Crazy New Ideas | Hacker News Reader

Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

901 pointsrazin774 comments

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 just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page?

Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS?

youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??

Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode.

Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful.

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc

This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.

Yeah but if you found out a quicker and more efficient way to stop people from reading HN, every business would want it because their workers would stop bloviating 4 hours a day for those who know what it is, and the rest of the world would continue on ignorant of it as it always has.

But it's not worth anything. Sometimes you just can't clean up garbage. Graham has too many dishonest people in YC. They're like gollum and want their precious but think they're Gandalf.

We all know HN mods fuck around with rankings, but you know how I know they fuck around with rankings?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062309

This post has 30 upvotes, it got those 30 upvotes in 30 minutes. It's now at the very, very, very bottom of this thread just above all the dead guys because it is critical of Graham.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27046196

This post has over 60 upvotes and is critical but is also completely relevant. It has been "detached" by dang.

How do you determine how many upvotes a post has received?

They're his posts?

Oh, of course. Thanks.

This is not proof of what you think it is. It may be evidence but it isn't proof.

dang detaching off-topic subthreads is the opposite of mods opaquely fucking around with rankings. He explicitly detached the thread, and posted that he had done so. That's a judgement call which you're welcome to disagree with and I'm not going to affirm or second-guess because I don't care much.

As to the other: we don't know how HN sorts comments, but I would be surprised if it was as simple as the highest-valued comments floating to the top. It is far more likely given what we know about moderation goals, that controversial comments are penalized.

So maybe your comment got 50 upvotes and 20 downvotes? The mods don't want us making huge subthreads about stuff which people disagree about, for the most part: they want some of that, but anything which is drawing a lot of karma from both sides is that much more likely to draw low-quality replies.

Again, this isn't a comment about your comment: pretend I didn't read it, I barely did in fact.

But it certainly doesn't prove that dang put his thumb on the scale. The mods here seem to be pretty transparent about how everything works, without leaking actual formulas which are subject to change and could provide ammunition with which to game the system.

> dang detaching off-topic subthreads is the opposite of mods opaquely fucking around with rankings. He explicitly detached the thread, and posted that he had done so. That's a judgement call which you're welcome to disagree with and I'm not going to affirm or second-guess because I don't care much.

Yeah, you don't care about it much, it wasn't you that it happened to. I don't care that much either. I do care about this easily abused behavior, though.

> As to the other: we don't know how HN sorts comments, but I would be surprised if it was as simple as the highest-valued comments floating to the top. It is far more likely given what we know about moderation goals, that controversial comments are penalized.

I know, as do anyone that has experienced it, that they are penalized. If you say sane but controversial things around here you get downvoted, hidden, silenced. This sounds melodramatic, but think about what you are saying - HN is looking for boring, safe, everyone agrees commentary.

> So maybe your comment got 50 upvotes and 20 downvotes? The mods don't want us making huge subthreads about stuff which people disagree about, for the most part: they want some of that, but anything which is drawing a lot of karma from both sides is that much more likely to draw low-quality replies.

> Again, this isn't a comment about your comment: pretend I didn't read it, I barely did in fact.

With all due respect, I know. I can tell.

> But it certainly doesn't prove that dang put his thumb on the scale. The mods here seem to be pretty transparent about how everything works, without leaking actual formulas which are subject to change and could provide ammunition with which to game the system.

Yeah that's how abuse works, that's how loopholes work. Rules for me and not for you. Rules that are arbitrarily applied.

That's what I've never gotten about HN. You guys are so smart, but it's like you skipped politics 101.

> 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.

This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom.

I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

When Drew Houston first posted Dropbox on HN, BrandonM had the top comment that doubted its viability/usefulness as a product. It's been the topic of a lot of discussion since then, including between the two themselves.

>I have a few qualms with this app:

>1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account...

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Sorry, I can't resist... I just noticed from the URL that my comment was the 9,224th item ever on Hacker News. Hacker News was a very different place back then. YC wasn't well known at all. Hell, the iPhone hadn't been released yet. We still had to walk uphill both ways to get to school and back.

Few seem to consider that contextual difference. Poor word choice aside for a moment, "quite trivially" meant something very different in 2007 than it has come to mean today.

Other users have provided the link, but my heart sinks a little every time I see this brought up, especially when the commenter is singled out by name. People forget that this is a real person. He also happens to be a great HN contributor, and has been for many years.

I realize it's internet fun to point neon arrows at people seeming outrageously wrong in the past, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

When BrandonM wrote "I have a few qualms with this app", he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application. (Note the title of Drew's post: "My YC App"). He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed. We should be so lucky for all responses to "crazy new ideas" to be that decent. This community would be healthier, and actually the current thread is a standout example of how far from true it is.

The criticisms he was raising turned out to be a non-issue in hindsight, but were on point in 2007, when the idea of file synchronization was widely derided as a solution-in-search-of-a-problem which only technical users would ever care about, users who (as the comment pointed out) could already roll their own solutions. The idea had recently been publicly mocked in a famous blog post*, so it was on people's minds as the prime example of an idea only technical users would ever care about—and even YC funded Dropbox because they believed in Drew, not the idea.

* described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275

Edit: oops I mixed up the dates- Joel's blog post was from 2008. But the point that file sync was widely derided as a consumer product still stands.

>, but the truth is that people aren't reading that comment accurately and there's a huge dose of hindsight fallacy here.

I appreciate your defense of that comment as it made me re-read it as charitably as possible.

That said, I think you're still overlooking some of the reasons that cause the eyerolling of it that's separate from hindsight bias.

First was the "quite trivially" phrase in the comment. That type of verbiage automatically triggers the perception of haughtiness. Imagine if someone did a Show HN of a new webcam security doorbell and a commenter said, ", you can already build such a system yourself _quite trivially_ by getting some components from DigiKey and soldering them yourself". Can you see how that sounds really dismissive?

Second, it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users like BrandonM who can string together curlftpfs with CVS/SVN.

So for him to avoid that comment required stepping outside himself to see the perspective of non-techies. He could still dismiss Dropbox... but for different reasons related to not meeting needs of the end user mass market rather than purely base an opinion off his personal skillset.

Even with all of that, it's not a great example of what pg used to call a middlebrow dismissal, especially when there are so many millions of worse examples. "Quite trivially" sounds terrible out of context, but (a) he scoped it to Linux users, (b) it's clear from the downstream reply that he was speaking from experience, and (c) he immediately agreed with Drew that even that solution had drawbacks and thanked him for the technical correction. That's the behavior of someone making good conversation, not someone being haughty. A haughty dismisser would have seized the opportunity to up the snark.

> it was overlooking the idea that the YC app(lication)s are not intended to create products for Linux power users

I don't think that's an accurate reading. His Linux point was only one of three, and the other two were about the mass market. Given that he had implemented the Linux solution himself, I think the fact that he led with that point was probably more out of geeky exuberance than overlooking non-technical users.

It seems to me that in the context of 2007 all three of those points could easily have popped up in Dropbox's YC interview. Don't forget that back then, YC would sometimes fund a startup even though they didn't much believe in the idea (Airbnb famously so), because of the personal impression made by the founders. That's still the case today, and it was the case back then as well :)

> That's the behavior of _someone_ making good conversation, not someone being haughty.

I meant to focus on the text's tone sounding haughty rather than accuse the person being haughty.

Let me try to explain another way to emphasize the text aspect: that particular sentence in isolation is what is quoted on the internet outside of HN:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+suc...

https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22you+can+already+build+such+...

The "quite trivially" may only be scoped to one bullet point and may be unfairly weighted when looking at his followup thoughtful conversation -- but it also elevated it legendary HN lore.

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 the word 'haughty'. We need those good English words.

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 stated since[1], I was an undergrad when I made those comments. I know how much I’ve grown since then. It feels like someone else said them, and everyone is talking about “not me” when they remark about it today.

I definitely appreciate the love, though. Thanks!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661824

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.

>I’m long past being frustrated about being misinterpreted,

Thanks for adding to the discussion. While dang was trying to defend your character, I was emphasizing the peculiar wordsmithing of your text being an enduring magnet for memes. Are you aware of snowclones[1]? Here's a recent snowclone example[2] from HN: For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by installing an x11vnc server on your host, setting up a SSH tunnel to a remote server which forwards the host's VNC port, [...]

Here's my theory on the phenomenon and why your old comment keeps getting cited...

Your 1st bullet point's text about ftp was so poetic that it hijaacks the mind and it overshadows the rest of your comment(s). It's like people think Bruce Springsteen's song "Born in the USA" is a celebration of patriotism when actually, the total lyrics are about disposable veterans from the Vietnam War. It's the "born in the USA" chorus that more people remember and not the nuanced verses of sadness.

If you had written about ftp in a more hesitating way with more qualifiers...e.g. "Maybe I'm reading the Dropbox application incorrectly but it seems like it duplicates what ftp already does [...] blah blah blah" -- your skepticism would have been forgotten because the text would have been boring and safe.

But your text of, "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account," -- combined with obscure tools unknown to the masses like "curlftpfs/SVN/CVS" -- was irresistibly quotable. That unintentionally became your "born in the USA" chorus.

Even before your 2007 comment, there was already a "too many techies are out-of-touch about the needs of non-techies" criticism in the air and the internet punching bag to express it was the famous 2001 Slashdot comment[3] about the iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

So the HN collective found a new example of "out of touch techies" in the "famous Dropbox comment". But only the 1st bullet point and it doesn't care about the rest of your thoughtful nuanced conversation and replies. It's unfair but I'm glad to hear you've made peace with it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230416

[3] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

Haha, thanks for pointing me to that comment. It’s especially hilarious to me because I wrote a blog post nearly 10 years ago about exactly how to configure SSH+VNC like that[1][2]. It was even featured in the now-defunct Hacker Monthly.

I appreciate your theorizing on its staying power. It’s interesting to think about why a particular phrase sticks with people.

[1] http://shebang.mintern.net/tips-for-remote-unix-work-ssh-scr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364025

> pretty much the definition of hindsight bias

This. The antidote is to revisit examples of "couldn't you just X" where X indeed prevailed. There are even instances where superseding technology was actually better, but it was too late to replace X.

My favorite example is Iridium (and the whole satellite internet industry so far, let's see what will happen with Starlink). It's one thing to remove friction, but only if the new cost structure is still favorable.

Disruption doesn't happen because new tech is better/cooler, it happens when it introduces competitive advantage.

It’s not hindsight bias if you think it’s face smackingly obvious at the time.

I agree there’s still a conundrum here, why is something obviously one way to some very smart people like BrandonM while the exact opposite seems just as obvious to other people. I suspect it’s more about what people value than what they know technically.

> but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

Well, not exactly. There's plenty of people who have been successful at, frankly horrible things.

I count this kind of "not your computer, ours" rent seeking change as "bad if successful".

I don't really buy this. A lot of complaints are about the privacy of the whole ordeal. That's kind of moot considering Google has access to all of my banking emails, Dropbox has access to all of my invoices, Apple has access to all of my photos, and Equifax already leaked my SSN years ago.

Most of my life already doesn't happen on my personal locked-down device.

Fwiw, unlike the examples above, we have permission to your data (if you give it to us) but we don't own or control any of it. We don't store it elsewhere. We don't sell it to the highest bidder. We don't mine it for some other purpose.

Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's our only business model.

I think we can improve privacy and security for most users who have trouble managing it. For instance, we can patch Chrome zero-days (many have occurred this year) a lot faster for everyone.

What we offer today is a faster way to use applications that do own your data so you can be much more productive and hopefully enable a new set of applications never before possible.

We help improve decentralization of the web over duopolies like Apple/Windows. We make the browser more powerful, not less.

We improve the market share of Linux as a consumer computing OS as it underlies our tech.

In time, we might be open to people owning their own hardware and running Mighty on it but I think a lot of people will prefer we make it "just work" for now. I don't view either world as mutually exclusive.

If there's an opportunity to research making things trustless, we'll work on that.

I dont have an issue with this specific case, more the industry shift to rent seeking. Cars have subscriptions. Next your thin client hardware needs to pay rent to work. It is a slippery slope and claiming virtue doesnt decrease the gradient.

Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple.

The rest feels like classic SV/startup window dressing to get the job done.

>I dont have an issue with this specific case, more the industry shift to rent seeking. Cars have subscriptions. Next your thin client hardware needs to pay rent to work.

I think that's just called "switching to a subscription model". "Rent seeking" has a different meaning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

> "Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple."

That's factually incorrect that, that always happens and I am not sure why you think we're grouped into that without any evidence or a basis of reasoning.

i have a hard time classifying mighty as 'rent seeking' - they are providing you computational resources in return for money, not seeking some sort of gatekeeping money by virtue of owning a scarce or critical-path resource.

Agreed, my concern is about the trajectory of the product offerings more broadly. Embrace-extend-rent seems a common theme. I hope the case of Mighty has better intentions. Perhaps I am too cynical.

I wonder if the pitch deck had the same value proposition we are getting or if it said "lets own consumer virtual desktop starting with Chrome". Both are valid.

Feels like a bait and switch.

"twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??"

This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.

I learned of the true magnitude of the pandemic weeks before the rest of the world, thanks to twitter.

There are a lot of bad things about it but it genuinely surfaces information you could not have got otherwise or previously.

Nonsense. There's no such thing as a "gravitational pull" that's all "frosting." If that were to be the case, you would see startups investing in Superbowl ads or sponsoring the Olympics. If it worked, there's enough VC money around to make it happen.

MAU metrics highly depend on retention, and the retention highly depends on PMF. If Twitter didn't have PMF, it wouldn't have retained such a huge global userbase.

