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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#441

Post by chubot »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #247
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…

> 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 was curious about Mighty and looking forward to their technology. That’s not the problem. The judgment came largely when they announced that it cost up to $600/year. It costs so much that it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new computer if you might need it for…

If people will pay 2x or 10x the price of self-hosting for AWS, then I have no doubt that some people will pay 2x or 10x the price of a laptop for Mighty. (I wouldn't, but I also don't use AWS :) )

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#443

Post by adwn »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #425
gustavo-fring wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree with you that you can get insane mileage from improving the basic UIs of almost everything. It's sad how little attention we give to this stuff. I think that's what Jobs got and his imitators only imitate...a genuine concern for the user. edited by me for content

I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no? We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit…

> I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments.

You're getting downvoted and flagged not because you're saying "factually correct stuff", but because your post is full of incoherent rambling and baseless accusations – before you edited and completely changed it, that is.

And for the record, I'm not a fan of Paul Graham, far from it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#444

Post by gustavo-fring »

adwn wrote: post #443
gustavo-fring wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no? We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit…

> I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. You're getting downvoted and flagged not because you're saying "factually correct stuff", but because your post is full of incoherent rambling and baseless accusations – before you edited and completely changed it, that is. And for the record, I'm not a fan of Paul Graham, f…

What part is baseless? Sorry for the edit, I know that it's too critical for dang and HN readers, but I promise, having been on Reddit since the summer it came out, that it is as accurate as it can be from my perspective.

You call it rambling because you don't agree with it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#445

Post by dannyphantom »

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…

Could perhaps the idea of a thin client inside a thin client not be an idea that could be further developed to be of use one day?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#446

Post by aerosmile »

qshaman wrote: post #328
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he is just hustling his audience And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.

yeah, good point. The saddest part is, I'm confident that people will buy into that "crazy idea" and before you know it, they have a 4B valuation. VCs always win, even when they loose.

Sooo... it seems like you've got it all figured out. But from the bitterness in your voice, it doesn't seem to be the case.

I remember being at a similar point in my life - the success of other people seemed so different from mine that the game definitely felt like it was rigged. And of course it was rigged to some extent given the human nature, but there truly is a way to take advantage of the parts of the game that are a more of a level playing field than anything we've ever experienced since the dawn of humanity. And the first step towards getting there is to be less bitter and more inquisitive. If you think you got the VC industry all figured out but you can't get it to work in your favor, then clearly there's a mismatch in your thinking.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#447

Post by not1ofU »

nottorp wrote: post #184

If this is about Mighty, the bad parts of it aren't technical. - Even with today's concentration of information, there are several independent information sources left... and they want us to access them from a single point of failure? - Who pays for this and how? How do I install my own ad blockers and anti tracking extensions on Mighty? Am I supposed to just trust them that they won't sell my advertising profile? -…

Founders: "Write that down"

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#448

Post by ergot_vacation »

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…

"twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??"

This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#449

Post by pgwhalen »

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…

I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#450

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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