Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#321

Post by tsimionescu »

adenta wrote: post #168
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…

Imagine not having to think about cross browser comparability. Customer wants to use internet explorer? Just head to ie.example.com, for a mighty version of a given website.

What happens when Mighty's competitors offer slightly different browser emulations and you now have to build your web app for Mighty and Weakly and Mediocry as well?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#322

Post by john_minsk »

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…

So during their onboarding process they have a survey about your usage patterns. One of the questions is about speed of switching between tabs and one of the answers is "Tabs are switched very fast (I'm sorry, but 1 sec is not fast...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#323

Post by bttrfl »

Unrelated to PG's post... I had no clue what MightyApp is so I went to their website [0]. When I scrolled to "Work without the fan noise" section on the homepage my fan started to work pretty hard. Haven't checked if they intentionally got the fan to work, but it was a nice coincidence.

[0] mightyapp.com

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#324

Post by gonehome »

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…

> “ People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client)”

This is the kind of asymmetric dismissal he’s talking about, and it’s not very good.

Dangerous? We run everything via cloud services and encrypted communication. “Sounds technically ridiculous” - so did probably every modern technological idea when it was new “you put your database in some other company’s servers?!”.

You’re mostly proving PG’s point.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#325

Post by zug_zug »

swayvil wrote: post #12
anotha1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he meant to say we're observing the rules via mental systems(instruments) we developed to "fit in" instead of whatever neuro-typs use.

I interpreted"flying on instruments" as employing an abstraction-layer (insulative, enculturated, solipsistic even) vs direct-observation.

So for some context, "flying on instruments" is considered much better in flight. A fair number of novice pilots kill themselves because they get lost in clouds and get emotional and think they aren't level anymore.

The instrument tells them they are level, but they get paranoid and either stall or crash because they don't trust that the machine is more reliable than their emotions, even when it's drilled into them.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#326

Post by LudwigNagasena »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #276
dunkelheit wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 proba…

> Then as time passed and we learned more

Yeah, lots of time has passed since people started to use masks to prevent a spread of infection. Like, 100 years?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#327

Post by TimPC »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #170
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.

Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!" It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which crashed and burned. Of course some of these ideas - a minority - turned out to be successful. But a little digging shows success was not about…

I don't think most crazy ideas crashing and burning is good enough to disprove the thesis. Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things. I think if you look for marketing you'll find it, so even ideas that win on technology can look like monopolist strong-arming if that's what you're looking for. Also not all ideas that win on technology are the very best the technology could be, they are often the right compromise that's a good deal better than what they competed against. Windows for instance did a lot of strong arming monopolist tactics but was also the clear technical winner on PC for ease of use for much of its existence. I don't think the monopolist tactics would be enough if the average joe found it too hard to use.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#328

Post by qshaman »

SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #306
qshaman wrote: post #237

He is an investor on this “crazy new idea” , I don’t believe him, he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the respect of millions , you don’t see them hyping crappy startups for a few bucks (billions* )…

> he is just hustling his audience And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.

yeah, good point. The saddest part is, I'm confident that people will buy into that "crazy idea" and before you know it, they have a 4B valuation. VCs always win, even when they loose.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#329

Post by stephc_int13 »

intergalplan wrote: post #257
stephc_int13 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. So you think it is a dragnet-surveillance get-acquired-for-our-data play, longer term? That's even worse, if so.

In short, yes. But being acquired is probably only seen as a salvage plan at this stage.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#330

Post by breck »

mumblemumble wrote: post #285
breck wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> powerful

I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant.

In the non-multiomics world I also make browser based data visualization software (most recently worked on this, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer). I want to load up 500GB and facet on multiple dimensions and then share the link and have it all run instantly.

I'm not talking about Gmail and Text editors here. M1s solved that.

Post reply on HN