551–560 of 808 posts
I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.
This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.
I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.
This is one of the major problems with PG's essays---he frequently assigns the worst possible motives to the people he disagrees with.
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…
That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite a fair bit.
It seems people often have a weird "anti-bias" to believe that everything that goes on to be wildly successful was originally dismissed as ridiculous or impossible. First of all, it's not true. There are plenty of examples of ideas that seemed good to begin with and turned out to be good in practice. So something seeming ridiculous doesn't really count as an important quality in predicting success. Secondly, even if…
Mighty is trying to make your browser experience smoother, faster, whatever (saying nothing of the larger vision). That's obviously a good idea, and it's easy to tell a story about how the founders overcame huge technical hurdles to make it work, and so on.
But then Mighty is also obviously one of the ugliest, most inelegant ideas ever invented, which, in case it fails, can be used to point it how obvious it was.
So, yeah. Not sure there's much to be learnt here?
I think the key statement to realize here is this, > Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day). I don't quite think that crazy…
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Unpopular opinion: the use of "tech" or "high tech" to describe many of today's tech companies is a misnomer. For me, a tech company is a company that leverages advances in applied sciences and mathematics (computer science included) to create new, innovative solutions. While there are certainly companies that are innovating in fundamental technologies and making that a cornerstone of their businesses, the vast major…
I definitely agree, but with one exception: a fair amount of these companies have reached such a scale that they actually have to invent or at least develop new tech in order to run their business. Facebook and Twitter, for example, aren't primarily "tech" companies, but because they operate at such an insane scale, they regularly develop new tech that allows them to continue and grow. So the tech part is more or les…
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…
Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear.
Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.
My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.
You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.
Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.
Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.
I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.
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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…
For blogs in particular - this came after both geocities and livejournal. Folks had the ability to host their own websites with relative ease and to write a post history that other folks could subscribe and comment on. Blogging as a verb and Blogs as a noun really came into their own when folks decided that this sort of journal was a common enough task (and shared hosts like live journal lacked enough features) that…
I remember getting into a few people's web-based online diaries in the late '90s and definitely some folks used geocities to host their journals. I remember using it myself to post whatever nonsense I was doing to share with friends.
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Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has. But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollu…
How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?
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There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting a…
The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs. At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used. And when I use it, I doubt average load is over 25%. So the Mighty model has a 20x utilization advantage by those numbers. That should easily support twice the peak CPU power for me when I need it. Another thing is that the Mighty CPUs will (presumably) be upgraded continuously, while my laptop CPU gets no faster after purchas…