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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

481–490 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is related to programmers tribes. Casey and Jon and from the engineering tribe. The cool stuff tribe is what I call the business oriented tribe. But I think you're missing the point. The technical merits of Mighty is a secondary problem.

Could you expand on what I'm missing? I'd love to hear your analysis (not sarcastic, would love to hear other people's thoughts)

Obviously not the parent commenter, but I’ll give this a shot. I think that Jon and Casey’s (and those of like mind) are not commenting on Mighty as a piece of individual tech, but commenting on the fact that Mighty as a product could even be in a position to exist.

I am most likely to phrase the general position (which I think Jon and Casey would support) put forth as follows: the problem a service like Mighty is trying to solve ONLY exists because the standards and practices of modern software development is fundamentally broken.

You even touch on this in your GP post about devs taking the shortcuts to ‘making something cool’. As the parent post calls it, the cool stuff tribe are those developers who will use available cheat code because they expect that doing so is acceptable.

Your GP post seems to try and counter the Jon and Casey position by saying that because developers just want to make things that they will and there is no concern for any impacts these accumulating decisions may have. I think the ‘you’re missing the point’ comment derives from here. You seem to be saying that Jon and Casey’s position is not palatable to devs because those devs are not concerned with performance and don’t like to be told to consider such aspects of the things they make. But, J&C’s point is that if the standards for developing software were not so broken then the position of the cheat code using devs would be uniformly decried as substandard and unacceptable. In a world where development standards were in line with J&C’s views Mighty would not be in a position to be a viable product because using the web via a native browser accessing properly developed web content would be a pain free and perform any experience.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#482
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…

Good heuristic.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#483
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> powerful I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant. In the non-multiomics world I also make browser based data visualization software (most recently worked on this, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer ). I want to load up 500GB and facet on multiple dimensions…

> I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant. But why? Wouldn't you be better suited writing a native application that would do this better? This seems like you're building a problem for this solution. Most people use a browser for Gmail and to read news. Your example already works really wel…

> But why?

Because cancer is incredibly complicated and requires incredible amounts of data, analysis, and *collaboration*.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#484
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.

No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#485
post #245

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…

Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applicati…

> why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities

Ahem, that ship has long since sailed. We have an entire generation of developers now where all they know is the Web, and industry investments, tooling, etc has all shifted in that direction

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#486

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…

> Paul Graham is indirectly talking about I find it strange that for someone that is a relatively immune from any real scrutiny, and constantly claiming to be a bold thinker, PG is always so coy in his writing. I would find PG's recent stream of ego driven rants much more enjoyable and potentially insightful if he would just say what he's really trying to say. He might be trying to add strength to his arguments by ma…

Agreed.

He is trying to build a stronger case by using an elaborate straw man argument.

Turns out to be quite transparent and poor.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#487
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mighty is such an obviously good idea, and if you've spent decades on the cutting edge of the web you'd understand why. People's demands for more powerful web apps are for all intents and purposes infinite , and it is much more pleasant as a developer to develop once, run anywhere, than to develop an app for low powered clients and a different one for high powered ones.

Define "powerful". I'm rocking a 8 year old laptop. I also use NoScript, which means I'm pretty aware of what code webpages are actually running on my computer. What I've seen is that the things that make it really chug have very little to do with how much actual functionality the website has. Beautiful CSS animations usually aren't too bad, either, even on my old computer. The real performance hogs tend to be things…

Gmail's so bad now that I only use "classic HTML" Gmail in the browser, and native clients (Apple's Mail, for example). I have no idea how they managed to make a relatively simple "web app" so huge and heavy. You could add all of full-fat Gmail's features to "classic HTML" Gmail for very little cost in bundle size and active resource use—though the result might not be an "app" in many folks' opinions, I guess. I just know navigating classic Gmail, with its "bad" full-page loads, is way faster than the "efficient" AJAX-style crap on normal Gmail.

Mobile Gmail's not just heavy—it's broken. Whatever stupid, misguided bullshit they're doing with scrolling makes it register clicks where they weren't intended if I'm not super careful.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#488

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…

You can't post personal attacks like this to HN, regardless of who you're attacking. Perhaps you don't feel that you owe $person better, but you owe this community much better if you want to participate here.

You crossed badly into bannable territory in this thread. I've responded in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066921.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, but I understand it's more convenient to think that.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#490

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…

The GP comment was originally extremely trollish, which was obviously why it got downvoted and flagged. The commenter later replaced it with something completely anodyne, making the original responses seem unreasonable. That's abusive. I've responded in more detail below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066921.
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