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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#431

Post by gustavo-fring »

graeme wrote: post #428
geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc This may or may not work but there seems to be…

Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has.

But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're Gandalf.

We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know how I know they fuck around with rankings?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309

This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30 minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of Graham.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196

This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#432

Post by finnthehuman »

klaudius wrote: post #348
_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…

That "pond" metaphor only works if anyone and everyone getting rich anywhere in the world all happen to be doing so at the companies that are popular topics of conversation within the Valley bubble.

Otherwise, what the fuck is he even going on about?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#433

Post by EEMac »

chrisco255 wrote: post #369
TimPC wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very smart professor of mine once thought "They added pictures to hypertext, that's sort of cool I guess." Looking backwards definitely biases you to seeing things you didn't see at the time. Even memories get tinged. But memories are probably the most accurate you can do. I missed bitcoin entirely despite knowing many people who bought as I still don't understand what the appeal is. It doesn't seem efficient to me…

Yeah, and some ideas are just ahead of their time, like the noted pets.com 90s failure contrasted with chewy.com's success today.

Good point!

Ordering pet food over the internet in 1995: crazy moonshot weirdo stuff.

Ordering pet food over the internet in 2021: just another day.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#434

Post by atldev »

> They also vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for new ideas impossibly high.

I enjoy this style of writing. Seemingly simple but packs a lot of meaning (like JoelOnSoftware back in the day).

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#435

Post by aa_memon »

I believe the technology behind Mighty is amazing, the people involved are amazing, the experience for it's users will be amazing.

I believe the underlying reason for HN's reaction to Mighty has almost nothing to do with any of the above. To the contrary, most of us probably feel that Mighty will be a raging success. But we don't actually like that at all. When I reflect on my own thoughts, the reasons my initial reaction is pessimistic are:

1. If Mighty makes badly designed/architected apps "fast", nobody will fix the underlying issues.

2. The internet will be amazing for the folks that can afford to pay $30-$50/month and all others will have to live with a sub-par experience because of #1

3. Some other company will come along and try to subsidize Mighty for all those that couldn't afford it but they'll monetize by advertising and further personal data collection.

4. Further lack of control over core software on our personal computers.

I fear that one day I'll visit a website with a message saying "This website runs best using Mighty".

There were similar sentiments when RSS blogs started moving to medium. Medium is amazing! but at some point medium needed to introduce a 3 item limit.

More and more of the internet which a lot of us remember as this open thing that no one owns is being siloed into privately owned.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#436

Post by chubot »

nearbuy wrote: post #377
wildermuthn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Do you use AdBlock? That makes a huge difference.

I just set up a new computer and I was wondering why Chrome and Firefox was so slow. Then I remembered I hadn't set up AdBlock yet.

I wonder if Mighty has ad blocking? It's an interesting question of which will be better for their business -- blocking or no blocking. (I won't try it because of the obvious privacy problems, because I use a fast computer, and avoid slow web sites. But it probably has an audience.)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#438

Post by nostrademons »

chrisco255 wrote: post #232
tlb wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I've found that you can get surprisingly far in life simply by being willing to fix your mistakes and switch your bets once it becomes apparent you're wrong.

I initially dismissed the WWW as a disorganized mess when I first encountered it in 1994 - I liked Gopher better. By 1997 I had changed my tune and was all-in on learning HTML and CGI and even some of the new technologies like Java applets, RealAudio, and DHTML. (Note that Java and RealAudio were themselves eventually losers, but by then I was all-in on Javascript.) It felt like I had missed the boat in 1997; the dot com boom was in full swing and people were getting rich off much more sophisticated stuff all around me (TBF, I was in high school). But the WWW and Javascript/DHTML remained a lucrative career for 20 years afterwards.

A lot of people, once they take a position on something, dig in and don't change that position for a lifetime, then miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because they dismissed it to begin with. But truly world-changing ideas usually have a lot of room to grow. If you're wrong for 2-3 years and then change your mind, you'll feel really stupid, like you totally missed the boat, but that's nothing compared to the 20-30 years left of growth that the idea might have.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#439

Post by boredtofears »

stingrae wrote: post #413
stephc_int13 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most desktop apps are web apps. Not yet.

for the average user, they are.

I'm not sure who the average user is, but everyone I can think of in my life that fits that description definitely does not have more "web apps as desktop apps" than pure desktop apps. Not by a long shot.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#440

Post by dvt »

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.

This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom.

I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

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