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

391–400 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#391

Post by hardwaregeek »

throwkeep wrote: post #341
hardwaregeek wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I mean I'm not saying it's a good thing that Mighty exists or that it might succeed. I'm just saying that we shouldn't take pithy Twitter replies as evidence it'll fail.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#392

Post by hardwaregeek »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #312
hardwaregeek wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is related to programmers tribes. Casey and Jon and from the engineering tribe. The cool stuff tribe is what I call the business oriented tribe. But I think you're missing the point. The technical merits of Mighty is a secondary problem.

Could you expand on what I'm missing? I'd love to hear your analysis (not sarcastic, would love to hear other people's thoughts)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#393

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

>> That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning

I think you overstate your case with the word "often". It is far more often that what they're building never amounts to anything. Even the most successful founders typically bat less than 500

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#394

Post by skeeter2020 »

bko wrote: post #359
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…

From the article, PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously predicated on the person having deep domain expertise. I don't think anyone with deep domain experience in banking would say "Who cares if someone gets my bank account info"

How exactly do we identify these domain experts? This also implies crazy disruption comes from within, which doesn't explain why successful companies are the ones getting disrupted. My only conclusion is that PG wants us to trust him or that his theory is a whole lot of smoke.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#395

Post by mikewarot »

keiferski wrote: post #38

Something I’ve noticed a lot lately is that the people who have crazy new ideas are often the absolute last people that should be communicating them to the world. I’m not sure if it comes from the insularity of academia or just a basic inability to write clearly. My theory is that many domain experts haven’t needed to communicate with a lay audience in decades (if ever) and thus aren’t aware of their own baseline ass…

I think many (but not all) domain experts end up that way because they are so interested in a topic, they've internalized all the jargon and assumptions required to get there. It takes quite a bit of effort (and practice!) to keep the viewpoint of the common person in mind as well.

Feynman loved explaining things, so he had to keep trying to explain them in a manner that the ordinary folk could understand, but he also loved physics, which kept him diving deeper, and playing with it.

Having charisma and knowing what people want, and how to sell was Steve Jobs portion of the game, once the initial technical hurdles were solved. Woz likes to minimize circuits and do clever things, that was his part of the game.

Here on HN, the balance seems to be keeping it focused enough on hacking technology, while still appealing to those who want to make money off of it in yacht loads.

It's all about balance between at least 2 domains.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#396

Post by stephc_int13 »

suhail wrote: post #277
easton wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applicati…

Linux has low market share, Apple won't let you on non-Apple hardware, and Windows has high fees to license in that way. The only path is the browser and most desktop apps are web apps. Feel free to read my post that goes deeper about our thinking: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...

>most desktop apps are web apps.

Not yet.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#397

Post by NikolaNovak »

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?

That's sarcasm but let me try to address the notion behind it, to best of my limited personal understanding; "prevent spread" has multiple factors to it.

My impression, in my locality, is that at beginning of pandemic people focused on notion of using masks to protect themselves (and many though not all governments indicated that's not efficient/recommended).

Then "as time passed and we learned more" focus moved to using masks to protect others (though many individuals, in my circle, still aren't clear on that).

My impression is that we have evolving, and still not necessarily 100% certain evidence/understanding, on how it spreads and what are the most effective measures. It's made more complex because

a) there's no silver bullet; most measures increase your chances to some percentage. This makes discussion between experts and public more difficult as public tends to think in binary terms.

b) While yes there are many public health measures we've known for 100 years (wash hands, have clean water, cook/boil/heat things to sterilize them, sneeze in elbow/Kleenex, wear mask, remove waste, etc etc), not all are equally effective against all vectors. What seems "Common sense" / "Logical" to a layperson like myself, may be more nuanced to an expert with experience.

I mean, for what it's worth, I'm 100% certain my dad, a year in, is still worse off for using a mask because of how he uses it. Many and especially older people around me reuse their masks for days and weeks , touch them constantly, put them under their nose for prolonged periods, don't squeeze/tighten them sufficiently, etc. Even if all that touching doesn't hurt, their belief that they're protected coupled with incorrect usage coupled with likely increase in risky behaviour is a net negative.

People can scream liberty and freedoms and personal responsibility, but I feel public health officials have to look at cold hard facts, of both disease but also people's actual behaviour (as opposed to some ideal non-existent form) and how it actually affects spread rather than how it logically intuitively should.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#399

Post by marvin »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #92
pilingual wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to see a list of world-changing ideas that came out of domain expertise and those that the essay claims could be dismissed because the person was not an expert. AirBnB, which is perhaps pg's favorite company, would never have gotten into Y Combinator without Michael Seibel and the endorsement of the JTV crew. AirBnB simply would not exist today. So I hope people don't read this essay and think, "I'm not a…

I'd argue that for unique companies like AirBnB the founders become domain experts while they're building the company.

I figured that was subtext, and that we're not necessarily talking about what a hotel executive would think.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#400

Post by skeeter2020 »

anotha1 wrote: post #9
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…

Yes, because even when those implausible ideas fail, your more likely to learn something than when experimenting on an existing hypothesis with just a minor change.

Your framing of the question totally ignores opportunity cost. All that time spent working on ultimately failing crazy ideas is time you did not spend working on anything else, either marginal and likely or less risky/crazy.
Post reply on HN