I also disagree. Twitter has plenty of issues, that I'll grant, but being entirely run on FOMO? Plenty of domain experts in niche areas have twitter accounts, I've been able to learn a ton I otherwise wouldn't have without Twitter's platform.

Twitter, while poorly run at the moment, is one of the best platforms on the web for spreading information. I hope it never dies

Twitter deserves a full time CEO

I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.

No would you post a link? It does fit with the general idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Note the date of course - this is well before Dropbox was a household name.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

There are two types ideas:

1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.)

2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones)

The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.

Good heuristic.

It would only be a good heuristic if the same thing isn't being said about actual bad, failed ideas. But I'm pretty sure you can find similar "can't you just" remarks for those.

That's just the realization that opinions of technical people don't really matter that much. They don't add up to a critical mass that puts enough buck in the game to make it bang.

Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean or it's a bust.

In other words, “we were promised flying cars but ...” You might as well celebrate stock buybacks.

Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.

> twitter: couldn't you just not?

This is, actually, still true :)

I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect.

the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up

blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling

wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page"

youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"

I agree. These are examples of things I initially dismissed, in part because I thought didn’t see how they addressed the minor factors that were holding back a sudden and widespread adoption. And yeah, I think there is a technical element to this and I do recall technical people puzzled about how popular web pages in a browser had become (seeing it as an unusually limited interface).

Not all though, for all I know this was an unusual perspective even among technically savvy people. I suppose the people who saw the possibility and could act in it were both technical but capable of seeing things outside that narrow lense.

Also remember I wrote these as examples of things I reasoned incorrectly about!

EDIT - re-reading my comment above, I see I did write "technical people" rather than "me". I'm sure I'm not at all alone in having this tendency, but I'm definitely not ready to defend the idea that this is a universal or even common tendency among technical people. Perhaps I should have written "when I find myself thinking "couldn't you just""...

For blogs in particular - this came after both geocities and livejournal. Folks had the ability to host their own websites with relative ease and to write a post history that other folks could subscribe and comment on. Blogging as a verb and Blogs as a noun really came into their own when folks decided that this sort of journal was a common enough task (and shared hosts like live journal lacked enough features) that software to easily throw together a stream of articles had common value.

That is, at least, if my knowledge of the series of events is off. Livejournal existing is about when I got into the web but that predated blogs (and particularly bloggers in the context of investigative journalism) becoming a term by quite a fair bit.

I think you're right about the timeline. I do remember livejournal being around before Blogger, which is around when "blogging" became a term.

I remember getting into a few people's web-based online diaries in the late '90s and definitely some folks used geocities to host their journals. I remember using it myself to post whatever nonsense I was doing to share with friends.

You could use the finger command on users and read their .plan files even earlier than that. Quake developers were famous for those. https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_19...

Thanks, I was looking for this comment. Most of the examples he gave just seem like absolute straw men to me:

> The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

> Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

It was pretty obviously apparent with wikis that letting anyone update the page, from the browser, was a cool technological achievement. I was well into my tech career at this point and don't remember anyone reacting to wikis this way.

> youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

I mean, these are getting ridiculous. When YouTube came out video sharing was a major PITA, a pain that hit most technical people, too.

I just don't buy GP's premise because all of the examples seem like something only "Tech Support Guy" from those old SNL skits would say.

> > The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

> Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

I don't get why we're even talking about it. The original example is nonsense. The web literally does what that example says - pushes byte streams to computers that use a rendering tool to view them.

Arguably, what made the web popular wasn't HTTP per se. The two core ingredients were, in my opinion, DNS infrastructure and that "rendering tool", AKA. web browser. Together, they made it easy to publish files and let random people access them. Arguably, the third leg would be the <A> tag in early HTML, which kept everything glued together while it expanded exponentially.

>youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Hosting videos back then required plugins on the part of the viewer, which was something we were all cautioned not to download because of security.... Youtube was the first site that broke through the ice and had enough content to start taking advantage of network effects, and didn't blow that lead.

A somewhat HN-famous example of the "couldn't you..." sentiment would be this from the debut of Dropbox ("couldn't you just use ftp"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days.

I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.

There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure.

[1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.

This seems related to Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary.

Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear.

Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.

My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.

You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.

Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.

Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.

I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.

I think the big thing about these innovations was that the nay-sayers didn't expect how big a demand there would be for specific implementations of them after the network effect kicks in. Social media? Technically it is very simple. But now everyone is on it so the dominant platforms are making billions with advertising.

We didn't need a social media platform. We needed a social media platform where most of the interesting people (including our friends) are on.

I just wish social media platforms had adviasarial integration like telephone companies were forced to do.

Let the platforms compete on UX and data handling policies.

That way, the interesting people on one platform aren't gated away from the interesting people on others.

I mean I want a social media product with only my friends on it that filters out all the crap.

To summarize: one can't predict user adoption. If they can, I'd encourage them to start the required companies in order to capture it.

In many cases what people failed to anticipate was simply how successful online advertising would prove to be. Many of these ideas were just ways to lose money when they were first implemented.

This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say.

While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible.

I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

The problem is that success in Silicon Valley means how much money you can make from a product and not about how the product improves the lives of the users in a balanced and morally acceptable way. Is it really successful to disregard user privacy and capitalize on their lack of knowledge, or to build unsustainable tech on top of already unsustainable tech rather then fixing the real issues.

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-market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from mass-market ideas.

Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market

The celebrity market (or showbiz in general) is poised to be disrupted by YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as the gatekeepers (production and distribution houses) have been effectively thrown off from their perch.

Exactly and the pandemic basically disrupted the traditional celebrity info market.. you can't go to a party or restaurant etc... no photo ops.

Luck also seems to plays a big role in the programming lang market.

Yet the behavior of lang maintainers seems to have an outpaced influence over that luck: individual programmers actively chose Guido over Larry or Matz. In turn, Armin's framework looks about in line popularity-wise with DHH's at present, but the trend seems clear. We trust Node because Ryan rage quit. Oracle has cast a shadow over Java, and their TIOBE descent is finally manifesting. K&R may never be unseated, e.g. A Deepness in the Sky. Anyone who's seen Anders in person has witnessed his presence.

I wouldn't discount the effects of actual human characteristics and behavior, even if choices end up mostly based on fashion and a fascination with infamy. One can influence their own luck.

I agree.

I would like to add luck to the theatrical world too.

I look at movie stars, and it seems like a very exclusive club.

If you can read lines, have a bit of charisma, and get that ever so lucky break--it almost seems like you have to work at getting kicked out, and even if you gain a bunch of weight, and fry your liver, and kidneys with drugs; in many cases the actor just gets more opportunities.

It seems like a couple hundred actors get most of the jobs.

As to the Kardiasians I believe it was luck, and a good product. I can't believe I wrote that last sentence. I never thought I would put "good", and "Kardasians" in the same sentence.

I kinda get the success of the Kardasians though. The ladies look multiracial. They are of all ages. For so long the fair skinned starlet was the desirable one.

Now--it's changing, and I like the change.

I'm still baffled by the younger one's financial success in makeup, and what not. She is worth over a billion dollars. MBA programs should be studying her business moves.

Selling to women is an art. If you can crack the mystery you can be a billionaire too? I remember hearing someone say selling to men is easy. Give them a product they like, and they will come back. She said selling to women is more nuanced. I always have that advice in the back of my mind.

I have a very pretty sister who moved to Los Angeles. She skipped college. She felt it was a waste of time, and she was probally right? She used networking to get jobs. She then decided to make, and sell shoes. In a few years, she had multiple stores, and is very successful. (Sadly we are not close. I will always love her, but the greed got mixed in family stuff. I guess that happens a lot?)

I remember looking at her first prototypes, and didn't get it at all. I wished her well though. She got a tiny bit of financial help.

She didn't need any advice from me though. She knew what would sell. She literally started off making the shoes in her garage, with minimal materials, and tools. I was always encouraging. I knew fashion was way out of my wheel house though.

(I really don't have a point? I rambled all over the place? Looking at my writing I hope nothing is considered sexist.)

> I'm still baffled by the younger one's financial success in makeup, and what not. She is worth over a billion dollars. MBA programs should be studying her business moves.

This is not what luck looks like. This is what a good plan being executed perfectly looks like.

Your sister sounds like someone who understood her market well, worked out a plan to tackle it, and executed it perfectly.

I wish I understood a market well enough to create that kind of plan. I don't feel like I understand myself well enough to market to me, let alone anyone else.

It’s surfing. The wave is luck, but the successful ones know how to get up on the board and ride it.

The problem with luck is that people who are extremely skilled at something seem to usually get inordinately lucky. Part of skill involves setting yourself up to get lucky.

To some degree, problems of luck are also problems of volume: if you are president #45 and you have a 5% chance at creating a viral tweet, tweet 50 times and you will get one.

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)

I find going from 0 to 1 much more interesting than 1 to n though, since 0 to 1 seems far less understood.

As do I, what I'm addressing here is a question of "do they have some kind of special staying power" which is in my mind, an absolute yes.

Its understanding how they managed that that you can work your back to 0, I think. There is value in that

> their sustaining success absolutely must be

Isnt that just survivorship bias?

If it's non deterministic, if these people are just extraordinarily lucky, then OK. But that means it's all just luck, just being in the right place and knowing the right people at the right time. And I don't have that kind of luck so I should stay away from mass-market ideas. Or probably, any ideas at all because there's nothing special about the mass-market, and it's all "just luck".

There are millions of beautiful people out there trying to get rich and famous. The Kardashians have managed to do that very successfully, and consistently, for years. I don't think that's luck. That doesn't look like luck. I think they knew exactly what they were doing, had a good plan, and executed it perfectly. And a major component of that was understanding their market perfectly.

Considering there are now many many more of those type of people on youtube and instagram, I would not call it undeterministic. Sure, there is many luck and several variables involved; not many can do the same, especially not on that scale. But the general process of how it works is today known enough for other people succedding too.

Pornography for women works completely differently than pornography for men.

Can you expand on the idea that the Kardashians produce pornography for women? Sounds like it could explain why I don't get it!

I don't know if I would call it "pornography for women" but in my experience women tend to be more interested in social dynamics. e.g. Who said what to whom and why, X is fighting with Y because of Z and J is siding X instead of K, and so on.

These shows tend to be about groups of characters engaging in what you might call social or political struggles. Tensions, drama, conflict, emotions, and so on. Reality shows like the Kardashians are a distillation of these aspects and create something that is sweet like sugar to people who are disposed to enjoy that flavor.

I think a lot of people judge reality TV shows without watching them and kind of look down on them. If you don't have the taste for something it's easy to look down on it. For example, lots of people look down on Star Trek, which I loved when I was younger and still do. If I had to answer why I liked Star Trek, it's because I like to imagine myself as Captain Picard and figure out what I would do if I were faced with the given moral dilemma of the week. If my fantasy preferences tended towards "How would I handle the handsome jerk my sister is dating while I myself am a beautiful billionaire?" then I would watch different shows.

I think your comment is more sophisticated and useful than my “pornography for women”. What I was getting at in particular was that fantasies of luxury, arbitrary amounts of money, clothes, homes, vacations, and being listened to, resonate with many women on a fundamental level, and this may be entwined with their sexuality. Whether this is a form of pornography or not is complex. The points about politics above are well made. I have always thought that these endless “social dynamic” controversies represents a real time estimation, by the women involved, of their mating attractiveness, which partially governs all the chrome junk they’re enveloped in, but I am certainly a very amateur analyst. Two more thoughts, one from my late mother and one from me. 1. There are no books in these houses and no abstract concepts. 2. It is useful to contrast the details here with men’s obsession with sports.

The parent is actually talking about a far larger category that existed commercially in a studied way long before the Kardashians, it's simply: sex sells.

Madonna knew it in the 1980s. Britney or Jessica Simpson knew it in the 1990s. Paris Hilton knew it in the 2000s. The Kardashians have known it the past 15 years. Hugh Hefner knew it 70 years ago. Every model of consequence knows it.

The Kardashians are extraordinarily talented at selling sexuality. They know how to package it. They know how to market it. They intentionally replicated the system that worked so well for Kim, on to Kylie Jenner as she came of age.

Once you gain an initial position via your sexuality, leverage it into further gains. Sex rarely fails to sell.

And the parent is also correct in that it mostly (not exclusively) works for women, regardless of the downvotes attempting to change human nature and reality. A few male celebrities have benefitted tremendously from the effect, including Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey (how many famous male models can you name from the past 20-30 years though?).

There are literally millions of beautiful people trying to make a living out of being beautiful. I don't believe that "being beautiful" or "sex sells" adequately explains the success of any of the people you mention.

And the target market for the Kardashians (I think, as far as I understand it) is not the people who find them sexually attractive. This is different from Marilyn Monroe, who mostly appealed to straight men, and for whom "sex sells" would be a perfect description. The Kardashian's market don't want to have sex with the Kardashians. They want to be the Kardashians (I think).

Yes, I had that thought too. My wife is an artistic, leftist resister type with a background in ballet, dance, and education. She watches the Kardashians, all the Housewives, the Shahs, all that crap. She doesn’t aspire to this either. She buys all her clothes in thrift shops! So it is extremely complex.

Millions of woman try to get famous based on looks and sexuality alone. They (almost) all fail. So I think it is more complicated than that.

This is rather insulting and dismissive. There's a lot of empty media content aimed primarily at men that's no more ultimately meaningful than celeb gossip that's hardly "pornography." Sports are the most obvious. A lot of empty action/comedy shows would also fit the bill, I think.

