Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#461

Post by russellendicott » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

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…

This reminds me of people who have children very young and by the time they realize in their late 30s how crazy the idea of a 21 year old being the sole example of how a human should behave, the children are now adults. Some things best done with youthful ignorance I suppose.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#462

Post by newbie2020 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:41 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…

Twitter, while poorly run at the moment, is one of the best platforms on the web for spreading information. I hope it never dies

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#463

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

zug_zug wrote: post #325

swayvil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpreted"flying on instruments" as employing an abstraction-layer (insulative, enculturated, solipsistic even) vs direct-observation.

So for some context, "flying on instruments" is considered much better in flight. A fair number of novice pilots kill themselves because they get lost in clouds and get emotional and think they aren't level anymore. The instrument tells them they are level, but they get paranoid and either stall or crash because they don't trust that the machine is more reliable than their emotions, even when it's drilled into them.

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#464

Post by kevinskii » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

I can't speak to Mighty's potential, but this essay is quite good.

As one anecdote in support of its argument, I have an acquaintance who co-founded a startup about 10 years ago. Much like Dropbox's early skeptics, I didn't understand how this business solved any real problem that couldn't be trivially addressed in a multitude of other ways.

I was puzzled as the business continued to grow and open offices around the world, and I was astounded when they were acquired for many multiples of the minimal VC investment that they eventually accepted.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#465

Post by gofreddygo » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

dunkelheit wrote: post #367

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…

People always bring Dropbox to these discussions as an example of a startup that was dismissed by HN but turned out to be huge, but turns out there are examples of the opposite thing happening too! Does anyone remember Color Labs? Go read this thread and marvel at the similarities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463 . A stellar team backed by top VCs who invested (extraordinary at the time) $41M sets out to…

I see this as a pessimism/optimism spectrum. We are on the extreme left if we can reliably predict successes and on the extreme right if we can reliably predict failures.

As we pick a few datapoints (Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb) and we average it out, we are pushed towards the left.

More data we pick (colorlabs for example, and I'm sure many others) we are pushed more towards the right.

Most popular article dealing with VC news, startup promotion, funding news, valuation bragging, acquisition gossip, startup failure reports picks data that push the narrative towards the extremes.

My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we can't predict shit.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#466

Post by gustavo-fring » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

kevinskii wrote: post #464

I can't speak to Mighty's potential, but this essay is quite good. As one anecdote in support of its argument, I have an acquaintance who co-founded a startup about 10 years ago. Much like Dropbox's early skeptics, I didn't understand how this business solved any real problem that couldn't be trivially addressed in a multitude of other ways. I was puzzled as the business continued to grow and open offices around the…

WeWork?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#467

Post by zaphar » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

There is a difference between thinking something is a bad idea because it's hard and thinking something is a bad idea because it's dangerous. Your Stripe example is an example of something that was hard. Mighty is an example of something that is may not actually be hard but is most likely dangerous.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#468

Post by finnthehuman » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

>even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity

PG wants you to think that they're mutually exclusive. They're not, but he has a product to hustle.

The problem (for PG) is that curiosity is not uncritical. Curiosity poses more questions than those in the category "how well does this product work?" Anyone actually curious is going to wonder about the problem space, not just one proposed solution.

Pretty obvious questions include: "how did software get us to the point we're exploring this as a design?" and "could the problem it seeks to solve be addressed in a way that eliminates assumptions about the solution space?", "What are peripheral ramifications of design decisions, and how much do I care?" "Would other approaches solve the same issues, have the same ramifications?" or "Are they synergies to leverage by trying multiple things in concert?"

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#469

Post by nicebyte » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:45 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…

medium isn't amazing - it's probably one of the _worst_ ways of putting writing on the web. pastebin is better than medium.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#470

Post by gustavo-fring » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

dataviz1000 wrote: post #460

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 telli…

I feel like Godwin saying this, but the other side of that coin is that's the same process that Joachim Feist's biography describes Hitler as going through.

You might be a Skywalker, but you don't know which one.