Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#331

Post by robomartin » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

> it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever

This happened to me when I was younger. I had an idea that could best be described as Uber, years before Uber existed. I worked hard on analyzing this idea, preparing all sorts of financials, enrolling in an incubator program to understand how to pitch, getting help everywhere I could.

The incubator held a pitch event that would be attended by a range of people from different professions and judged by a panel of their choosing.

I made my presentation. It went very well. Until one of the five judges essentially took over. Up until then I had received reasonable questions and offered reasonable answers. He chose to be brutally dismissive. I don't know his background but the guy attacked at such a level that no other judge asked any questions. It was truly distressing, to say the least. Once the firing squad treatment ended I said "thank you" and left the auditorium.

I must have been obviously fuming and the attack must have been obviously unfair to some in the audience because an executive from UPS (the shipping company) decided to follow me out and talk to me. After calming me down he said he though my idea was excellent, that it needed refinement and that I should not give up on account of that jerk. Still, I was rattled. Definitely.

I was too young and stupid to process that event for what it was: A jerk being elevated to judging startup ideas who was there to feel superior by hurting people. Again, I was too young to process that and I did not have anyone around to help me get past it. I quit. I abandoned that particular dream. All because of that one jerk.

Now, many years later, I wish I hadn't. I wish I had been equipped with the wisdom to dismiss him for what he was and move on. Again, too young, didn't have enough experience and this guy was at the right place and the right time to destroy me. And that he did.

Thankfully my career moved on. I have nothing to complain about. I sometimes wonder how much of that goes on in the startup scene. I wonder how many great ideas (or potential entrepreneurs) evaporate because of assholes who want to "seem clever".

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#332

Post by mumblemumble » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

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…

It's true, but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here. We tend to focus on the stories of successful founders. To some extent, those are even the only ones we hear about.

Because of that phenomenon, there is absolutely no incompatibility between the existence of disruptive startups, and the opinions of more conservative voices. Similar to how there's no incompatibility between the existence of people who win the lottery, and the opinions of people who don't play the lottery.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#333

Post by breck » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

intergalplan wrote: post #281

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.

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…

Write once run on billions of clients but scale to supercomputering power.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#334

Post by tlb » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:01 PM UTC

marvin wrote: post #271

chrisco255 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

You only have to be right a few times in your life to make your career. Most people are right zero times, and hardly anyone is right 10 times. Von Neumann might have hit 10.

So regretting past mistakes is a big waste of time. Learn from them, but don't let it get to you emotionally. (All easy advice to give, and hard to follow.)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#335

Post by choiway » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

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…

It's funny how this context changes the entire the article. I didn't realize that this was related to Mighty and thought it was a good "call to arms" for domain experts in non-tech industries to disrupt their markets.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#336

Post by stephc_int13 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #296

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.

> 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.

If won't happen overnight, but if they are successful with this tech it simply won't make sense to put friction in front of it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#337

Post by FlyingSnake » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

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…

It’s quite illuminating to see the very forum that PG created is calling him out on his shortcomings. Almost all the recent posts by PG were panned down by HN hivemind and PG seems to take no hints from the wisdom of the HN crowd. The case with MightyApp is the latest in the saga.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#338

Post by the-dude » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

te_chris wrote: post #240

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 isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.

The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's & gov's who want just that : centralized control.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#339

Post by vidarh » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

gwright wrote: post #292

vidarh wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

I don't buy that data is a technical problem. It's a business problem in as much as holding users data hostage is central to a lot of business plan. All of the data in my Google account, for example, fits on a microsd card. Of course I want backups of it, and so I don't want to actually store it on a single microsd card, but the point is that this doesn't require much logic at the core. You can push processing to the edge while using a storage service. But you can push storage services towards the edge too. For a lot of data we already employ near write-once for the core of the data, which is ideally suited for synchronisation schemes over fully connected centralised storage. Your e-mail, and things like Google Photos are good examples.

Consistency is less of a challenge than it might seem. It's a challenge if you're frequently disconnected from the network for extensive periods of time and might access and modify data from multiple disconnected devices in that period (note modify, not augment and create something new, which is easy to accommodate). But supporting that is very different from supporting mostly-local computation.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#340

Post by solosoyokaze » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #324

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 eve…

From a privacy perspective alone, it’s a terrible idea to give a company your browsing data.

That is dangerous and certainly not best practice. The critique is valid.