I decided to stop working on Mighty • Hacker News Board

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#71

Post by raverbashing » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

memish wrote: post #22

Good pivot and a humbling reminder for us all. Jonathan Blow on the day this was announced, "Very hard to describe how embarrassing this is for everyone involved in the Web and, sort of, software more generally." https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387094702139142145 > Wait, Paul Graham supported this? Jonathan: Very vocally, to the point of insulting world-class programmers who think it’s dumb (he did not know…

And of course he was right: "My hope is that what makes this temporary is that it will not actually work better than most peoples' laptops."

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387121451187118080

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#72

Post by II2II » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

roflyear wrote: post #21

amadeuspagel wrote: post #7

In May 2021 Paul Graham wrote Crazy New Ideas [1], in which he explained that envy is the only reason people criticize ideas by "reasonable domain experts". This was widely understood at the time to refer to critics of Mighty[2][3]. [1]: http://paulgraham.com/newideas.html [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062713 [3]: https://www.echevarria.io/blog/the-mighty-pushback-isnt-all-...

I know to exist in the VC world you have to buy into insane shit and convince yourself you believe it is the next best thing, but this just seems so ludicrous to me. I don't understand it at all.

We live in a world of stuff that was once viewed as insane shit, yet ended up to be the next best thing. Sometimes the stuff was insane shit at the time, the technology failed because it could not be ready at the time, yet we still ended up with something useful in the long run.

None of this is to say that all of those crazy ideas, or even any given crazy idea, will work out in the long run. The thing is, we cannot know until that time has come and gone.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#73

Post by MomoXenosaga » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

Kwpolska wrote: post #40

nisten wrote: post #29

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only…

> use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.

I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#74

Post by abetusk » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

In my opinion, on the face of it, remote experiences like this, be it gaming or whatever, are not out of the realm of reason. In practice, they tend to not work (again, in my opinion) because the rate at which computers get faster and cheaper far outpaces the infrastructure necessary to make a these "fly by wire" solutions work or have them be adopted.

If Moore's law (or it's equivalent in compute/dollar) really ever does level out, then this will become more attractive. With the cost of compute dropping exponentially, it doesn't seem like this can ever really get a foothold.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#75

Post by paulgb » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:05 PM UTC

yrgulation wrote: post #55

nisten wrote: post #29

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only…

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour.

It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#76

Post by iLoveOncall » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

talhof8 wrote: post #39

I don't think it's M1 that killed it. Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it. Also, people are not too happy about giving away their browser history data to server-side powered browsers. That being said, it's still sad to see startups fail. Hopefully they'll have better luck with their new direction. Fingers crossed!

> Probably high server costs and being a vitamin and not a painkiller killed it.

Being a project with no customer base killed it.

I remember it being discussed 6 months or a year ago on HN and while it was a popular topic, it was not being discussed kindly.

It's something that should have never made it past the stage of cool demo.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#77

Post by liuliu » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:07 PM UTC

aslilac wrote: post #59

modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

yes! this is the same reason I’m glad Stadia died. “cool demo” does not equal “practical business”, and local compute will always be superior to cloud compute.

"always" is not given. But yes, glad more computing on clients. More power to the people.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#78

Post by ayewo » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #6

Can someone explain what Mighty is? There's no context either here or in the linked Twitter thread. After significant searching, I found it: https://www.mightyapp.com Basically Stadia for webpages.

To better understand Mighty and their business model, start with this heavily debated post about them from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26957215

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#79

Post by kaesar14 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #67

modeless wrote: post #41

Looking at tweets like [1] it seems like their original bet was that server single core performance would dramatically outpace client single core performance. Honestly even if that had happened I still don't think their product would have made sense. The hosting cost and bandwidth/latency requirements would still have killed it. The death of this product is a good sign for computing overall. The more of computing tha…

My primary feeling is that I think technical people drastically overestimate the pain that most "normal" people experience when it comes to browser performance. I see it all the time on HN, e.g. people bitching about the amount of RAM Electron apps take and the like. Who cares? The average user certainly doesn't. If anything, 98% of the time when I experience browser performance issues it's network-latency related, o…

100% - people cared about browser performance and usability until Firefox and Chrome solved 99% of the problems users would ever face (tabbing, consistent rendering, security, beauty(!)) and now it’s a market that’s immune to change.

Re: I decided to stop working on Mighty

#80

Post by aniforprez » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 5:12 PM UTC

paulgb wrote: post #75

yrgulation wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.

I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?