Crazy New Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#531

Post by arduinomancer » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:15 PM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #235

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…

Maybe this is a terrible stance but if the idea pisses off Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, I wouldn't take that as a bad sign. jblow and Casey are brilliant programmers and I mean them no disrespect, but their philosophies are certainly in the vein of prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient. Unfortunately (or not, depends on your view), programmers do no…

> Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient

I don't think this is accurate. I watched a talk with Jonathan Blow recently and he went on for quite a while railing against premature optimization.

https://youtu.be/JjDsP5n2kSM?t=561

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#532

Post by solosoyokaze » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:23 PM UTC

graeme wrote: post #428

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…

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc This may or may not work but there seems to be…

People are dismissive not because of the technology or "you could just do that with a shell script" reasons. They're dismissive because it's security and privacy worst practice to give this data to a third party. Mighty may be an incredible feat of engineering for all I know, but I would tell everyone I know to avoid it because it's a bad idea to hand over your browsing data.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#533

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

tutfbhuf wrote: post #198

Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often on HN.

People ask for the same thing for politics, and for various subjects. So how many different "hide" filters should we create?

Then there's the classification problem. Is post X really about politics? It's not binary.

The only solution that would even approximately work would be to add a block list of domains to peoples' profiles. That way, if you don't want to see anything from paulgraham.com, and I don't want to see anything from HuffPost, we can each do that. But even that only approximately works. I've seen articles posted here that are Twitter comments on Paul Graham articles.

Or, the absolute simplest solution: Skip over the articles that don't interest you. It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#534

Post by aniforprez » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #530

aniforprez wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "but why" question was not pointed at visualizing 1TB of single cell RNA sequence data or collaboration. It was pointed at why you'd want to do it in a browser? Why wouldn't you be able to make links and share them from a native application that they can then open in their application? Maybe I'm missing something in your problem statement but are you downloading all that 1TB in your browser window and changing pa…

This is slightly what I'm thinking, for that particular use case. The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to the client strikes me as slightly unhinged. Even if we assume you can achieve a sustained transfer rate of one gigabit per second, it's going to take over 2 hours to get a terabyte shoved down to the client. I'm guessing, though, that the actual vizualization is nowhere near one terabyte. Data's g…

> The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to the client strikes me as slightly unhinged

Yeah which is why I asked for clarification from them because it seemed really weird to assert that as a positive for the app?

> It would be much faster, and, I think, simpler, to keep the data on a central server, have it generate the visualizations, and push them down to the client.

Yeah I completely agree but in this case, Mighty would have next to no advantage over just loading the visualization on your own machine. Hence, again the confusion about asserting Mighty as a means to an end

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#535

Post by ChrisArchitect » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:31 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…

Dropbox got big because iPhone users were so desperate to be able to share files between people and desktops that they started using it in droves. The desktop users that took it on were simply looking for some more storage and it just took off from there. There was no reason to pay attention to it initially (and still isn't imo) and over in android phone land everyone had no reason to either other than to retrieve files their friends sent them.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#536

Post by themdangrules » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #522

gustavo-fring wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly would we deal with this issue then? I'm sure you've seen where people have accused you of editing Austin Allred's username on his account. Nobody else can do that.If I believe that lambda school or coinbase has been involved in shady business practices, is HN not the place to discuss that? Do you not have a conflict of interest here?

(Although your account is rate-limited because of the quantity of flamewar comments you've posted, I've temporarily turned the rate limit off so you can reply. You don't need to create new accounts, which HN's anti-troll software is rejecting anyhow.) You posted surprisingly vicious smears in this thread, even blaming one person for the death of another. Some of that you edited in an extremely misleading way, so that…