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't until Paris Hilton that I was really aware of how powerful this category can be, and others have figured out the formula as well, leading to the Kardashians and other influencers. The successful ones have the social intelligence to know how and what kind of outrageous or salacious news to generate to attract people who like to feel envy, indignation, and a sense of superiority to famous people to watch their antics, and thus feed the hype machine that keeps them in the spotlight and allows them to reap the rewards of that spotlight.

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.

This is a solid point about Donald Trump. I owned the Trump board game as a kid. (Released in 1989! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump:_The_Game) We thought he was such a goof, but he was definitely a social media star before social media networks.

Kim Kardashian was Paris Hilton's intern and appeared on Paris Hilton's show. I don't think that was accidental.

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.

He was always slightly outrageous which the left wing media had a job dealing with in a way that did not benefit him. He'd say something a bit bad which was then on the cover of all the newspapers when it would have been politically better to ignore him.

I think you're giving them a lot more credit than is due. they are merely puppets poorly acting out situations scripted by people who do understand how to market their products

That's no different than actors and singers, who act out situations scripted by their publicists and managers who understand how to market their products. Regardless, we are talking about the kind of product that's being sold, which is fundamentally different than those sold by actors and singers.

actors and singers are contributing to the arts, plus they require at least an iota of talent, which is more than can be attributed to those vapid degenerates

Yes, and this is exactly Marcus Holmes's point.

But they are billionaires and we are not

I don't think this category is entirely new. Drama and gossip always was a prominent topic among people, even before global media was a think. But what shifted over time was the quality of content that was allowed to surface in media. In the 80s and 90s cheap trash-content became a think, to feed the growing demand for content, and to lower the costs of production, but also because people learned more about the culture of modern media. And with this movement, many types of content which were former just local stuff that people did privatly, became professionalised for TV and pushed to the whole world. So it really was just a matter of time till even parasocialicer made their appearence.

And with parasocialicer I mean the type of people who's main effect is to be someone who'se existence people can enjoy, without delivering anything actually skillfull outside of social interaction. Similar to cat- or dog-content.

Certainly there's nothing new under the sun. The difference is the degree in which these people are prominent in media and the zeitgeist, to the point where they make a comfortable living from this work.

You should clearly not enter a market you do not understand, because you'll probably lead you to bring a knife to a gunfight.

But your conclusion about mass-market is too broad, this is not a single thing and can really depend on your definition and perspective.

Apple devices can be considered mass-market or niche.

the phrase "famous for being famous" sums it up nicely. it's a feedback loop.

With respect, I believe anyone who uses the term "famous for being famous" isn’t working very hard to understand the subject. It is roughly like saying a programming language is successful because it uses semicolons.

I think it makes sense, a lot of celebrities that I know, I only happen to know them because someone else talked about them, not because they have some kind of talent that I was looking for.

I sort of see where you're going with this, but a large part of the equation missing (at least in your outline; not to suggest you're ignorant of it) is 1) startup capital (they were already wealthy) and 2) a powerful and influential network. Their skill was leveraging these things, of course, so I'm not saying their success was inevitable, but even having those opportunities in place for Kris, Kim etc. to build on puts them far ahead of most people trying to enter the market. Maybe before trying to figure out how to appeal to the mass-market like a Kardashian, try figuring out how to appeal to a small but dynastically wealthy and famous market like a Kardashian ;)

> 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.

The same is true in science.

The same is also true in business (this is one root cause for the "hard-to-place smell" that surrounds the HBS case study approach).

There's actually a lot of "Kardashian-like" people out there these days.

People literally throw money at girls talking to a camera, taking photos of themselves and their lives and/or playing games.

I still don't quite understand why :D

People, not girls. There are actually more men than woman with that livestyle. Unless you are also consider Instragram-Influencers who are selling beauty-products. But those usally don't play games.

>> my "Kardashian problem"

You need lots of empathy for sociopaths if your aim is to understand the why and the how of their successes. The fact you don't understand them makes me think you're a good person. The world would be a much better place if people weren't trying to copy them.

Thanks :)

I don't want to copy them, per se. I respect them for their business acumen, and I would like to be that good at marketing. But as you say, sociopaths. I would do different things with the power that that kind of money brings.

It's a soap opera played out as though it's real life and on social media, and soap operas have been popular since the 1930s.

IMHO the reality and social media aspects of it get all the attention and people focus on those and think it's something entirely new and unprecedented, but really they're just force multipliers. Soap + reality and social media. That's it. The things that actual make it engaging are exactly the same as those in any soap, but even soaps are powerful enough that they can bend some people's reality.

I once saw an interview with the star of a popular soap here in the UK. He played a despicable character that manipulated and betrayed the people about him, especially women. He said that at a certain point when his character was particularly nefarious he had to avoid going out in public. Quite frequently he would be walking down the street and a woman (it was always a woman) would start screaming and shouting at him, telling him how horrible he was, and he should be ashamed of himself. Some of them even threw things at him. An actor in a TV show, it wasn't even a reality show, this was long before they even started. (Dirty Den in East Enders).

A lot of people consuming this stuff, even the explicitly fictional dramas, have a lot of problems distinguishing between reality and fantasy. They will sometimes even acknowledge they know it's just a show, while also directing abuse at the actors. Deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and real life, as reality shows do, and the brew becomes even more viscerally engaging.

Given this, things like qAnon become a lot more understandable. There are a _lot_ of people who are just out and out fantasists. If there are enough to make actors hide at home, that means there are some on almost every street in every city or town in the world all the time.

Edit: https://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/eastenders/a27088763/soap-v...

The Kardashians have just perfected the Seinfeldian idea that people want to watch people doing whatever.

I met the owner of the garage on Oak Tree road in Edison, NJ several years back. Hia garage was part of Paris Hilton episode where she works with customers visiting for car repair. What he said shocked me. He said we are fools thinking that Paris Hilton is stupid. The joke is on us. He said she was paid a ten figure amount to be part of the show and she very well knew how the market worked.

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____"

Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies

u r talking about the small changes that can be disruptive. This is different than the crazy ideas mentioned in the article. Ideas like the earth is round or that a large mass can bend light.

I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!

This is just cargo culting the Dropbox "you could just use FTP" comment.

This argument have been attempted already, you can also take Juicero, "can you just squeeze the bad yourself?" , and was indeed a dumb idea. This "crazy idea" is not removing any friction to regular people, regular people browse youtube, or instagram, tik tok, etc... this is targeted to techies, look at the homepage, people who are pointing out the "crazy new idea" , is neither crazy, new, or good at all, are the target of this product. Just because some successful companies had bad feedback in the beginning, doesn't imply "you missed it" or their product will become the next thing. The HN crowd of today is also not the same as the crowd back then(dropbox founder comment fiesta...).

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” - Dropbox

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I knew this would show up again. It's a comment that will live in infamy.

I love how what ended up happening was "Or you can pay Dropbox to not have to do any of this".

I don't want to manage my backups or I guess file syncs between machines.

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).

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.

That is a great list. I also felt the same about many of those technologies, but I never thought to put it so succinctly -- as you have!

For years, I never understood the point of Twitter. It felt like nano-blogging -- Why not just use a regular blog platform?. Later, I realised it is a single global open forum of "random" chats that are interlinked via @person and #idea links. So if a bunch of random people who don't know each other are nano-blogging about #idea, it's like they are part of a chat room called #idea. And, of course, you can cross-post to multiple @people and #ideas in same Tweet. And there is no gate-keeping: You don't need to ask to join an #idea and I don't think it is possible to block other people referencing your @name. Other social media platforms seem to integrate with the @people and #idea thing -- no sure if that actually came from Twitter.

Technology and concept aside, I still think most of Twitter is garbage content. /Once in a while/, I see a Twitter thread from an economist or hedge fund manager that is referenced by FT Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/). And to be fair: A lot of interesting discussion about racial injustice in last five years originated as complaints or short stories on Twitter... then blew-up in more traditional media. Else... it seems like noise.

Related to your list: One thing I have never understood: Brand names create social media precense, like Coca Cola on Facebook. And people subscribe. Why? That is so weird. Coca Cola... really? I dunno... maybe they have fun photos on their Instagram. I assumed social media was for human-to-human contact, not business-to-human contact. I was wrong! Some of those brand names have massive social media following. Campbell's Soup! Tide Detergent!

Canva - couldn't you just use photoshop? This isn't a dig at Canva, but praise.

All of those examples boil down to making technology more accessible for the millions or billions of less technologically savvy people.

Indeed, anyone with the knowledge would overlook a lot of these. They're not revolutionary on a technical or individual level, but they are on a social level.

Another perspective; blogs and wikis are two use-cases of essentially the same interaction. The different designs guide and inspire people how to use them. Then, they discover that the use-cases are beneficial.

In some ways, all of social media consist of apps tailored to specific use-cases that haven't been new for decades, but they "invite" normal people to use them.

Great observation! It feels to me kind of like the 'blub' problem [0], in that these are both cases where technical folks misjudge the utility of something new (to them) because it merely makes it easy to do something, instead of making it possible to do something. And maybe that 'something' they either don't know they want, or don't realize how often they would use it if it were available, or don't appreciate that others want.

Edit: It might also be an example of the curse of knowledge: what seems trivial to an expert may be a showstopper for a layperson. An expert suffering the curse would implicitly assume that everyone else has the same knowledge sufficient to make convoluted method seem trivial.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

There are incremental/larger/easier improvements and then there are populism "improvements." The one tends to amplify the other. Facebook was incrementally better than Myspace at first, and then became more popular and much better. Myspace was much better than Friendster. It's an evolutionary model where some improvements are made, some features are lost, and specialization meanders.

I think the transition point is when incremental improvements amplify themselves to the point where they are both way more popular and way more efficient than what came before.

Except for twitter, all the alternatives you wrote doesn't even fit the criteria of "couldn't you.." because it is not replacing the given product MVPs. What do you mean by update a page. Blog and wiki just "update the page" more than most other form of sites.

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 VCs, friends and family members were critical of my ideas or simply didn't spend the effort to really listen. I see the same thing happening to other founders and startups. Specially fun is meeting VCs who have never built a startup themselves or coming from a non technical background be overly critical and share their strongly held opinions on how my startup could fail. I ran out of fingers counting how many ways.

Ofcourse a startup can fail. Thats why it's not a company yet. There is a saying that it takes many miracles to make a startup a success. Most founders know that already. We are already scared.

Paul is suggesting a different approach. A more positive one. And given the statistics around Paul's and YC's success versus other VCs, you would think that the HN crowd of all people would at-least pay attention.

P.S: My startup was rejected multiple times by YC. So not a fan exactly.

Do you not think there is a balance between unalloyed boosterism and lying (the YC way) and not giving you any good feedback?

There are just way more people that I know and trust personally that I think could give positive, but constructive advice. I would believe absolutely nothing coming out of Paul's mouth because he hasn't shown that he's an honest person. He's not disinterested about any of this, but feigns like he is above it.

I think some of us are very sick of the absolutely fake and fraudulent way he and others like him and Musk operate. They do not care about the truth or other people, they care about their own egos and people for whatever reason buy that.

After marriage and running a decent sized org, I learnt that all people are not exactly like me. They are different. In many ways. While some like PG like to support others and shy from confrontation, others like Steve Jobs etc found success by being more direct. Looks like both ways can work. And I am teaching my team at work the same - that there are many paths to a win. This was not easy in the beginning for me personally, I could not appreciate the differences. But I am learning.

You can't post personal attacks like this to HN, regardless of who you're attacking. Perhaps you don't feel that you owe $person better, but you owe this community much better if you want to participate here.

You crossed badly into bannable territory in this thread. I've responded in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27066921.

How exactly would we deal with this issue then? I'm sure you've seen where people have accused you of editing Austin Allred's username on his account. Nobody else can do that.If I believe that lambda school or coinbase has been involved in shady business practices, is HN not the place to discuss that? Do you not have a conflict of interest here?

(Although your account is rate-limited because of the quantity of flamewar comments you've posted, I've temporarily turned the rate limit off so you can reply. You don't need to create new accounts, which HN's anti-troll software is rejecting anyhow.)

You posted surprisingly vicious smears in this thread, even blaming one person for the death of another. Some of that you edited in an extremely misleading way, so that the community's original response seemed unreasonable, when in fact it had been appropriate. Even in the above comment, which is still up, you've accused someone of being fake, fraudulent, and dishonest, with zero basis. When asked not to do any of this, you haven't even acknowledged what you did—instead you're changing the subject dramatically. Isn't that a little distasteful?

> I'm sure you've seen where people have accused you

Since you saw the thread where people were bringing it up, I'm surprised you didn't see the explanations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959559

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26959675

> is HN not the place to discuss that

People discuss companies, including YC-funded companies, at great length on HN all the time. That's not the issue here. The issue is that you've been breaking the site guidelines very badly, and we need you to stop.

> Do you not have a conflict of interest

I've written extensively about that over the years. If you or anyone is interested, some of those past explanations can be found at the following links:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The short version is that we don't moderate HN to suppress criticism of YC or YC startups, because that would be (a) wrong, (b) futile, and (c) dumb. We moderate HN to try to keep it interesting and in line with the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) — that's all. I'd never claim to be immune from bias (who could?) but I can tell you what principles we try to apply and can at least claim to have years' worth of practice at them.

There's nothing secret here, by the way, in the sense that anyone can get an answer to any question about how HN works (other than technical details about anti-abuse software, and that only because they would stop working if they weren't secret). Trying to run an online community any other way would be inefficient and self-defeating. We try to never do anything that isn't defensible to the community, because the community's good will is the only asset HN has.

