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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#651

Post by stavros »

BrandonM wrote: post #643
dang wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but if you read the text as a whole, it's not true that it's haughty. That it sounds haughty when quoted selectively is the internet's fault, not the commenter's. At most he can be accused of (a) not pre-emptively bulletproofing his text against selective quotation, and (b) not knowing the future. And (a) reduces to (b). I take your point about lore, and on that level it's just good fun. p.s. Also, nice use of th…

Hello. I’m honestly loving this conversation. Thanks for engaging seriously about it. It also means a lot, dang, that you took the time to both understand my points and also to counter the narrative, all these years after I commented. As much as I appreciate your thoughtfulness, I really don’t mind the commentary. I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted, and I learned a lot from it, anyway. As I’ve…

I don't know about everyone else, but I always read your comment with the mindset of "this could definitely have been me", not "hah, look at this idiot". I hope most other people read it the same way, because I don't think anyone is 100% correct in their predictions of which product will do well.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#652

Post by nbzso »

meheleventyone wrote: post #154
zitterbewegung wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the best time to prove your product to have a good effect. Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.

> Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation. By that same token the average persons browsing habits are also not the same. Optimising for Chrome power users who have eleventy billion tabs open and run hefty web apps isn’t the normal usecase. My families browsing is mostly taken care of on a 2…

The business model is obvious. Data. The new petrol. The use case is the question. The general trend against personal computing. The naïveté of todays startups and VC in general. But this is nothing new. It will pass, some people will get rich, some will lose money. Do I like it? No. Do I care? No. Why? Because I have learned my life lessons well. If something survives as tech standard, it will be used. So I focus my attention on not being early adopter on any kind of tech.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#653

Post by enraged_camel »

npsimons wrote: post #620
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…

I don't know if I'd say it's Graham's best essay ("Beating the Averages" still ranks as one of my favorites), but reading this most recent essay, I was thinking of Elon Musk. Say what you will about the guy, and there's an argument to be made that Tesla at least is incremental and not a crazy new idea, but Musk co-founded Paypal and is now pushing limits in spaceflight.

>> but Musk co-founded Paypal

I don't think that's correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#654

Post by peterthehacker »

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

Has mighty app announced what pricing will look like? I’m assuming that you couldn’t offer something like this for free.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#655

Post by tshaddox »

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…

The problem I see with this heuristic is that it is going to give false positives for, well, the vast majority of cases where there's a supposedly new idea that actually is just an unnecessary rehash or combination of things that already exist but with a new coat of paint. I don't see how the heuristic can possibly have any predictive power. Look at pretty much every tech startup, every get-rich-quick scheme, every cryptocurrency project, etc. and they'll be making grand claims that their idea is groundbreaking, and technical people are going to say "couldn't you just x?" or "isn't this worse than the existing x?" and those dismissals are actually going to be reasonable and proven valid in the overwhelming majority of cases. Of course, your heuristic will also catch the tiny number of cases that do turn out to be groundbreaking (or at least extremely successful or popular).

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#657

Post by deckard1 »

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…

There were people also defending Theranos and WeWork.

I take all articles and comments here with a huge grain of salt. Especially Paul Graham.

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Way back in 2005. Back when lemonodor was a thing.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#658

Post by no_wizard »

regextegrity wrote: post #597
marcus_holmes wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…

I think your problem is treating the success of the Kardashians as deterministic

Their initial success may not have been, but their sustaining success absolutely must be, or else it would have fizzled out, one way or another. Many celebrities tried to latch on to this style of success as their careers waned more generally, (Jessica Simpson comes to mind, she had a similar enough reality TV show and was a big star for her time), but there was no sustaining power there. Not saying she isn't in her own right successful (she is), but by all given metrics I can think of, the Kardashians are outliers here

How about these examples? Amiga had customers, and was profitable, yet Amiga is no longer a force in the computing, nor is Commodore.

Both had more (arguably) capable operating systems than Windows (until at least Windows 95), yet, no sustaining power.

Look at the sustaining power of iOS and Android, despite other more capable competitors that tried to win market share (Windows Phone, WebOS, and I really wanted WebOS to win, mind you)

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#659

Post by sjg007 »

corybrown wrote: post #617
shard wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other replies to your comment don't seem to address your fundamental point that the Kardashians and their kind are in a different category than other celebrities. Their skills are not acting or singing or sports, but rather generating news to keep themselves in the headlines. I don't really recall this being a category until the start of reality TV, and even then it was short-lived after the shows ended. It wasn'…

Yes, this is something the 45th US president did quite well

Trump is arguably one of the first successful reality TV stars. He basically laid the groundwork.

The Kardashians took up the ball that Paris Hilton dropped.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#660

Post by ZephyrBlu »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #587
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 think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…

> This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works

Just because they understand how to play the game in their current situation, it does not mean they could replicate the process of getting to their current situation.

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