Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#341

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

hardwaregeek wrote: post #235

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…

Maybe this is a terrible stance but if the idea pisses off Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, I wouldn't take that as a bad sign. jblow and Casey are brilliant programmers and I mean them no disrespect, but their philosophies are certainly in the vein of prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient. Unfortunately (or not, depends on your view), programmers do no…

"For all the jblows and muratori's in the world, there's a lot more people who don't care about perf and just want to make cool stuff. For better or worse."

And that it's mostly people who don't care about this on deeper level are why we have such a bloated ecosystem. Layers of bad code stacked on layers of bad code.

If there were more jblows and muratori's in the world, Mighty would have no reason to exist. The web would already be performant. That PaulG is bullish on Mighty strikes me as a pessimistic view and a bet that the underlying problem won't be solved.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#342

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

nomel wrote: post #286

IAmLiterallyAB wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The whole value proposition is that the beefy remote machine is handling the rendering, isn't it? At least half the performance of a web page is wasted on DOM re-shuffling.

Not to mention, it's not like Chrome can run Javascript without looking at the data, and if they're not running Chrome, they'll start getting into compatibility issues.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#343

Post by f430 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

Paul's writing inspired me to start a porn studio. Thank you Paul!

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#344

Post by distances » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

drclau wrote: post #216

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 this may be an American thing. People as successful as PG, Musk, Bezos, Gates etc become demigods, for a majority of people. Cults are created around them. They can never be wrong and so on. As a result, the opposition arises too: the people who dislike these demigods for the same reasons their followers like them. I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked…

> I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now.

I agree there's much less business related worship in Europe. I also worked a couple of years for a successful "startup" (it's a public company so hardly a startup any more), and wouldn't be able to name the founders. I've also been visiting HN for a good while and have no idea who PG is, beyond that he apparently is some boss at YC and likes to write controversial blog posts.

We do get our share of Gates/Bezos/Musk news but lots of it is quite critical, I don't think anyone sees them as role models.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#345

Post by stephc_int13 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:09 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…

We can still create and run programs on our computers. This is more important than you think.

Delegating power/freedom is dangerous, we're already delegating too much.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#346

Post by visarga » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #111

visarga wrote: post #103

This video is relevant. They talk about "openendedness", serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems. There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s

I watched this entire video and it's awesome. Their whole channel is a gold mine of information.

Yes, it's the best channel together with Yannic's channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew

I come every couple of days back for more.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#347

Post by chrisco255 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

elbasti wrote: post #228

chrisco255 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace. I don't buy the argument that performance will always get tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.

Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.

I think the situation is bad because developers are expensive, and really expert devs that know how to optimize app performance are even more expensive. You mention Notion and Slack and other Electron apps. Not to disparage the teams on these projects as they are impressive from a pure UX perspective. But building these complex apps cross-platform native is particularly difficult today. So Electron is used as a shortcut. The usage of Electron allowed Slack and Notion to grow rapidly with a smaller team than they otherwise would were they to try to replicate in Windows, Linux and Mac as well as web... not to mention mobile. And once an app is established and has tons of features, as they both do, doing a rewrite is both expensive and risky. Big rewrites almost always fail, and they divide your precious dev resources even more.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#348

Post by klaudius » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

_ot4t wrote: post #222

This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app. To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app. I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope. It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it nove…

Paul Graham addressed this in his previous essay "How People Get Rich Now":

    The best way to envision what happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on top. Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able to punch right through the middle.

    The edges of the pond were pure tech: companies that actually described themselves as being in the electronics or software business. When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you meant. But now startups are punching right through the middle of the ice crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and TV networks and car companies.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#349

Post by tsimionescu » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

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…

> Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital?

I would say typing is a pretty big one. It is extraordinarily unpleasant when typing lag is anywhere above maybe 50ms,and even worse when it is variable, like it would inevitably be if going over the Internet. It's even worse with mouse movements, where occasional spikes in lag can ruin your day.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#350

Post by JKCalhoun » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:13 PM UTC

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #326

NikolaNovak wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"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?

I think OP meant the general public's familiarity with using masks day to day. I think Japan has had the jump on the US for some time in that regard.