I completely understand how easy it is for unexplained details to compound into weird and sinister pictures. That's a fact of human life that we all have to deal with, especially online. But really the cleanest and freshest way to deal with it is to check what's actually happening, when that option is available. HN, even though it has millions of users, is still small enough that that option is actually available. Why not take advantage of that?

My "smears" involved talking about how Reddit didn't ban the watchpeopledie and greatawakening subreddits until they became a public issue. People were making death threats in the latter, talking about secret messages from Trump. It's preying on mentally ill people. It's wrong.I said that Graham's influence encouraged Swartz to take the actions he did. To believe that the world was his oyster that he could hack without consequence, and that now the conspiracy subreddit thinks that Swartz is some kind of martyr for freedom.I promise you nothing I said is factually incorrect. You consider them smears because they "smear" the people that pay your salary. You do get paid for this, I hope?I accuse Graham of being dishonest because he won't actually directly discuss issues he has, instead he does it this roundabout way of posting essays, essays which you review and you have banning and moderation power over. You don't see the conflict of interest? It's punching you in the face. I consider Musk a liar, because well, he's a liar. I know Sam has interviewed him before.I did edit my post, but that's because I knew it wouldn't fly. You accused me editing it to be neutral of being "abusive". But I was editing it so it would not ideally cause trouble. But it did anyway because damned if you do, damned if you don't. Now you're trying to portray my edits as abusive. Come on, dude.You've never stood up for me, dang, when people are being pedantic and bullying. What do you want me to admit to? That I have a really strong dislike of you and Graham because here you are being manipulative for all to see? Yeah, I did. That you aren't honest with yourself about the "essays" that Graham attacks people in? Yeah, I feel that. That your moderation is arbitrary and selective and doesn't scale? Yeah. I'll admit, I'd never heard of that essay is French excuse, but it's a good one. I'll have to teach it to my kids (re: Uncle dang).This is a new account, not to be "abusive", because I logged out and don't have the password to the old one. I'm not so offended to call your accusations "smears", but please be aware this is a two way street.I wonder if you would have banned Musk when he called an innocent person a pedophile? Hell of a smear.

This account is getting caught in HN's anti-abuse software (correctly), but I've let the comment through because I don't want to prevent you from replying. (You may need to edit it to fix the whitespace - sorry, that's our bug.)

I don't want to keep doing this, though, so would you please use your main account? I removed the restriction from it, so it should work.

A few responses: if you say you didn't intend to mislead by editing your comment, I believe you; nothing factual that you've said about pg remotely justifies the abusive language you used; Elon Musk has nothing to do with any of this; if someone was bullying toward you on HN, or you felt they were, that sucks, and I'm sorry we didn't stand up for you. I try to stand up for someone who's being unfairly criticized when I know about it—don't forget that we don't see the overwhelming majority of what gets posted; I consider it a smear when people say awful things about others without justification; it doesn't depend on payment.

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

I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom.

However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest. This kind of black and white thinking is pervasive in PG essays, and always lead to a cute conclusion. You can have two domain experts that disagree. You can have an idea that spans multiple domains, and there are no (or few) experts in all of them. Maybe the Crazy New Idea seems brilliant to experts in one domain, but only because they don't grasp the others.

That two domain experts disagree on a radical idea is irrelevant, if the one presenting the radical idea turns out to be right. There are no points given out for merely participating.

This happens all the time. And the most interesting ideas are rejected by almost everyone, except the tiny minority that happens to be positioned to understand the change. So you can’t make predictions by tallying up expert votes either.

Likewise, one of the best, most valuable, things that Albert Einstein did was to attack quantum mechanics in every way he could.

> I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding.

Criticism is the crucible in which crazy new ideas are forged into crazy viable ideas.

> However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.

Let's be honest: in this day and age "the rest" are far too vocal and need to STFU on things which they have no knowledge. Sure, domain experts can disagree - let them be heard, but the know-nothings should be given zero attention.

Except for children, who often ask the best questions.

Asking innocent questions is okay, good even. Five whys comes to mind.

But stating opinion as fact or "just asking questions"[0] is not conducive to understanding.

[0] - https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

>I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom.

It depends upon the level of attack. Outright dismissal without consideration compared to critique. Is the intent to destroy the idea so it goes away or to test it for flaws? That's done by the suggestion given to ask questions. Instead of saying "this is stupid", figure out why your think it is stupid and turn it into a question. Such a question is a soft attack, one that may be met with an explanation without needing for direct conflict, or which may be met with a 'I haven't considered that, let me think on it' or a 'That's one of the flaws I'm still working on'.

>However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.

While the presentation did present this as an overly binary classification, I don't think the intention (that I perceived) is wrong. Some people have more experience in certain things, and given we are all mortals with limited time, we need to have some way to decide how much attention we give ideas and using relative expertise in domains seems a decent filter. This does not have to be perfect, because the result is not accepting the idea but instead not outright rejecting the idea. In cases where the idea still is mistaken it will still be revealed under critique. It is a test to determine what should be given the chance to be critiqued given limited time and resources.

It would lead to experts overlooking ideas from sources who don't have expertise, but I think that is acceptable for two reasons. First, there are already a flood of ideas so applying a filter that lets more through will still lead to ideas not being considered, but this time due to a lack of time and resources. Second, this is all relative so a good idea from a non-expert would still pass the filter for someone who is slightly more of an expert. If they find it passes their critique it now is able to pass filters of people who are more of experts in their fields. Good ideas can still bubble up (we just need to take care that they are correctly attributed).

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 understand, it seems so obvious to me. Dropbox started as a better FTP, Coinbase is a better Bitcoin wallet, Gmail is a better SMTP, Mighty is a better Chrome. All of these products are meant for the masses because the core technologies/protocols are too complicated or restrictive to directly interact with.

> Mighty is a better Chrome

yes, it's better in the sense that the privacy issues are even better; well, worse in the viewpoint of the user, but since when VCs cared about it?

And other than that I don't even think Mighty is better that Chrome, because it wouldn't work if you have a bad internet connection speed or if the connection drops

Mighty isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.

The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's & gov's who want just that : centralized control.

Yes. Unless they can figure out how to be free to consumers.

Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applications was that they didn't require an install and were lighter than their desktop counterparts, and now that isn't true, so can't we ditch them?

Why doesn't Heroku simply give you a linux instance to do whatever you want like you'd do with EC2? Because it's easier for end users to deal with something that has a higher level of abstraction. Mighty is addressing an existing problem with a complex technology that seems simple on the surface.

Linux has low market share, Apple won't let you on non-Apple hardware, and Windows has high fees to license in that way.

The only path is the browser and most desktop apps are web apps.

Feel free to read my post that goes deeper about our thinking: https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...

>most desktop apps are web apps.

Not yet.

for the average user, they are.

I'm not sure who the average user is, but everyone I can think of in my life that fits that description definitely does not have more "web apps as desktop apps" than pure desktop apps. Not by a long shot.

very valuable is it possible to get beta access @suhail

Microsoft keeps cutting the cost of licensing Windows for VDI though. Microsoft 365 E3 costs $32 a month (when you're already probably paying them $15-20 per month, not a bad increase) and includes Windows 10 Enterprise licensing for VDI. $12 + compute (which we could presume is $30-ish per month for a VM similar to the one Mighty ships? depending on if you buy the servers vs go to a cloud provider, etc), and it seems like you could get there for the cost Mighty is charging for Chrome. You'd need a sysadmin to set it all up, so a service like Mighty where you could just show it you have the correct licenses and get a beefy VM turned up would be really nice (Microsoft is working on something, but who knows when it'll be out).

I read your article, and the technology sounds interesting. I also understand you pivoted from offering a simple VDI service, presumably because of licensing (and of course, everything I just said goes out the window if Microsoft decides to alter the deal). But for the worker who doesn't 100% live in web apps (I'm thinking of the legions of accountants who have 8GB of RAM tied up in Excel all day long) and needs more than their garbage corporate machine can handle, I don't see this being enough.

Maybe I'm wrong, and they'll hold me up as the next "Dropbox is just FTP with extra steps!" person. I would be fine with that. But maybe, just maybe, once the streaming tech is proven (it looks like it is, honestly), reconsider?

Maybe they’ll do that someday. Bootstrap to there, and then switch around and save us all the hassle of writing webapps.

That would make this comment thread look more hilarious than «less space than a Nomad, no wireless».

> why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities

Ahem, that ship has long since sailed. We have an entire generation of developers now where all they know is the Web, and industry investments, tooling, etc has all shifted in that direction

This is so common in SV, you are just being arrogant and salty in general, because people are showing how dumb, privacy unfriendly, and dangerous this product is, it has nothing to do with envy. Using Dropbox as an example is even worst, thats like saying "X celebrity is famous and smoke weed, then if I smoke weed, I will be famous". PG is clearly biased and he is just trying to get a return on his investment, thats all, and if he needs to hype this product to make money he will. People are not dummies, if the product is meant for the general public and not the HN crowd, then start a Google Ads campaign, or get in the Tonight Show or something.

This is so pitch-perfect an example of what pg used to call a middlebrow dismissal (which we reworked as 'shallow dismissal' on HN), upgraded to 2020-21 rage levels, that I'm not sure one could improve upon it as a parody. Is there any note it doesn't hit?

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

It's not. This is survivorship bias from the infamous stories about Dropbox, Coinbase, etc. There's plenty of "Show HNs" of HNr's criticizing companies that go nowhere. Including one of my own!

What you're referring to is effectively called "non consensus and right"[0]. The problem with this concept is that it can only be verified after the idea is deemed right or wrong.

https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...

Non-consensus and right is the best framework for making investments, since you need non-consensus in order to get a cheap price. But for merely estimating the probability that something will succeed, consensus (whether positive or negative) is probably slightly predictive in that regard, as you point out w.r.t. survivor bias.

I do put a lot of stock into Paul's essay, though. If someone credible and highly intelligent has some non-consensus opinion, it's a good idea to suspend judgement and really listen to their reasoning.

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.

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 build a location enabled photo-sharing app. VCs tout it as "the next Google". Most of HN is pretty critical with some voices advocating caution and saying "let's not be so dismissive, maybe there is something more to it". Well, it turned out there was nothing more to it.

So no, being dismissed by HN does not automatically mean that your idea is good and you will be successful.

I am really surprised that you didn't choose the more obvious line of reasoning, which would be to bring up examples of companies that PG predicted to be breakout successes and then they failed. PG marveled about Instacart and Flexport well before anyone else, including myself (I know members of the founding teams in both companies very well, and think very highly of them... but even so, I didn't see their companies as the type of breakout successes that they became until PG made his case for them). The constant hate against PG is really starting to get tiring, especially when you see such sloppy reasoning. Why judge his reasoning based on what other VCs thought? Saying PG = VC industry is a really stunningly poor argument IMO.

Yep, you can actually go through the list of companies YC has funded on the website and most of them are out of business today (as you’d expect based on the stats on VC backed ventures). Of course, nobody talks about those.

I am struggling to understand what you're trying to say. Technically what you said is perfectly correct, but in a "the sun goes up in the morning and comes down in the evening" kind of a way. I doubt there are many people on Hacker News who don't realize that most VC backed ventures fail.

What would have been more insightful is a conversation around relative benchmarks. For example, "do YC companies fail at a higher rate than the cohort of equally funded companies?" (hint: no).

Or perhaps, if you're trying to criticize the VC industry, perhaps ask, "if a VC put in money in every YC company since the beginning of YC, what would their IRR be today?" (hint: massive).

I'm trying to say: 'Of course, nobody talks about those.'

Since it's soooo obvious that we should all hide our failures and glorify our successes without questioning this practice (I did say 'of course'), I understand how you missed the point.

I see this as a pessimism/optimism spectrum. We are on the extreme left if we can reliably predict successes and on the extreme right if we can reliably predict failures.

As we pick a few datapoints (Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb) and we average it out, we are pushed towards the left.

More data we pick (colorlabs for example, and I'm sure many others) we are pushed more towards the right.

Most popular article dealing with VC news, startup promotion, funding news, valuation bragging, acquisition gossip, startup failure reports picks data that push the narrative towards the extremes.

My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we can't predict shit.

> My instinct says we are squarely around the center where we can't predict shit

Completely agree. There are a lot of people in this post trying to rationalize their own biased opinion on what predicts success or failure though.

To expand on your model, I think our ability to predict success and our ability to predict failure are separate things not on a continuum with each other but orthogonal metrics. We need to count false positives and false negatives here.

I predict that HN is no better at predicting success than average. It might be better than average at predicting failure but given the distribution that might not be that hard: if you dismiss every idea AND most ideas fail, then you always look like you are getting it right with a few occasional wrongs. Think about it in the inverse: if most startups succeeded spectacularly but a few failed miserably and you always were bullish on all startups, people would just say that you are almost always right.

The only real difference between predicting success and the result being failure and the opposite is that in this world success is unbounded (your valuation isn’t constrained since you can create a whole new market segment), but failure is always bounded. Therefore getting a success wrong sucks more than getting a failure wrong: you could have made a lot of money by correctly predicting a unicorn.

> I predict that HN is no better at predicting success than average

I can't fully agree on this. In a fair game (coin toss) your chances are just that, average. In a game where your experience, network and wealth can influence the outcome, things can be different. This is common in the enterprise market.

In the consumer market (which isn't more fair, but just works differently), that model fails miserably, that's where we start seeing the failures of the predictions and bets made.

What I see happening, is the vested parties (VC, Founders, investors) trying to cherry pick data points (from both markets), and then bragging about how they are good at predicting in both markets, but when you add in more data you see, that is not the case.

