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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#711

Post by rsj_hn »

s3r3nity wrote: post #364
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…

Don’t forget my favorite: “Slack is just IRC with clever marketing.”

TBH, I still don't understand what people like about Slack. I'm not trying to insult Slack users, but it seems like the chat-version of an open office floorplan, where everyone is yelling into a crowd, and supposedly the crowd is sitting in front of their screens, scrolling through this noise and occasionally yelling back. I'm surprised employers allow such a productivity hit, let alone pay to have it in their workplace.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#712

Post by activatedgeek »

agalunar wrote: post #555
activatedgeek wrote: post #18

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…

This is the whole "black swan" idea that Nassim Taleb writes about – events that are very rare and unpredictable but completely life-changing. This might be a poor paraphrase, but roughly: We're not very good at reasoning about these sorts of events, and domain experts are not immune. It's easy to believe you have more predictive or explanative power than you actually do, and to expose yourself to unacceptable risk a…

In this particular case, my argument is more along the lines of what this "team of experts" does is a conscious choice throughout.

Black swan events can probably describe a lot of things, but my understanding is that an individual or a team does not really set themselves up for black swan events. It just happens.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#713

Post by activatedgeek »

the_af wrote: post #582
activatedgeek wrote: post #18

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…

> 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 And don't forget Newton!

Oh wow! I totally missed all the alchemy and theology studies he was into.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#714

Post by CraftingLinks »

Is this about his stupid browser again? It's not that the idea is "crazy", people are dismissive because the idea is "perverse". It has a perverse business aspect behind it, this world does not need ontop of the mess modern Internet has become.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#715

Post by prawn »

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

It comes down to two things: consistency of brand, and constantly creating content. Media does the rest. If you think about 45, he almost always wore the same thing, put his name on everything, applied the same style of opinions to everything (either loved or hated something, with limited nuance). Offered a simple opinion on everything.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#716

Post by Mulpze15 »

This essay resonates a lot. I have currently a crazy new idea. I feel I am a domain expert. I am working really hard on it and have good feedback from non tech people in the domain.

Still, so many non experts dismiss my ideas and prototypes. Without asking Why, How, etc. And feeling good about themselves, tapping themselves in the back for "helping me make my ideas better".

I am not talking about other domain experts, those criticisms are super interesting. But being a computer dev and/or being smart in your domain does not make you a domain expert in my domain.

The ratio of supportive people vs incompetent critics is astounding. Even as I have one successful company behind me already. The lonely reference at the end feels right.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#717

Post by [deleted] »

deadite wrote: post #605
dang wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That conflates different cases in a way that strikes me as misleading.

The gist of it is that there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos, that attempted to brush off valid criticism with "you don't like her because she's a woman" or "you want to see the company fail because it's run by a woman". No, actually, I just want to see some data, regardless of who is in charge. Save the "women run the show in SV" rhetoric and flashy cover page photography for Vogue. T…

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#718

Post by tsimionescu »

wildermuthn wrote: post #607
tsimionescu wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? I would say typing is a pretty big one. It is extraordinarily unpleasant when typing lag is anywhere above maybe 50ms,and even worse when it is variable, like it would inevitably be if going over the Internet. It's even worse with mouse movements, where occasional spikes in lag can ruin your day.

This is a solved problem though, with optimistic updates. See Mosh, which does this for the terminal. If you've ever had to run Vim on a high-latency remote connection, it feels like having superpowers.

Sure, but it's not solved in Chrome, is it? Mighty is just a VM running Chrome as far as I understand.

Not to mention, the problem is fundamentally simpler in a terminal, with a very limited range of outputs. The problem of optimistically drawing the result of your input on the screen is much harder when that input could affect any portion of the screen in any way, like it can on a JS-powered web page.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#719

Post by tsimionescu »

sjg007 wrote: post #679
tsimionescu wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Mighty behaves like a full replacement for a modern web browser on my system, it will have to give the web pages I visit (opt-in) access to my GPS, camera, microphone, Bluetooth, battery information, and other peripherals, I sliding all of my mouse and keyboard input. It will have to allow me to upload or download files from the web page. Also, all my tabs are running on the same remote VM, so this only protects other systems, not my banking or JIRA.

Sure, it's the ultimate sandbox for the code itself, it probably protects me perfectly from Meltdown attacks against other programs on my main system, but I don't think that's enough to call it 'endpoint security'.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#720

Post by randomsearch »

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…

> In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App.

This is the subtext I came here for, thanks.

I'm undecided on Mighty, I don't have a strong opinion. I wouldn't consider it "revolutionary", unless perhaps they have a vision way beyond the product they've talked about publicly, but it would seem a bit unfair to use that as a defence against criticism.

One thing I did notice is that a few people involved or indirectly involved with Mighty seem to have a problem with the criticism on HN, which seems really strange to me if you consider yourself an open individual who supports freedom of discussion. You don't need to engage with that criticism directly, but presumably it's useful to be criticised - you'll need answers to those arguments. And if the criticism isn't constructive, well, who cares? There's always some noise.

It feels to me like "oh yes I want people to freely debate ideas and criticise them but just not the ideas I like".

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