My "smears" involved talking about how Reddit didn't ban the watchpeopledie and greatawakening subreddits until they became a public issue. People were making death threats in the latter, talking about secret messages from Trump. It's preying on mentally ill people. It's wrong.I said that Graham's influence encouraged Swartz to take the actions he did. To believe that the world was his oyster that he could hack without consequence, and that now the conspiracy subreddit thinks that Swartz is some kind of martyr for freedom.I promise you nothing I said is factually incorrect. You consider them smears because they "smear" the people that pay your salary. You do get paid for this, I hope?I accuse Graham of being dishonest because he won't actually directly discuss issues he has, instead he does it this roundabout way of posting essays, essays which you review and you have banning and moderation power over. You don't see the conflict of interest? It's punching you in the face. I consider Musk a liar, because well, he's a liar. I know Sam has interviewed him before.I did edit my post, but that's because I knew it wouldn't fly. You accused me editing it to be neutral of being "abusive". But I was editing it so it would not ideally cause trouble. But it did anyway because damned if you do, damned if you don't. Now you're trying to portray my edits as abusive. Come on, dude.You've never stood up for me, dang, when people are being pedantic and bullying. What do you want me to admit to? That I have a really strong dislike of you and Graham because here you are being manipulative for all to see? Yeah, I did. That you aren't honest with yourself about the "essays" that Graham attacks people in? Yeah, I feel that. That your moderation is arbitrary and selective and doesn't scale? Yeah. I'll admit, I'd never heard of that essay is French excuse, but it's a good one. I'll have to teach it to my kids (re: Uncle dang).This is a new account, not to be "abusive", because I logged out and don't have the password to the old one. I'm not so offended to call your accusations "smears", but please be aware this is a two way street.I wonder if you would have banned Musk when he called an innocent person a pedophile? Hell of a smear.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#537

Post by dang » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

themdangrules wrote: post #536

dang wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Although your account is rate-limited because of the quantity of flamewar comments you've posted, I've temporarily turned the rate limit off so you can reply. You don't need to create new accounts, which HN's anti-troll software is rejecting anyhow.) You posted surprisingly vicious smears in this thread, even blaming one person for the death of another. Some of that you edited in an extremely misleading way, so that…

My "smears" involved talking about how Reddit didn't ban the watchpeopledie and greatawakening subreddits until they became a public issue. People were making death threats in the latter, talking about secret messages from Trump. It's preying on mentally ill people. It's wrong .I said that Graham's influence encouraged Swartz to take the actions he did. To believe that the world was his oyster that he could hack with…

This account is getting caught in HN's anti-abuse software (correctly), but I've let the comment through because I don't want to prevent you from replying. (You may need to edit it to fix the whitespace - sorry, that's our bug.)

I don't want to keep doing this, though, so would you please use your main account? I removed the restriction from it, so it should work.

A few responses: if you say you didn't intend to mislead by editing your comment, I believe you; nothing factual that you've said about pg remotely justifies the abusive language you used; Elon Musk has nothing to do with any of this; if someone was bullying toward you on HN, or you felt they were, that sucks, and I'm sorry we didn't stand up for you. I try to stand up for someone who's being unfairly criticized when I know about it—don't forget that we don't see the overwhelming majority of what gets posted; I consider it a smear when people say awful things about others without justification; it doesn't depend on payment.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#538

Post by blululu » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

rikroots wrote: post #528

The alternative, of course, is when a plausible person expresses an implausible-sounding idea which turns out to be, well, wrong. For instance when Noam Chomsky presented his theory of Universal Grammar[1] which managed to impede and derail the study of linguistics for decades[2]. [1] - This is my own personal opinion supported by no evidence whatsoever. [2] - Again, an outrageously subjective statement without an ou…

Chomsky’s followers are not as powerful as they used to be so you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a linguist. That said, this objection does not directly contradict Graham’s point. There are issues with Chomsky’s theories, but they are non-obvious and we learned a lot along the way. Would it have been reasonable to have dismissed these theories out of hand? Maybe but we false positives and false negatives exist as a trade off, and we would miss things if we try to lower our false positive rate too aggressively.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#539

Post by allenu » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

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 really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect.

the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up

blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling

wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page"

youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#540

Post by dang » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

bmmayer1 wrote: post #493

dvt wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not som…

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.

I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

* described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

Edit: oops I mixed up the dates- Joel's blog post was from 2008. But the point that file sync was widely derided as a consumer product still stands.