The essay is really just self serving to keep stoking the YC starmaking machinery (see lyrics to 'Free Man in Paris' by Joni Mitchell). Keep people dreaming and some of the crazy ideas will hit.

People often forget that even Apple (or might not know if young) was not wildly successful and almost went bankrupt (or close to that) and had to be bailed out by Microsoft.

Also forgotten is that the quality of the execution matters a great deal. Dropbox or Coinbase w/o good execution and attention to details would not be where they are today. Ditto Color Labs with great execution would not work necessarily.

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 files their friends sent them.

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.

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.

Interesting metric. The underlying principle is:

"No one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

HN just hasn't internalized it quite yet, so we have the counter-indicator.

> PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase

Those are not needing defense. Those are quite mundane business.

Dropbox for one, everyone thinks it's useful. The controversial part is whether or not it's a good business. Turns out Dropbox is not so great a business. I mean, if Dropbox is in China, it will be crushed by copycats and die very quickly.

Similarly for coinbase. It's useful. The question was whether or not btc and crypto currency will be big enough for coinbase to be a great business. Of course, given the success in crypto currency, coinbase is a great business.

But neither of these are “crazy new ideas”. They are not even new ideas...

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

The success of a startup depends on many factors and pessimism on HN is definitely not one of them. HN is a forum where people intellectualize things from their limited point of view. It is usually not the primary forum where the founders seek feedback. I think HN is a remix of the old slashdot forums with a healthy mix of digg + reddit.

If they pivot, does that mean the negative feedback was right or is it always wrong? What if the feedback precipitates the pivot?

I have no idea if Mighty will succeed or not. But I suspect it will not succeed as a a $30/mo consumer product. Indeed, I'd bet money on it. The companies everyone keeps referencing were free products. I got excited about Dropbox. So did my friends. No friend has excitedly sent me a link to Mighty.

I'm sure some professionals will pay though. How many and how many they need to hit their numbers is another question. They can still probably ride the hype machine to an exit.

there are lots of links to casey's twitter account but the real gem is[0]. it reads like the famous jurassic park quote: 'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should'

[0]https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441

The reference to the Copernican Model of the solar system is an interesting one since it produced less accurate predictions than the Ptolemaic Model. Improving the predictions of the Copernican model initially involved the introduction of epicycles, diminishing the value of the crazy new idea.

It took the work of Kepler (elliptical orbits) and Newton (a physical basis for elliptical orbits) to elevate the heliocentric model to the status that it enjoys today.

There are two reasons why I bring this up: one is the validity of many of Paul Graham's assertions and conclusions. The other is to point out that things aren't so simple. Copernicus did not reap the rewards of his ideas since it took the work of others to prove those ideas. In fields outside of science, there is little reason to expect people to arrive upon similar conclusions. (Even within the sciences, there is no reason to believe we would converge on similar conclusions in the same time frame via different paths.)

Graham has a tendency to use hindsight to show that, yes, indeed he is contrarian and genius.

The Ethereum people do it, too. They use the example of old massively successful tech to prove that Eth too can catch on, but they don't cite all the failures.

Paul Graham is high on his own ego. Unfortunately, too many people take what he says at face value, like he's some sort of magical preacher of the Valley.

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN, for any meaning of $person. And please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with. You're damaging the community you're part of by doing these things, and that is self-defeating behavior—especially if you consider how fragile this place is. I'm sure you're not the kind of person who would drop lit matches in a dry forest or even litter in a city park. Please stop doing the equivalents here.

The odds are high that the internet converges to suckage. We're spending a lot of energy trying to stave that off. Since you're such an active community participant, wouldn't it be in your interests to help that effort, rather than hurt it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think there's a very strong analogy between the Copernican model vs Ptolemaic and computer languages (for example) - you can have something like C which has obvious defects (grant this for the argument, substitute something else if you like), but a replacement like Rust isn't taking on just C, but the entire ecosystem around C and all the tooling and knowledge therein.

Similarly the Copernican model was "more correct" depending on how you look at it (currently we model everything relative to everything else, the earth and sun "orbit" around a midpoint that is inside the surface of the sun but not the exact center, for example) but it provided WORSE predictions than the Ptolemaic model of the time.

And this had real practical implications in the technology of the day - navigation charts, etc, analogous to trying to use new tooling and finding it doesn't support aspects the old tooling did.

To add to this:

He lists two reasons why people want to dismiss "crazy new ideas": envy, and the desire to seem sophisticated. Using Copernicus as an example simply does not fit these claims.

Reasons to dismiss Copernicus's ideas:

1. They were worse predictions, so for all 'practical' purposes of the day (essentially, only knowing where the wandering stars would be), adopting his ideas would be poor.

2. Most crazy new ideas like this proposed by people on the fringe of a field are flat out wrong. The Copernican Model is a good example of a common mistake, really: Someone saw a complex but accurate system and tried replacing it with a simple system that is easier to understand but rejects the actual data. Turns out the world is complex and doesn't care about being intuitive. See all of quantum mechanics for an example.

3. Classical relativity was only established later by Newton. The moon, sun, and other planets were poorly understood at the time. It wasn't until Galileo's observations that evidence was gained for a rocky moon. The idea that the whole Earth could be moving and spinning without violating everyday observation, and therefor the other bodies in the sky follow the same rules as those on Earth, is simply a large and unnecessary leap in intuition. Sure, it's a correct leap, but the path of reasoning there is backwards. It is only with Newton's laws of motion that heliocentrism begins to make any sense.

4. Further, much better evidence (as discussed above) came to light far before Copernicus's ideas had any effect on non-academic matters. Other than finding things interesting, and generally liking to know how the universe works, heliocentrism has no practical affect on life even today. Sure if you work at NASA it's super important, but most people don't. Trying to force an idea before it's time, when it won't effect things anyways has little practical value.

The crux of this is that this article is not a response to people dismissing a new idea. It's people dismissing a new business. He seems to be arguing that new ideas by domain experts shouldn't be criticized because they might be right, while ignoring that people can have strong financial motivation to promote incorrect ideas. Fighting such ideas is good because:

- If the ideas prove correct, internet criticism of it really won't matter. Only a few key investors need to be convinced, and yeah they'll make a lot of money.

- If the ideas are wrong, healthy skepticism is the strongest force against snake oil salesmen.

90% of starts fail, so the criticism will usually be on the correct side, even if the exact criticisms don't point to the true cause of failure.

> heliocentrism has no practical affect on life even today

I disagree. These discoveries (showing that we aren't "special" or at the "center") had huge religious/philosophical implications and through some intermediate steps ultimately led to the kinds of secular states we (most of us) spend our every day in practice.

Yes and no.

Humans are dogmatic about politics, the backfire effect is a thing, etc. Why should things be magically different for scientists?

There’s a reason “science advances one funeral at a time “

This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.".

I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of the main points of academia is to give people the chance to explore those ideas. But they don't turn out good "on average", not even close.

Yes, because even when those implausible ideas fail, your more likely to learn something than when experimenting on an existing hypothesis with just a minor change.

Your framing of the question totally ignores opportunity cost. All that time spent working on ultimately failing crazy ideas is time you did not spend working on anything else, either marginal and likely or less risky/crazy.

Ending up "net ahead" does not necessarily mean maximizing the fraction of successful projects. I don't think pg is saying that implausible-sounding projects usually turn out good. He is saying that when they turn out good, they have outsized impact, precisely because they initially sounded implausible and therefore produce lots of new information if true.

The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure.

But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big paradigm shift.

A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history. Would you have invested time in solving Schrodinger’s weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you have invested time in public key cryptography in 1975? 1976? 1980? 1990?

People who got in early, got to make the big discoveries in those fields.

> A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history.

Everyone assumes they would always have been on the right side of history. It's basically impossible to know what you would have been like had you been born in those times. Better is to back-test your rule against paradigm shifts that have occurred in your own lifetime. What are some ideas you dismissed that turned out to work? What are some products or projects you have a revulsion against that are still succeeding years later? What caused you to reject them? What did you miss?

This is an excellent point, and I think this comment thread would have much less negativity if everyone asked themselves this question.

But then they’d have to own up to the nauseating idea of callously dismissing some truly spectacular sea changes, such as failing to buy 1000 Bitcoins for a few dollars in 2009. I think most people are too full of envy to do that.

How many can honestly say they kept an open mind to the handful of such paradigm shifts we’ve experienced in the last 20 years?

You only have to be right a few times in your life to make your career. Most people are right zero times, and hardly anyone is right 10 times. Von Neumann might have hit 10.

So regretting past mistakes is a big waste of time. Learn from them, but don't let it get to you emotionally. (All easy advice to give, and hard to follow.)

A very smart professor of mine once thought "They added pictures to hypertext, that's sort of cool I guess."

Looking backwards definitely biases you to seeing things you didn't see at the time. Even memories get tinged. But memories are probably the most accurate you can do.

I missed bitcoin entirely despite knowing many people who bought as I still don't understand what the appeal is. It doesn't seem efficient to me as a payments technology or from a privacy perspective. I kind of wish I bought early even though I probably would have cashed out way too soon, as the money would have been nice.

I liked Stripe due to my revulsion to PayPal but wasn't exactly going to be on them winning. I was pleasantly surprised. Ditto Shopify because of my dislike of Amazon stores. I think I underestimate the chances of good ideas and good products winning because I know it's very hard.

I took a few bets early in my career on start-ups. I think I underestimated the difficulty of selling into retail on one company that I still think had a good idea. The others ended up being acquisitions, although the products weren't continued. I still believe social notetaking is an interesting hard problem in need of a good solution but I don't think we had found it.

I think the big lesson for me is to not get taken in by the cult of personality around strong founders and focus more on the merits of the ideas. That can be tricky as you're not getting the full picture when you interview making it even harder to see a crazy idea as good for the right reasons but it's the right approach.

Yeah, and some ideas are just ahead of their time, like the noted pets.com 90s failure contrasted with chewy.com's success today.

Good point!

Ordering pet food over the internet in 1995: crazy moonshot weirdo stuff.

Ordering pet food over the internet in 2021: just another day.

I've found that you can get surprisingly far in life simply by being willing to fix your mistakes and switch your bets once it becomes apparent you're wrong.

I initially dismissed the WWW as a disorganized mess when I first encountered it in 1994 - I liked Gopher better. By 1997 I had changed my tune and was all-in on learning HTML and CGI and even some of the new technologies like Java applets, RealAudio, and DHTML. (Note that Java and RealAudio were themselves eventually losers, but by then I was all-in on Javascript.) It felt like I had missed the boat in 1997; the dot com boom was in full swing and people were getting rich off much more sophisticated stuff all around me (TBF, I was in high school). But the WWW and Javascript/DHTML remained a lucrative career for 20 years afterwards.

A lot of people, once they take a position on something, dig in and don't change that position for a lifetime, then miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because they dismissed it to begin with. But truly world-changing ideas usually have a lot of room to grow. If you're wrong for 2-3 years and then change your mind, you'll feel really stupid, like you totally missed the boat, but that's nothing compared to the 20-30 years left of growth that the idea might have.

But keep in mind each of those was one of n implausible sounding ideas at the time. Even if you might have been willing, would you have had the resources to put into it, or would they have already been wasted on implausible ideas we don't remember?

As you point out, it depends on how we define "domain expert". I may be a "blockchain domain expert" but I also need to understand what consumers need from a blockchain in order for it to be a profitable venture. My idea may be very innovative, but if it doesn't solve people's problems it's not going to make much of a difference.

In other words, a successful business requires not only producing an innovative product, it also requires knowing if people actually demand this innovative product. One half is the core idea, the other half is how this idea interfaces with the world.

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"

Those two statements are not inconsistent.

The first statement isn't a suggestion that implausible sounding ideas can be dismissed on the basis of a lack of credibility of the person communicating the idea.

But I share in the dislike of an appeal to authority. The idea should stand on its own merits.

Surely it is saying exactly that? Changing the "but" to "except" I think makes it clear without changing the intent

He's saying implausible sounding ideas should be dismissed because they are implausible, not because of the credibility of the person behind it. Then he makes one exception which is when the person is credible.

That's different to saying that the idea should be dismissed merely due to lack of credibility of the person, which is what the second statement is talking about. The primary reason for dismissal in his first statement is the idea's implausibility, not the credibility of the person.

If his first statement said "all ideas should be dismissed, but for ones proposed by credible people", then that would be inconsistent with his second statement.

Wouldn't a criticism of the form "you have no idea what you're talking about here. You don't have credential x or experience y" satisfy both constraints? You've demonstrated the person does not have the necessary domain experience. And yet you've not addressed the idea at all and only the person who proposed it.

It wouldn't because the way that is worded suggests that the reason for dismissal is the credibility of the person and not if the implausibility of the idea.

What would follow from his first statement: "Your idea sounds really implausible, and so I'm going to dismiss it on that basis. And since you're not a domain expert I'm not going to put special effort into suspending judgement, I'm just going to go with my initial implausibility determination."

What would follow from his second statement: "I'm going to dismiss your idea because you're not a domain expert. The idea's plausibility didn't really factor into my decision."

I would agree though that his use of very simple language has left some ambiguity here.

Something I’ve noticed a lot lately is that the people who have crazy new ideas are often the absolute last people that should be communicating them to the world. I’m not sure if it comes from the insularity of academia or just a basic inability to write clearly.

