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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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471–480 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#471

Post by heipei »

Let's try something fun and imagine Mighty (and similar RBI services) were the only browsers available when finally Google, Microsoft and Mozilla launch their own browsers. Imagine the headlines:

"Run your own browser for free, forever, without having to sign up or put in your credit card!"

"Run your own browser, even when your network connectivity is bad!" -

"Run your own browser to access resources on your corporate intranet that are not available on the Internet".

"Run your own browser, you stay in charge of your data, login credentials and browsing history!"

"Run your own browser which efficiently caches resources locally so you only have to download them once instead of a constant 4K video stream".

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#472

Post by tlogan »

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…

There are two types ideas:

1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.)

2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones)

The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#473

Post by drcongo »

elcapitan wrote: post #429
uglygoblin wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making it all about money but things like reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the game".

Like .. what? Will people spit at him in the streets, if the company fails? Will they come with torches and pitchforks to his house and yell "it was a bad idea to run a browser in the cloud"?

It's interesting that you need any of this spelling out, especially as you're so irate about a turn of phrase, but even the post you're replying to here is politely spelling it out for you. Reputation _is_ money when you're a VC. You appear to be arguing with yourself and making up things to be angry about.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#474

Post by kevinskii »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #466
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?

Heh. Not far off, in my opinion.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#475

Post by [deleted] »

graeme wrote: post #453
ergot_vacation wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#476

Post by lbacaj »

lostcolony wrote: post #284
lbacaj wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set. Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism? Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country. Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got…

>> 'at whatever market rate they/the market set' Really? I would have expected something a bit higher than $20-$25 a dose, given the limited supply (it was pure research at the time), and COVID was decimating the country (so extremely high demand). I mean, a single dose of insulin, requiring no research, and no protective IP, and costing cents to produce, will run you or an insurance company hundreds of dollars. Give…

Appreciate your comment, it’s good learning for me to hear a different opinion.

I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist system too far.

But the main point still stands I think, the response to the above comment and the fact that it is very much those strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to do something or pure good will that lead to these results.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#477

Post by dang »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #444
adwn wrote: post #443

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. 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.

Posting something trollish, then replacing it with reasonable text and saying it was "too critical for dang and HN readers" is an abusive trick. You even smeared someone as being responsible for someone else's death. That's just vicious.

I'm not sure what to do. This is easily a bannable offence. You can't post things to HN like your original comment, which was horrible. Editing in so misleading and nasty a way is also egregious. Even the posts you left up, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066185 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066560 are egregious, and the latter is a shameful personal attack to boot.

On the other hand, I can give you the benefit of the doubt in a couple of ways: everyone goes on tilt sometimes, and most of us post things that we have reason to feel ashamed of later. Since we try to err on the side of giving people second chances, I'm not going to ban you for all of this. But please clean up your act if you want to keep posting to HN. We're trying against the odds to have an internet forum that hovers at least an inch or two above the bottom of the barrel, and behavior like you've contributed here just pushes it all the way down.

HN commenters need to at least try to follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Regardless of what you feel you owe pg or YC or HN mods or me personally, you owe this community much, much better if you're participating in it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#478

Post by ziml77 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #389
diyseguy wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is they lost all credibility with the public for that very obvious deception.

Which deception? I did not indicate one in my post so reference to " that very obvious deception" is not clear to me. note: "Evolving understanding/new facts" or "new/differing priorities" are not the same as "deception" to me. e.g.: * Thinking A and Saying A; then changing mind and Thinking B and Saying B; are not a deception * Saying "Because of X, A"; then later "Because of Y, B", because Y became more important t…

I'm with you. To me, it was pretty clear why they were making recommendations in the way that they did. There was no secret about why they wanted to limit the supply of masks going to the public at the start of the pandemic. They didn't know for sure how it spread, but they did know that the most important places to have masks were the hospitals. You need to be extraordinarily cautious there because every hospital worker that gets sick reduces the number of people available to deal with patients (and adds another patient). There was also concern about face touching if people not used to masks started wearing them, but I only recall seeing that being a concern when it came to sending children to school with masks.

Once the mask supply was able to meet demand and after they were reasonably certain it would protect against the spread of the virus, they adjusted their recommendations accordingly.

None of that is deceptive.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#479

Post by fillskills »

gustavo-fring wrote: post #454
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…

After marriage and running a decent sized org, I learnt that all people are not exactly like me. They are different. In many ways. While some like PG like to support others and shy from confrontation, others like Steve Jobs etc found success by being more direct. Looks like both ways can work. And I am teaching my team at work the same - that there are many paths to a win. This was not easy in the beginning for me personally, I could not appreciate the differences. But I am learning.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#480

Post by NoGravitas »

lbacaj wrote: post #118
antipauline wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring. Indeed. Venture capitalism is still capitalism, with all its abuse and exploitation.

Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course. As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist co…

> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year.

You realize Cuba also produced a vaccine within one year. So did China; though some people consider Dengism a kind of capitalism, so who knows, good for you, maybe.

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