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Comment by slowenough | Hacker News Reader

Yes! I requested an invite and reached out to Suhail on Twitter (I actually interviewed at Mixpanel ~ 18 months ago before I knew anything about MP or MA) about a technical question about MA that I got to thinking about from my experience building BG but didn't hear back from them.

Mixpanel was a cool interview. I remember the question was about data structure for a rank system (it was a heap). The office in SF is beautiful, and the lunchtime catered food, was great.

I guess I'd have more to say about MA if I knew more about it! I did not try it yet and I don't know how they make Chrome faster in the cloud and deliver a seamless broadcast of the screen to the user, but with enough smart people, I'm sure it's possible.

As I said in a previous comment, I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization' in the cloud, in some sense perhaps MA is starting at the beginning of that curve.

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> I definitely think the future is mreo 'app virtualization'

Why would you think that? Where do you see this trend? Their app looks incredibly stupid to me and it is hard to imagine any large number of people that would use it.

Your project aims to provide security, which is an interesting goal, that I think security-conscious people would want to use.

But to virtualize a browser... for performance? For browser apps (which are already "virtualized" desktop apps, of sorts), trading off enormous amounts of bandwidth, for what, cheap RAM sticks that are getting cheaper by the month and faster SSDs for quick swap? For what usage case? That one guy who happens to have a chromebook but needs to run 100 tabs actively? You could just run "unload tab" extension already... Or like just have a desktop that you VNC into... Which all of the people that need this have been doing for decades...

I'm sorry to give you a link but I addressed this here[0]. The TL;DR is computing advances will allocate disproportionately to the big cloud providers, consolidating centralized/server compute which, coupled with 5G and AI, will lead to high-bandwidth experiences streamed to comparatively "thin" devices.

For that being said, I agree that virtualizing apps "right now" is stupid outside a niche unless you have some secret sauce (like Mighty must, otherwise why?), because it's too much overhead.

Preserving resources is why I run headless, and that's why I avoided WebRTC/VNC/video instead of judiciously sent screenshots only on change.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21562899

>consolidating centralized/server compute which, coupled with 5G and AI, will lead to high-bandwidth experiences streamed to comparatively "thin" devices.

this will also give absolutely new meaning to "deplatforming" which will now mean that not only you can't post on some social media website but you can't use any computer at all.

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