My theory is that many domain experts haven’t needed to communicate with a lay audience in decades (if ever) and thus aren’t aware of their own baseline assumptions. Seems like a startup idea, maybe? Convert academic papers into comprehensible English. Two Minute Papers does this but it’s only for technology.

https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai

This probably applies to early Apple. Wozniak, while clearly a technical genius, needed Jobs’ communication and design skills to sell “personal computing” and make Apple a mass-market company.

We’re building this for clinical papers! inpharmd.com We have 10k summarized so far

I think many (but not all) domain experts end up that way because they are so interested in a topic, they've internalized all the jargon and assumptions required to get there. It takes quite a bit of effort (and practice!) to keep the viewpoint of the common person in mind as well.

Feynman loved explaining things, so he had to keep trying to explain them in a manner that the ordinary folk could understand, but he also loved physics, which kept him diving deeper, and playing with it.

Having charisma and knowing what people want, and how to sell was Steve Jobs portion of the game, once the initial technical hurdles were solved. Woz likes to minimize circuits and do clever things, that was his part of the game.

Here on HN, the balance seems to be keeping it focused enough on hacking technology, while still appealing to those who want to make money off of it in yacht loads.

It's all about balance between at least 2 domains.

Off Topic : The site is sending a GET request to

http://np.lexity.com/embed/YA/fa27bb6ce937aea400cc8e5f11aa42...

every 5 seconds.

Anyone have any idea what it is?

Note : The address keeps changing for every request.

Edit2 : Is it only on my PC, or are others also able to see it?

I see it too, but my ad blocker prevented the request(s).

A quick search for "lexity.com" shows that it's an analytics company.

> Lexity - Apps to help grow your ecommerce business

> Commerce Central is the easiest way to grow your small and medium ecommerce businesses. We provide the best real time analytics and insights for ecommerce for free, and apps to advertize your store through Google, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.

I see those requests too but my adblocker takes care of it.

Lexity.com looks like a Yahoo service and maybe this is the analytics being collected. AFAIK pg's site is still hosted on Yahoo.

Sometimes crazy ideas like SSL aren’t so crazy. I wonder if the HTTPS failure is due to the Yahoo part of this?

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

Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean, who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a cost, even if it's "free."

I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.

Do you think low paid workers are going buy a cheap laptop for 500$ and pay 30$ or 50$ per month for Mighty instead of just getting a more powerful Window laptop for like 1000$ or 1500$?

M1 macs can be had for $999, and they can even be bought with cheap financing options to convert it to a monthly payment.

Maybe there’s a market for people stuck on old computers but whose companies still spring for super fast internet and $50/month SaaS bills per user instead of just spending that same money (or less) financing the laptops they actually need, but it would be a small market.

Is it just the price that's the problem? What if Might were $30 to $50 per year?

I think that corporations may want to force all their users to use Mighty so that they can control exactly what goes on in the browser -- it is easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions.

Maybe even prevent browsers from downloading files onto the local computer. A full recording of each user's sessions. Integrated password manager that uses the Mighty login to tie them all together.

So I view it as valuable to corporations and thus mighty falls into the B2B category of company which makes software end users hate, but corporations love.

Probably a fair bit of money in that.

Don’t they already do this with VMs for less cost?

> easier to pay Mighty to "virtualize" the browser, than it is to keep all computers up to date and without malicious extensions.

Not denying your other points but Amazon Workspaces[1] is a product that perfectly fits their needs.

From a top-level exec's stand point I would imagine they would be more willing to buy something like Amazon Workspaces which gives them 100% control and peace of mind Vs piecemeal approach such as browser, conference call client etc.,

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces

Except VDI products for enterprise already exist and are much cheaper than Mighty. AWS, Citrix, VMware, and probably others play in this space.

Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned as one of the people who draft read this essay.

Graham does this often. Instead of directly saying what he wants to say, he beats around the bush. When Allred was getting criticized for shady business practices, Graham wrote haters and thanked him and Musk and a bunch of other people. Not sure why he does it, it is very underhanded, as though he's afraid of actually getting in a legit argument with the person. Easier to pontificate form his essays, have them posted to his website, then have the mods defend him.

"Essay is french for attempt." There are good and there are bad attempts, of course.

Probably terrified of outrage mobs.

I think he genuinely believes these issues are much broader than a single company. So he wants to encourage discussion about the general issue, instead of sparking even more unproductive, repetitive argument about a single company which would overshadow the broader and more interesting issue he sees.

(As we can see here, where a quarter of the comments are debating the business model of Mighty.)

If a “Crazy New Idea” (CNI) is getting VC funding from establishment tech capital to deliver a twist in an existing product, it doesn’t seem like it could be so crazy.

Reading this I thought of CNIs like the Internet of the 1980s, women’s suffrage in the 19th century, Project Mercury, The Eiffel Tower.

The CNIs gaining ground today in tech seem to be crypto, brain-computer-interfaces, quantum computing, and CRISPR gene editing.

If there was a similar offering as mighty for certain development tools including Xcode and android studio together, that would be awesome and something I would look into. Basically something which would reduce the build times.

From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".

Sure, but the disconnect seems to be that Mighty is advertised for people who essentially use their browser as an OS (I see Figma mentioned a lot), rather than people who just want to do basic browsing.

I think Mighty has unfairly taken the brunt of a lot of growing discontent with bloat on the web. I'm not ready to fork over $30+ for faster browsing, but I'm glad someone is working in this space, because I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.

> I genuinely would like to rent a fast virtual computer for the occasional video editing task and think Mighty is a step in that direction.

Can't you already do that pretty easily on AWS or Azure?

At minimum it seems like I’d have to choose an instance size, an OS that was compatible with my software, install the editing software, mount a common storage location with my footage, etc.

What I’d like to see is a service that let me add my credit card, click a button, and launch a video editor on a high-RAM machine that I pay for the hour (including the software license fee).

unfairly? privacy concerns aside they just added another huge abstraction on top of an already huge pile of shit we call modern web.

My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done.

My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw their money away at a SaaS service that simply cannot perform as well as local Chrome on a modern machine.

I could see the narrow use case for limited situations where someone has

1. Weird IT department restrictions that require them to use old, slow computers but also

2. Budget rules that allow them to spend monthly money on a SaaS but not on financing the hardware they need to get their job done and

3. Guaranteed high speed internet all of the time and

4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service

Surely this situation exists, but it still feels like Mighty is targeting a broader audience by providing untrue claims about remote thin client technology somehow being faster than a halfway decent local machine. I’d feel equally uncomfortable if Stadia was charging $50/month while claiming to be lower latency than local gaming.

The counter arguments about disrespecting hard working startup founders or doubting visionaries feel like a strawman response to legitimate questions about the value of their service. The technology and execution look to be good, AFAICT. It’s the product, pricing, messaging, and value that I can’t recommend.

I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.

> E2E encryption

How on earth would that work for their product? They need to access the data so they can render it.

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.

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'.

I don't have the faintest idea, but the notion of having my session cookies and credentials stored in a VM somewhere makes me very nervous and I am not even half paranoid.

So they need to figure it out otherwise it's only valid for personal use, which is not exactly the money is, imho.

Maybe some self hosted solution for corporate departments? Or waiting for an acquision from Citrix or VMWare...

No but it makes a lot of sense for Mighty App to be the middleman between your computer and the Internet. If I was them I’d just give it away for free and sell your data to Facebook (anonymously of course!)...

I agree with your stance. I was confused to come here and read that people thought he was referring to Mighty. I think Mighty is a pretty small, easily proven/disproven, not-crazy idea, not-that-new idea, with niche applications. To me that is a bit different than how this article reads. I think the debate is market size. The only real debate I hear with Mighty is whether it is good for <10M people worldwide or >1B people worldwide.

>4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service

Or just an IT/security department that is blissfully unaware of the shenanigans that some of its users are up to. Especially if people are accessing this from outside of the corporate network to start with.

RE: 4.

My company uses webmarshal which fronts requests and blocks pages deemed not good for productivity/data security. In that type of situation you already have an intermediary so mighty could make sense - make everyone use mighty and give it a custom blocklist. Obviously not a situation that employees would be a fan of, but it’s something that corporate is already doing, and mighty could improve the experience.

There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting against the speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to improve this product did exactly the opposite.

To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price. From this point it’s a matter of time other hardware also catches up in terms of performance and price.

Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don’t know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo

"They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on."

Me playing the devils advocate...

Perhaps not //forever//, but perhaps for the next few years (enough for them to make some good money).

Why? Chip shortage, GPU shortage.

Anecdotally, I just bought a computer for $7500, that, two years ago would have cost about $2500 (granted, it is the new tech, but even so, new tech of this tier two years ago would have been approx. $2500). On top of that, have to wait two months for it to be assembled. (ouch)

I agree with you that speed will probably not stop increasing, but if prices continue to go up, or even just level off, few people will be able to afford the new tech.

That being said, would I invest in Mighty? No since I agree with you in general....and agree with you about the zero privacy issue...very regressive position for someone like PG imo.

That assumes that AWS/Azure/GCP won't have the same issues getting chips to run Mighty on that PC manufacturers have getting chips to sell to consumers though. If the shortage keeps up, that is not necessarily true.

What if the future is that you don't necessarily just buy a machine in the future.

What if, when you purchase your machine, it includes a host of features including a could suite of things like; VPN, Cloud Browser, An actual amount of decent cloud storage, portable applications, hosted in your cloud bucket, but accessible from any device (If I have Illustrator, I can just run it from any machine - not just my own. I can allow guest access to my paid licenses - like Say i want my brother to be able to draw stuff on my Illustrator license while I am not using it.

Etc.

Imagine if instead of that $7,500 "computer" you bought a $7,500 'stack' and the access terminal you happen to be using most is the physical laptop that youre used to.

I tried to build something similar to this more than a decade ago (2007 or so - but wrote about it in 2004).

My biggest issue is better information/knowledge management.

I have TBs of files and data strewn all over. We should be focusing on "my information" and let me manage and secure that - and access it from any device easily, and securely.

If augmented reality tech works better the necessity of cloud as your machine will become ubiquitous.

However I think we gonna do have RTX in our mobile devices - AR glasses, whatever modern mobile tech - because of decentralization (security/ethics purpose)

> They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on

No, they are betting that no matter the processing power of computing devices of the day, developers will always push things to the limit and ship products that can end up being slow on devices used by a large share of the population.

This has always happened, because software product makers always want their products to have as many features/capabilities as possible, and release them to market as quickly/cheaply as possible, which means there are lesser incentives to limit functionality or to invest in performance optimisation.

There's no reason to believe this trend will cease, so Mighty is offering a service that allows people to get much higher performance of their webapps without always needing to have the highest-power computing device in their possession.

> developers will always push things to the limit

Agree, it's an arms race at this point between end consumers and app developers. However, it also means once Mighty becomes popular they have to contend with developers overwhelming their computing resources as well.

As long as Mighty keeps providing a better experience than the local browser on the average user's own device, they'll have utility for a significant number of people. Developers still need to provide satisfactory-enough performance to the bulk of their audience. Mighty is for the users in the right tail who are willing to pay for better-than-satisfactory. There's no reason to believe that right tail will ever disappear.

Yes and mighty will keep increasing prices as the developers can now ship any horribly optimized thing.

Mighty can succeed yes, but it's success would be bad for the ecosystem.

Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.

> developers can now ship any horribly optimized thing

No, they can't. Only the right-tail power users will ever pay for this. Unless almost all of a product's users are in that group, the developers still need to offer satisfactory performance to the rest of their users, or be vulnerable to a new competitor.

> Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.

People keep saying this. I doubt even Mighty believes they or their paradigm will take over "all computing" - just the niche that really needs it. Even a small market share can make them a big/successful company, but without making the whole internet significantly more centralised than it already is. I don't get the panic.

Couldn't they instead be betting that despite improvements in hardware speed the web will bloat faster than the hardware improves? Betting on that doesn't sound that crazy to me.

That is indeed one of their premise. However that also has, perhaps unforeseen, implications. To start with, their VMs have to be at least one step better than the end consumer's machine. Can they do it without increasing their price? Secondly, there's no guarantee that developers will overwhelm even Mighty's cloud resources?

All that said, it's worth noting that the first set of customers seem super impressed. So maybe Mighty are on to something.

The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs. At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used. And when I use it, I doubt average load is over 25%. So the Mighty model has a 20x utilization advantage by those numbers.

That should easily support twice the peak CPU power for me when I need it.

Another thing is that the Mighty CPUs will (presumably) be upgraded continuously, while my laptop CPU gets no faster after purchase. If that makes me only buy a new laptop every 4 years instead of 2, I've saved a lot of money and hassle.

I'm not saying this means Mighty will conquer the world. But there are reasonable arguments behind the model. Especially if you assume bandwidth will keep improving.

>The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs.

It's not. It's literally spinning up a VM in the cloud to run Chrome and stream a video to you

> At least 80% of the time my computer isn't even used.

Yes, but Mighty isn't running (and will never run) on your computer.

Wow you are really not understanding the comment you are replying to. He's discussing the business model.

And I've responded with the reality of the business model. There's no "CPU sharing" on "my computer". It's a beefy VM in the cloud.

Well, it most likely shares the CPU with other VMs, but that depends on the cloud, and the instance. And since the browser is always open, Mighty will always run that VM, with no sharing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063554

>> And when I use it, I doubt average load is over 25%.

So the idea is you can get your laptop utilization down to 1% by pushing your load to their cloud? Fascinating.

Hmm, I feel like this is missing that those cpu workloads are "bursty", and probably all burst around the same time for a given region. This analysis of unused computer time assumes they can sell your unused time to someone else, which either means network latency to another region or more capacity in the same region as you when you have similar usage times as everyone else. I have no idea if this idea works but I don't think it does for that reason.

