him. Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.

I think that's the curse of our social media. At best you get a binary Like/Dislike mechanism, at worst just Like. There's no contextualization of those choices.

In this case, PG's writing is directly related to the discussions around MightyApp even though he doesn't disclose this fact. I think that's important because it's seemingly a conflict of interest being passed under the auspice of objectivity.

I also think it's important to discuss MightyApp, not for it's merits but for it's implications.

Unfortunately social media doesn't offer a "look at this shit" button along site the like button. I venture to say if they did there'd be a lot fewer likes.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#299

Post by deadite »

gman83 wrote: post #80

I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.

Not the first time, not the last time. We were misogynists when we were criticizing Elizabeth Holmes. It comes with the territory.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#300

Post by aboodman »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #249
elbasti wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month, not $50. At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front. These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.…

Then you'll simply have to wait a few months. They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet. The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.

If that were the case you’d expect them to reply to the several beta test requests this rich/dumb early adopter has sent over the last year+.
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