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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#671

Post by amykyta »

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 there is an analog here to the great man theory vs zeitgeist. Maybe this tech was underwhelming and its massive impact was due to fortuitous timing. So you weren’t wrong about the tech just how it would mix with the spirit of the moment.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#672

Post by dang »

lvs wrote: post #670
dang wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos That's inaccurate. No doubt some responses were like that; "anyone" is an extreme exaggeration. The internet hivemind (which is all of us) leaps from a few data points to anyone , always , everytime , etc., surprisingly seamlessly. Truth be told, one can even substitute "single" for "few" in the previous sentence without too much loss of fidelity…

Holmes was a domain expert, wasn't she? I guess con artists also happen to be domain experts sometimes. Oh no, is it possible your precious founder is confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill?

I don't know if she was or not, nor if that idea would particularly count as crazy. It's a little silly to misread pg as saying that every such idea must be true. Also, why be so mean? It only makes things worse.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#673

Post by Misdicorl »

The central thesis

> Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts.

Is later contradicted by a discussion on the quality of criticism

> The lowest form [of criticism] of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it.

So which is it? Judge an idea by who proposes it or not? I think the essay stands without the tangent on ranking criticism, and it could perhaps be discarded entirely.

But that's too easy, and I think the discussion of criticism is a strong (unintentional) counterpoint to the essay. You have gated the hard work of weighing an idea behind the reputation of the person who proposed it. History all too often labels a genius only in retrospect and in their own time were more likely to be considered fringe or even crackpots.

In short, I think the essay is boiled down to "find the right people to trust/engage/pursue, and especially don't discard their implausible ideas". The tack on of trying to localize to a "smart domain expert" in whatever you're interested in seems.... uninspired. The tack on of being more open to implausible ideas is more interesting. But the fundamental work is unchanged from basically all of human history- "find (or become) the people who are going to be successful/transformative"

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#674

Post by sjg007 »

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…

Chromebooks maybe?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#675

Post by Uehreka »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #535
dunkelheit wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

That’s not how I remember it at all. The first time I heard of Dropbox it was in 2010-ish (1 year before I got an iPhone and several years before iPhones had a usable file system) when folks in my dorm were using it to share music libraries. I was a CS major and had never even heard the word “samba” (yeah, I know) and it seemed super useful for all kinds of things.

I mean, that’s just me, but my understanding was that it didn’t take off on mobile until after it had established a secure foothold on the desktop.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#677

Post by nthj »

valine wrote: post #368
heipei wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost a decent amount of respect for pg due to how he keeps portraying Mighty like it's gonna change how we use the Internet and computers in general. Like, really? I don't mind Mighty as a product, I don't mind their team, their pricing or their slick marketing website. But please, call it what it is: A nice and slick Remote Browsing product, one of multiple ones. Cloudflare recently launched an RBI product with mu…

I was critical of Mighty on twitter, but not because I think it can't succeed. I don't want it to succeed. The whole concept is solving a problem that shouldn't need to be solved, ie running bloated web apps on commodity hardware. Mighty is essentially subsidizing bad software engineering practices and passing that cost onto the end consumer in the form of a monthly subscription service. I don't want to pay $30 a mon…

Adobe could spend a billion dollars on R&D to optimize their web apps and still not get it. It's not an engineering problem, it's a corporate structure problem.

The only way to solve web app performance is to put 5-7 engineers in a room and say "we want it fast. As fast as possible. Get to work."

But no, they have the front end team, who has to run everything by the compliance committee, and the architecture committee, and the API committee, and the back-end team, that has to run everything by all the committees and the front-end team, and they also have to wait on the infrastructure team before they can test any of their stuff, and before you know it 12 weeks have gone by before an engineer has written an actual line of code.

And none of this corporate structure can be fixed because the CEO doesn't understand it, and all the management he hires to fix it are financially incentivized to continue holding their little fiefdoms.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#678

Post by jecel »

arduinomancer wrote: post #531
hardwaregeek wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Premature optimization makes it harder to write fast and efficient code. That is because you guessed where the bottlenecks would be before you had enough information (which is why it was "premature").

The optimizations make the code more brittle and hard to change so that when you reach a position to measure where the bottlenecks are it is too complicated to do the proper optimizations.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#679

Post by sjg007 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #342
nomel wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that could happen client side.

The whole value proposition is that the beefy remote machine is handling the rendering, isn't it? At least half the performance of a web page is wasted on DOM re-shuffling. Not to mention, it's not like Chrome can run Javascript without looking at the data, and if they're not running Chrome, they'll start getting into compatibility issues.

It's endpoint security as well. All browsing goes through Mighty.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#680

Post by anonytrary »

> If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.

I am not an expert, but this sounds related to Gell-Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

If a domain expert suggests a radical idea, by mere statistics, I should treat that radical suggestion with higher confidence than if a non-expert suggested the same idea. For example, a theoretical physicist talking about a flat earth in the context of 2D quantum gravity compared to a fanatic talking about how the earth is flat on YouTube. Of course, I'm not going to immediately dismiss Lee Smolin, but I might dismiss a random YouTuber talking about it because they are not a domain expert. This, I believe is at least somewhat related to Gell-Mann Amnesia, no?

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