> The Mighty model is timesharing CPUs.

Yeah, but I think it's better to think about it like virtual/remote desktops, where the granularity is a browser tab.

At least, that's the only way it makes sense to me. I might understand that to do 4k high res 3d on my phone - my phone will need help. And once that "help" is available - my TV, and my tablet and my smart watch can make use of it.

But I'm not generally willing to trade latency for cpu time sharing. What is interesting is an always on, always working desktop session. It's why I like screen/tmux and ssh, rdp - and would consider running a Linux terminal server, so my laptop(s) and desktop(s) could be a disk less, stateless thin client.

Make the observation that the browser tab is the new process/application granuality - and it makes sense to host tabs in the cloud.

Personally I'd want to self host it - but the idea doesn't sound quite so inane.

Not only that but you can just use a different browser.

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.

We have a game streaming service from Google, too (Stadia)... which is apparently struggling.

> 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 2012 MBP and a couple of ancient iPads. Mighty would be functionally useless for us.

Heck my entire day is spent in Chrome working in Drive and writing code in our own development environment in our web app. I am a browser power user in that sense on a three year old gaming laptop and I don’t understand the Mighty usecase. It’s a niche within a niche at the moment although I understand the appeal of the business model.

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.

Chromebooks maybe?

Geforce now or even renting an entire computer with shadow is for graphics performance, and is not 30 bucks a month. You also won't be entering any sensitive data while playing games. I think it's a cool thing they've done, but it requires you to put full trust into them as a company.

It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an issue, sure. But “high-ping” is a somewhat solved issue, whether in multiplayer gaming, in terminal utilities like Mosh, or even in optimistic GraphQL mutation updates. Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? The only cases I can think of are games like Rocket League: fast-twitch games where even the latency between my controller and my PC is something I happily spend hours optimizing — where latency prevents the necessary feedback loop for learning (akin to trying to learn how to hit a baseball while drunk).

But beyond near-zero latency use-cases, why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client? At the edge of performance, this question is easily answered: I would never attempt to train a PyTorch model on my admittedly powerful GPU. That’s what the cloud is for. So when it comes to my browser, why am I content to eat up memory and cpu-time with hundreds of tabs open that almost always include one or two that are broken, soaking up my resources, and have to be hunted down and killed off so that IntelliJ can return to its normal lightning-fast speed?

Might goes even further and asks why I would want to run IntelliJ on my machine at all. Wouldn’t I rather run IntelliJ like I used to run Vim over Mosh, where I never have to worry about storage space, about download/upload bandwidth, or about my computer becoming sluggish?

And that’s the killer idea here: that thin-clients almost always beat thick-clients. One could even argue that the entire internet is premised upon this reality.

I’d happily pay Mighty to try it out for a bit. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ve dropped more money of less fascinating ideas. At the very least, I’m rooting for their success, because it would change a lot more than how you consume content over the internet.

You just described a Netbook

What's mosh?

Edit: Managed to find the right string of words to google: mosh = Mobile Shell

https://mosh.org/

This is the standard network computing paradigm. In the past you had terminals connected to a mainframe etc.. Same thing. X11/RDP and what not.

The biggest gain here is security, you won't ever run code natively. The caveat is you also have to trust the host.

> The biggest gain here is security, you won't ever run code natively. The caveat is you also have to trust the host.

That assumes any malware cannot bust out out of mightyapp's sandbox to the host's host.

The biggest gain is the security of all of the code running on someone else's hardware.

The biggest loss is also security: all of your keystrokes, passwords, traffic, etc. are stored on someone else's hardware.

I think the key difference between a pytorch model and your browser is that you’re actively using and manipulating your browser and a pytorch model is a long running process without the need for second by second interaction.

And as you note the need for more power goes beyond a browser, IDEs, gaming, rendering, Bitcoin mining. Why just do it for the browser? You can, and some people do, remote into a more powerful machine for all of their work. This was the norm when terminals were true terminals. We could go back to this, but having your own computer historically had much larger benefits for people.

> why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client?

Because thick client distribute the load among many computer. With a thin client all that load is way more centralised.

> I would never attempt to train a PyTorch

No one is asking you to do that. We're talking about Mighty, a thin client that:

- runs a beefy VM in the cloud

- runs a single app, Chrome, in that VM

- streams video to the client

If a million people run Chrome on their laptops and keep it open for the entire day (and your browser is usually open throughout the day), that's... just a million people with their laptops.

If a million people run Chrome through Mighty, Mighty needs a million VMs always open, and a million video streams, also always open.

See how a thick client is better than a thin client?

The post is about crazy-new idea. This app is a RDP solution that is not a crazy or a new idea. It all depends on economic viability and marketing to the right people.

> It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

I was curious about Mighty and looking forward to their technology. That’s not the problem.

The judgment came largely when they announced that it cost up to $600/year. It costs so much that it’s actually cheaper to buy a whole new computer if you might need it for a year or more. Once you put a price tag on something and ask people to pay for it, judgment is fair game.

This whole dismissal of people saying that they couldn’t justify the product for the price as some sort of anti-curiosity thing feels disingenuous.

If people will pay 2x or 10x the price of self-hosting for AWS, then I have no doubt that some people will pay 2x or 10x the price of a laptop for Mighty. (I wouldn't, but I also don't use AWS :) )

> It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

His arguments are too vague to specifically defend Mighty. You can insert any technology and his arguments are neither valid or invalid.

> 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.

> I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.”

I haven't found Chrome slow on my mid-range PC (i5-7500). Or my phone (Pixel 3).

I feel like I must be in some parallel universe to everyone else talking about how slow Chrome is.

Just now, I loaded the first 6 links on Hacker News. 1 didn't load at all due to a server error. The other 5 all loaded in under a second (measured by DOMContentLoaded). I have uBlock Origin enabled (only in Firefox on the phone). Maybe that helps.

I can have 100+ tabs open without slow down if I want to. The bigger problem is I'm less productive with 100 tabs open because... there are 100 tabs open. It's just too cluttered.

I'm willing to admit Mighty might be a good product if people have this problem with slow browsers. I just never found this was an issue. Maybe it's a problem on low-end machines, but how many people have a low-end computer but are willing to pay $50/month for Mighty?

Do you use AdBlock? That makes a huge difference.

I just set up a new computer and I was wondering why Chrome and Firefox was so slow. Then I remembered I hadn't set up AdBlock yet.

I wonder if Mighty has ad blocking? It's an interesting question of which will be better for their business -- blocking or no blocking. (I won't try it because of the obvious privacy problems, because I use a fast computer, and avoid slow web sites. But it probably has an audience.)

I use uBlock Origin for ad blocking. Maybe ad blockers are the secret.

>even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity

PG wants you to think that they're mutually exclusive. They're not, but he has a product to hustle.

The problem (for PG) is that curiosity is not uncritical. Curiosity poses more questions than those in the category "how well does this product work?" Anyone actually curious is going to wonder about the problem space, not just one proposed solution.

Pretty obvious questions include: "how did software get us to the point we're exploring this as a design?" and "could the problem it seeks to solve be addressed in a way that eliminates assumptions about the solution space?", "What are peripheral ramifications of design decisions, and how much do I care?" "Would other approaches solve the same issues, have the same ramifications?" or "Are they synergies to leverage by trying multiple things in concert?"

I did not take Jonathan Blow's tweet to be saying it's a bad idea, or won't work, but rather that it's an indictment of the whole web stack that it's necessary.

Watch any of his talks and you'll know for him it's definitely the latter. He's complained about bloat and the web stack in particular plenty of times.

Here's a really good talk by him that dives into it, titled dramatically "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Also note he's currently developing a programming language called JAI that's trying (and seems like it might ultimately succeed) in being a faster and smoother alternative to C++ for developing games.

I have no dog in the fight either way, but I think it's weird that their demo product shots are on a Mac when part of their pitch is

> "50+ tabs without your computer coming to a crawl"

On Macs, people can just switch to Safari for free and solve that problem. Yes, Chrome is a memory hog. Stop using Chrome, don't send all your browsing data to a third party.

Perhaps Windows would be a better choice for Mighty demo shots, since there may not have a better option than Chrome for Windows.

I just bought an used Lenovo desktop that’s a few years old, but has an i7 and 32gb of ram. It handles a hundred tabs without blinking. I think the bigger problem is the artificial constraint we’ve put on ram, why are we still selling computers with 8gb of ram?

I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month, not $50.

At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front.

These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.

One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) + they are still a bit too expensive (we're in Mexico where they cost 1.5 - 2x).

I would love to be able to buy our customer service reps a setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks a month. That would scale to a customer service org of hundreds.

At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac.

IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy to buy a designer any computer they want. But outfitting a CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be amazing.

How long before the $500 Lenovos and Dells have same ballpark performance to the 2021 M1 Macs? AMD or NVidia will inevitably release an ARM chip that competes with M1, and it will just be 12-24 months before this is commonplace.

I don't buy the argument that performance will always get tapped out by developers. There is an upper limit to what even a horribly architected 2D web app needs to consume.

Maybe! Hopefully! But it begs the question: why is the situation so bad now? What will change? It's not like the apps I mentioned are inherently complicated.

I think the situation is bad because developers are expensive, and really expert devs that know how to optimize app performance are even more expensive. You mention Notion and Slack and other Electron apps. Not to disparage the teams on these projects as they are impressive from a pure UX perspective. But building these complex apps cross-platform native is particularly difficult today. So Electron is used as a shortcut. The usage of Electron allowed Slack and Notion to grow rapidly with a smaller team than they otherwise would were they to try to replicate in Windows, Linux and Mac as well as web... not to mention mobile. And once an app is established and has tons of features, as they both do, doing a rewrite is both expensive and risky. Big rewrites almost always fail, and they divide your precious dev resources even more.

You can probably buy them a VDI desktop for $20 per month (Amazon Workspaces and Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure are in this ballpark) and run Chrome on that. Especially with WVD, there are thin clients made specifically for it (or you can just use an RDP client on any OS).

Then you'll simply have to wait a few months.

They didn't reveal their true business model or pricing yet.

The $50 subscription is a way to simply not flood their servers while beta-testing them, and also getting a bit of money from rich/dumb early adopters.

If that were the case you’d expect them to reply to the several beta test requests this rich/dumb early adopter has sent over the last year+.

Maybe the tech was not yet ready?

Fake it until you make it is still a thing in Silicon Valley.

Can't you buy a decent desktop and have them chromote into it? A desktop should be more than enough to run the apps of many people.

Edit: Although, I'm not sure it supports multiple separate logins.

Well, if the Lenovo or Apple M1 were 3.5 to 5 times cheaper, they'd also be a good deal, right? In fact, they'd be a better deal than a 5 times cheaper Mighty, I would wager.

I don't understand how Jonathan Blow of all people, figurehead behind several great video games that would have been impossible to run on a supercomputer 25 years ago, could possible have this take.

He is very much in the church of hand-optimized low-level programming and anything that abstracts over that being where computing is going wrong.

you can't just compare a game and a web page. vastly different requirements.

I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people.

No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.

I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead he was deploring the state of software engineering in general and web programming in particular. He is saying something like "I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like Mighty actually makes sense". See his talk about preventing the end of civilization (!!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

Fascinating video as always from Jonathan.

Definitely highlights something I've always felt, which is that we're really making life complicated with all those tools and processes that are less than ideal.

I get the feeling business and the need to "ship" stuff is the thing really bringing technology down, even though it looks like it's moving it forward.

This is the first time I’m hearing of Mighty App and, at least at first glance, I wouldn’t categorize it as a “crazy idea,” in fact it seems pretty non-crazy to me - chrome but more efficient. It’s literally a faster horse. I guess the implementation is the crazy part...?

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

yeah, they mentioned 30-50$ monthly on their site.

But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm.

This sounds like the sort of nonsense used by scientific crackpots to attack their critics for "not understanding" them.

Sure, your idea may be revolutionary and actually upend everything, but the overwhelming likelihood is it won't and you need to go through the same evaluation process as everybody else and not be so salty about that.

Incidentally, I find the MightyApp concept interesting and wish it well in forging a new market, but this sort of rationalisation as the "main" driver behind reasonable scepticsm is a very poor defence.

As an intern I once attended an internal Innovation Symposium hosted by the company I was working for.

Most of the speakers talked in glowing terms about innovation, how good it was, and how welcomed it was.

But one speaker didn't. He said: "You'll know you're being innovative because you'll feel uncomfortable about your idea."

I had never before heard that point of view before, but it clicked.

If all of your peers think what you're doing is a good idea, maybe it's time to re-evaluate how innovative your ideas really are.

The problem with all of this is that immature good ideas look and act exactly like crazy ideas. It's hard to find comfort pushing on an idea with that fact always in the back of your mind. You could find yourself years down the road with nothing to show for all that effort.

> Whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it.

I don't think this tells the whole story. The church didn't immediately view the heliocentric model as a crazy new idea.

> In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus's theory. Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures and were interested in the theory. On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome:

> "... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ..."

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentr...)

The church's stance against the heliocentric model developed later, and probably for religious and political reasons.

Secondly, rational astronomers shouldn't have been convinced of the model as soon as Copernicus proposed it. It wasn't yet proven. It's like string theory today. It may have been an elegant theory, but a good scientist shouldn't consider a theory proven until it's actually proven.

Relating this back more generally to the essay, I think there's a bias in how we retell stories from history that makes it seem like great new ideas were initially mostly considered crazy. It makes a better story when one person overcomes the odds and invents something great despite everyone telling them they're crazy. But reality, most new ideas had a mix of detractors and supporters. We just remember the detractors better and amuse ourselves thinking about how wrong they were.

