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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#371

Post by clpwq »

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…

Interesting metric. The underlying principle is:

"No one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

HN just hasn't internalized it quite yet, so we have the counter-indicator.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#372

Post by freeopinion »

bsedlm wrote: post #192
stephc_int13 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple different incarnations because it could be huge. And I mean that in a bad way. Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still own our computers. I can see how it would start in the corporate world.

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.

I think the "architectural principle of the internet" is not what you suggest.

Years ago, I pushed as much work onto the client as possible to reduce the workload on my servers. Now, people complain if you push too much work onto their phones. They want the server to do the heavy lifting so the app can be more responsive on their low-powered mobile client.

"The internet" doesn't define how much weight each end of a connection should bear. It doesn't really even dictate that there are only two ends.

Should a webapp have a braindead REST api with a select, insert, update, delete for each table of the underlying db model and have the client make 1000 nested calls to the server to render the simplest thing? Or should the server api be much more sophisticated so that a single api call can provide all the information required for the render?

There's no one right answer just because "internet".

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#374

Post by joshuamorton »

tlb wrote: post #215
CJefferson wrote: post #6

This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.". I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of the main poin…

The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure. But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big paradigm shift. A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history. Would you have invested time in solving Schrodinger’s weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you have invested time in public key cryptography…

But keep in mind each of those was one of n implausible sounding ideas at the time. Even if you might have been willing, would you have had the resources to put into it, or would they have already been wasted on implausible ideas we don't remember?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#375

Post by shmageggy »

bonoboTP wrote: post #68
antipauline wrote: post #48

Why are you all upvoting this shit? Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact. You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.

Fully agreed. A lazy article all-round. Where are the examples? Where are the pitfalls? Is the insight merely that some wacky ideas turn out to be right sometimes? Yeah, sure so how can we tell in advance? How is this actionable? And his answer is: listen to reasonable domain experts . That phrase is doing some real heavy lifting there...

Pretty much all of his articles are similarly lazy (edit: and usually articles from other top SV folks). I'm always astonished that people upvote his stuff. I've come to think of it as an HN tax: we get a well-moderated forum with otherwise good content and in return we have to scroll past one extra article every month or so.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#376

Post by fighterpilot »

mbesto wrote: post #294
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 aft…

Non-consensus and right is the best framework for making investments, since you need non-consensus in order to get a cheap price. But for merely estimating the probability that something will succeed, consensus (whether positive or negative) is probably slightly predictive in that regard, as you point out w.r.t. survivor bias.

I do put a lot of stock into Paul's essay, though. If someone credible and highly intelligent has some non-consensus opinion, it's a good idea to suspend judgement and really listen to their reasoning.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#377

Post by nearbuy »

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…

> I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.”

I haven't found Chrome slow on my mid-range PC (i5-7500). Or my phone (Pixel 3).

I feel like I must be in some parallel universe to everyone else talking about how slow Chrome is.

Just now, I loaded the first 6 links on Hacker News. 1 didn't load at all due to a server error. The other 5 all loaded in under a second (measured by DOMContentLoaded). I have uBlock Origin enabled (only in Firefox on the phone). Maybe that helps.

I can have 100+ tabs open without slow down if I want to. The bigger problem is I'm less productive with 100 tabs open because... there are 100 tabs open. It's just too cluttered.

I'm willing to admit Mighty might be a good product if people have this problem with slow browsers. I just never found this was an issue. Maybe it's a problem on low-end machines, but how many people have a low-end computer but are willing to pay $50/month for Mighty?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#380

Post by heipei »

valine wrote: post #368
heipei wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost a decent amount of respect for pg due to how he keeps portraying Mighty like it's gonna change how we use the Internet and computers in general. Like, really? I don't mind Mighty as a product, I don't mind their team, their pricing or their slick marketing website. But please, call it what it is: A nice and slick Remote Browsing product, one of multiple ones. Cloudflare recently launched an RBI product with mu…

I was critical of Mighty on twitter, but not because I think it can't succeed. I don't want it to succeed. The whole concept is solving a problem that shouldn't need to be solved, ie running bloated web apps on commodity hardware. Mighty is essentially subsidizing bad software engineering practices and passing that cost onto the end consumer in the form of a monthly subscription service. I don't want to pay $30 a mon…

I believe it will be a successful business by normal measures, but not live up to the hype and vision of its founders and investors. I think there will be market for a tool, especially with enterprises where people are forced to use a particularly slow web-app or need other isolation features.

But for other people? Can you imagine Adobe saying "Here is our product, now please purchase this third-party cloud service to be able to use it." They either improve their software or launch their own server-driven app to capture those $30. That's my take.

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