Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#451

Post by nearbuy » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #436

nearbuy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I use uBlock Origin for ad blocking. Maybe ad blockers are the secret.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#452

Post by fillskills » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

Wow, I came here to say that this was possibly Paul's best essay ever. There is so much to learn here. Completely surprised by the negative comments and so many of them :). Specially on an essay that is essentially asking to not being critical right away.

In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions from friends and family. Most of the VCs, friends and family members were critical of my ideas or simply didn't spend the effort to really listen. I see the same thing happening to other founders and startups. Specially fun is meeting VCs who have never built a startup themselves or coming from a non technical background be overly critical and share their strongly held opinions on how my startup could fail. I ran out of fingers counting how many ways.

Ofcourse a startup can fail. Thats why it's not a company yet. There is a saying that it takes many miracles to make a startup a success. Most founders know that already. We are already scared.

Paul is suggesting a different approach. A more positive one. And given the statistics around Paul's and YC's success versus other VCs, you would think that the HN crowd of all people would at-least pay attention.

P.S: My startup was rejected multiple times by YC. So not a fan exactly.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#453

Post by graeme » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

ergot_vacation wrote: post #448

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 wa…

I learned of the true magnitude of the pandemic weeks before the rest of the world, thanks to twitter.

There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or previously.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#454

Post by gustavo-fring » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

fillskills wrote: post #452

Wow, I came here to say that this was possibly Paul's best essay ever. There is so much to learn here. Completely surprised by the negative comments and so many of them :). Specially on an essay that is essentially asking to not being critical right away. In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions from friends and family. Most of the…

Do you not think there is a balance between unalloyed boosterism and lying (the YC way) and not giving you any good feedback?

There are just way more people that I know and trust personally that I think could give positive, but constructive advice. I would believe absolutely nothing coming out of Paul's mouth because he hasn't shown that he's an honest person. He's not disinterested about any of this, but feigns like he is above it.

I think some of us are very sick of the absolutely fake and fraudulent way he and others like him and Musk operate. They do not care about the truth or other people, they care about their own egos and people for whatever reason buy that.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#455

Post by networkimprov » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

Gmail is a better Eudora/Outlook, not a better SMTP.

TMTP is a better SMTP. See link in my profile.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#456

Post by aerosmile » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

ergot_vacation wrote: post #448

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 wa…

Nonsense. There's no such thing as a "gravitational pull" that's all "frosting." If that were to be the case, you would see startups investing in Superbowl ads or sponsoring the Olympics. If it worked, there's enough VC money around to make it happen.

MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#457

Post by frozencell » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #105

weasel_words wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on." Me playing the devils advocate... Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years (enough for them to make some good money). Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage. Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two…

What if the future is that you don't necessarily just buy a machine in the future. What if, when you purchase your machine, it includes a host of features including a could suite of things like; VPN, Cloud Browser, An actual amount of decent cloud storage, portable applications, hosted in your cloud bucket, but accessible from any device (If I have Illustrator, I can just run it from any machine - not just my own. I…

If augmented reality tech works better the necessity of cloud as your machine will become ubiquitous.

However I think we gonna do have RTX in our mobile devices - AR glasses, whatever modern mobile tech - because of decentralization (security/ethics purpose)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#458

Post by theonionknight » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

ergot_vacation wrote: post #448

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 wa…

I also disagree. Twitter has plenty of issues, that I'll grant, but being entirely run on FOMO? Plenty of domain experts in niche areas have twitter accounts, I've been able to learn a ton I otherwise wouldn't have without Twitter's platform.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#459

Post by losteric » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

aa_memon wrote: post #435

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 rea…

Unfortunately, that timeline probably why Mighty will go big - the business model is a trojan horse for a very lucrative global surveillance business, which challenges and likely surpasses current businesses ("social media" and "search engines").

HN and the tech crowd at large is cynical but also naively ethical... missing how ideas can be profitable because we're really thinking in terms of bettering society. Exploitation is where the real money is at.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#460

Post by dataviz1000 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics. You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telling this one story over and over again, a story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem.

The system, lol, I mean our culture and society, is very resilient to change. If it wasn't, it would be a different system. A part of the resilience, the reason it doesn't crash down into chaos and anarchy is because it rejects and ostracizes people with new ideas. It's by design, how it evolved. However, it also needs to evolve and grow and the people who do that have to endure.

Not all people who are on this 'Hero's Journey' are correct. Disney isn't addressing whether the crazy new idea is good or not, although in their media it is always a good idea, which is what Paul Graham is writing about. Their stories are addressing the journey a person endures if they have any crazy new idea that challenges their culture and society, good or bad. Whereas, Paul Graham is looking to quantify signals that a crazy new idea is good, something he should invest in. To which, I'd add asking if the person with a crazy new idea is honest, not only to other people, but more importantly honest to themselves, integrity. If a person can separate delusion from fact except for that one idea, that's a signal.

[0]https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...