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 bets work on "average". On average they fail. It mostly so happens that crazy bets are on "average" taken by people with a network that can attract able and passionate people, who can see through an idea to its conclusion. This is where experts come in.

Experts often rely on validation by their "community", and by the nature of community dynamics need to upsell. They naturally attract the kind of people needed to execute crazy ideas. But then attracting such talent also has a corrective effect on the originally crazy idea, such that it has a higher chance of succeeding by minimizing the blind spots, the unknown unknowns.

> 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 know about Erdos, but the other had ambitious ideas, not crazy ones. Evidence that they weren't crazy is that the problems they were working on are still seen as the ones to solve by most of the physics community.

In fact, on the case of Einstein, he worked on much crazier ideas on the beginning of his career. I don't think any respected physicist ever thought about solving Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect was an interesting curiosity but mostly of interest of "those inventors out there", not of researchers.

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 as a result.

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.

> 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.

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, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client)

https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple different incarnations because it could be huge.

And I mean that in a bad way.

Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still own our computers.

I can see how it would start in the corporate world.

It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten archiectural principle of the internet which says that the "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart, the nodes are as dumb as pipes.

Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and the clients (leaves) dumb.

This is true from a technical perspective, and this is probably why the web is still not perfectly sound from an engineering point of view.

But from a business perspective, there is huge value in dumb clients (not for the end-user)

It’s the first I’d heard of this axiom. Can you give an example of that in a real architecture?

I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)

But no one uses that architecture anymore. To the extent that you have a terminal on a remote server, you use it to configure the server, from your own thick client.

Is it true that chromebooks outsell other laptops?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle

It is not an axiom though, but rather an architectural guideline that comes with its own set of trade-offs and must be applied judiciously.

There's an ongoing tension here between software getting complex enough to be slow and people wanting to move computation to servers.

The problem with that, of course, is that the clients inevitably gets faster, and cheaper, and software gets pushed to the leaves again.

We're carrying around what used to be super computers.

This is also why I would be very cautious about investing in something that bets on offloading computation from clients: If you time it right, it could be huge for a while, but you're betting against advances in the speed and cost of computation. The same advances you'll rely on to scale and drive down costs.

As such it feels to me like they're playing a game of musical chairs.

Yes, this is a seemingly never-ending cycle.

1. Software is too heavy, let's push it on the server 2. Dumb client gets faster 3. Servers cost money, let's use the unused CPU cycles on the client 4. Bloatware happens, go back to 1.

I think you are leaving out the data story. It is very difficult to push data to the edges, you can easily run into volume or consistency problems.

No surprise that this means that there is no single solution. Complexity sometimes makes sense at the edges and sometimes make sense in the core. It just depends.

I think we have a lot to learn about building systems that give us the flexibility to move things around as needed. Plan 9 was interesting from that point of view because it gave a way for edge resources and core resources to be composed via 9P at any place in the network.

I don't buy that data is a technical problem. It's a business problem in as much as holding users data hostage is central to a lot of business plan. All of the data in my Google account, for example, fits on a microsd card. Of course I want backups of it, and so I don't want to actually store it on a single microsd card, but the point is that this doesn't require much logic at the core. You can push processing to the edge while using a storage service. But you can push storage services towards the edge too. For a lot of data we already employ near write-once for the core of the data, which is ideally suited for synchronisation schemes over fully connected centralised storage. Your e-mail, and things like Google Photos are good examples.

Consistency is less of a challenge than it might seem. It's a challenge if you're frequently disconnected from the network for extensive periods of time and might access and modify data from multiple disconnected devices in that period (note modify, not augment and create something new, which is easy to accommodate). But supporting that is very different from supporting mostly-local computation.

I think the "architectural principle of the internet" is not what you suggest.

Years ago, I pushed as much work onto the client as possible to reduce the workload on my servers. Now, people complain if you push too much work onto their phones. They want the server to do the heavy lifting so the app can be more responsive on their low-powered mobile client.

"The internet" doesn't define how much weight each end of a connection should bear. It doesn't really even dictate that there are only two ends.

Should a webapp have a braindead REST api with a select, insert, update, delete for each table of the underlying db model and have the client make 1000 nested calls to the server to render the simplest thing? Or should the server api be much more sophisticated so that a single api call can provide all the information required for the render?

There's no one right answer just because "internet".

If you have to manage 100s of devices, you prefer thin clients. As a user, you want control over your device and rich functionality. Dumb clients usually give you dumb services.

I thought we have moved past thin clients and moved on to centrally managed software, either in the form of javascript web apps or as apps from an app store.

I wish he would say this in the post!

Then he'd have to face specific arguments. This way it looks like it's some general wisdom, and anyone who isn't enthusiastic about Mighty App can be painted as the unsavory characters he invents. How easily this army of strawmen is burnt to a crisp!

The Jealous Nerd:

> One reason they do it is envy

The Hipster:

> it's an easy way to seem sophisticated

The Dark Ages Inquisitor:

> Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen

The Luddites and Sheep:

> the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm

This replies to none of the legitimate criticism, and manages to be more dismissive by filing everything under "crabs in a bucket, extra salty".

Not to mention the privacy concerns of allowing someone else’s machine to proxy all of your web requests.

Yeah, that's the point, this is why this "tech" is not what we want/need.

I have trouble seeing how it's going to find a sustainable market except as business spyware/leak-prevention. Which is yet another reason I'm not a fan of the idea. In that capacity it may actually manage to survive and even thrive, but I'm not going to be happy about it.

They simply didn't reveal the business model yet.

The $50 subscription is to avoid flooding their servers while testing the software.

This product will likely starts as a corporate malware but once the beta is over and their tech is really working at scale (more difficult than you might think) they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

> This product will likely starts as a corporate malware but once the beta is over and their tech is really working at scale (more difficult than you might think) they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

So you think it is a dragnet-surveillance get-acquired-for-our-data play, longer term? That's even worse, if so.

In short, yes. But being acquired is probably only seen as a salvage plan at this stage.

> they'll probably give it for free or very cheap.

They wont give away this for free:

> Each browser instance gets 16 vCPUs using state-of-the-art Intel CPUs running at up to 4.0 GHz.

People would mine bitcoins with it. Not to mention they'd be footing more than all of youtubes bandwidth costs if this gets popular.

If won't happen overnight, but if they are successful with this tech it simply won't make sense to put friction in front of it.

My IMMEDIATE reaction to this was someone is gonna pay $50 a month to possibly make more money than that mining cryptos on the browser. JS crypto miners are already there now they just need to pay some numpty to run a browser somewhere with more resources. They're even offering GPU-level processing!

This doesn't look like an end-user product, so it's mostly can you trust/audit the company? Most of them are already using aws to host their data.

Wasn't this a feature of Amazon's Silk browser?

"The browser uses a split architecture where some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage loading performance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk

Opera Mini did it first.

I was young when that was first announced and privacy wasn't as big deal or a concern as it is these days. I remember it making the news and me being excited about it and noticing how fast everything was. It took a day or two for my brain to catch up and ask "this means they have access to everything?"

I abandoned it right away.

Silk, Puffin, Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Maxthon - are all predecessors.

Well, this idea of a remote browser has some predecessors but the true lineage goes back to VT-80 and mainframes.

> People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous.

An idea isn't bad if it's valuable and built on ridiculous / dumb / silly / simple / old technology. A product should be measured on output, not input... in fact I'd go as far as to say that we (hackers) should celebrate ideas that deliver incredible value with such a simple implementation.

I agree that being ridiculous is not sufficient to discard it.

Many things are considered ridiculous or impossible before they work.

The main point is that yes it could work and be valuable, but not for the end-user. It would be mostly valuable because of the transfer of power from the user to the server.

We should know better, we should learn from the lessons of the recent past, we should be more careful before giving away our freedom (power is highly correlated to individual freedom)

This domain is frustrating to talk about as a technical person because success isn't based on technical soundness, but rather popularity.

So any argument I could realistically make against $sillyAppThatHasVCBacking will not matter if enough Paul Grahams back it and $sillyApp makes itself a moat.

WeWork would be the most prominent example of this; even after their 2019/2020 crash, they'll probably come out of the pandemic okay compared to its competitors simply because it just got big enough.

You're right. Prominent unicorn competitors to WeWork filed for bankruptcy during the pandemic. One example below

https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/a-look-at-how-proptech-sta...

The Behind the Bastards series on this was great.

- Personally I don’t think PG is defending mighty app because he has skin in the game. I would think he is at a point where he doesn’t need to.

- Also IMO we should let mighty app (or for that matter other crazy ones) play out. We all know little about the capabilities of individuals and what the future holds. So why to ridicule and prematurely declare certain death.

- I disagree about your first point, he is a player and do not like losing.

- I would agree with your second point about most tech, but this is special, I'd say this is political.

Couldn't disagree with you second point more: you shouldn't let dangerous tech "play-out". It's much easier to kill snakes just as they've hatched. Basically every bad thing about web and software in general was born as "play it out" and then it grew to big to be killed.

Yes, we should know better, we've seen this story being played out a few times.

Delegating power/freedom is always dangerous, especially if you're doing it for free.

Hold it. I agree with you, but I'm having a language nerd moment. This feels like one of those "catch more flies with honey than vinegar" things, where although the point is made clearly, the metaphor is literally false (vinegar is incredibly good bait for catching flies).

> It's much easier to kill snakes just as they've hatched.

Aren't a ton of itty bitty snakes going to be harder to kill than one big snake? I've never tried to kill snakes of any age myself, so I could be way off.

Imagine not having to think about cross browser comparability. Customer wants to use internet explorer? Just head to ie.example.com, for a mighty version of a given website.

What happens when Mighty's competitors offer slightly different browser emulations and you now have to build your web app for Mighty and Weakly and Mediocry as well?

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it.

I think this is a general and important point (and sadly not at all discussed in his post). When an expert publicly says something that seems wrong, my default explanation is that they have a vested interest that consciously or unconsciously forces them to consider the implications of what they say and alter the message accordingly. Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant.

This is especially true for public statements. If I were a friend of pg and we would go to a pub and he would not stop talking about how awesome one of the startups he invested in are, that would be a strong signal for me. But if he shills for one of his investments on twitter and on his blog just like some influencer-investor would do, I don't find this especially strong evidence that said startup is revolutionary even though he is an undisputed expert on startups.

>>"Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant."

I agree with your general point, but my interpretation of those events has additional axis:

1. Masks are in shortage, and may not protect you, and public doesn't know how to use them and will probably do more harm than help by reusing and handling and touching their masks

Then as time passed and we learned more

2. This is getting bad; even if masks don't save the person wearing them, if it helps others, we are at a point where we need all the help we can get. Please wear masks to help slow the overall spread.

While there's definitely part of the complex factoring of the recommendation that masks became more abundant, I feel initial message was "Crappy masks won't save you" and later message "Crappy masks won't save you, but may save others from yourself"

98% of people I talk to don't understand that surgical mask / cloth mask will do extremely poor job of protecting them; but may protect others. (it also adds an axis of complexity for those who don't want to wear masks because they feel they have the right not to protect themselves, because that's not what mainstream masks are for; it's not about wearing a helmet or not to protect your own head; it's about protecting heads of those around you)

And then, when they finally got around to actually applying some science to the question, the message became, "Surgical and (decent) cloth masks will protect others from yourself, and may also protect you."

I can't track down papers atm, but, on a more anecdotal level, there have been quite a few case studies of superspreader events where the people who were wearing masks were much less likely to contract the illness than people who weren't. Given the specific details at play, it's hard to explain how that could happen if cloth or surgical masks don't protect oneself as well.

The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model.

> The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model.

So close but so far.

At a minimum please give https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... a read. The real story is that SARS-2 does spread through aerosols whereas droplet transmission is pure unproven dogma. The paper I linked goes into some reasons why that is the case (for ex the fact that transmission is more likely close to someone doesn’t actually provide strong evidence for droplet xmission)

EDIT: I should add that even if it were primarily droplet transmission - which I very much doubt - masking would likely still fail for the stated goal (source control) in a community setting due to improper usage. And improper usage doesn't just mean "the mask is below your nose", it means "you're not changing out the mask the moment it gets damp", "you're touching your mask with unwashed hands", "you're touching your hands with unwashed mask", "you're standing closer to your conversational partner to compensate for the fact that masks muffle hearing" (<--this last one isn't "improper usage" so much as an inevitable result but I digress). And this is all without discussing any of the various negatives of mask-wearing that it's become trendy to pretend literally don't exist.

But to your point, you already correctly hinted at the fact that if aerosol transmission is the dominant transmission mode, then masks don't work even in theory, let alone in practice.

> Then as time passed and we learned more

Yeah, lots of time has passed since people started to use masks to prevent a spread of infection. Like, 100 years?

I think OP meant the general public's familiarity with using masks day to day. I think Japan has had the jump on the US for some time in that regard.

That's sarcasm but let me try to address the notion behind it, to best of my limited personal understanding; "prevent spread" has multiple factors to it.

My impression, in my locality, is that at beginning of pandemic people focused on notion of using masks to protect themselves (and many though not all governments indicated that's not efficient/recommended).

Then "as time passed and we learned more" focus moved to using masks to protect others (though many individuals, in my circle, still aren't clear on that).

My impression is that we have evolving, and still not necessarily 100% certain evidence/understanding, on how it spreads and what are the most effective measures. It's made more complex because

a) there's no silver bullet; most measures increase your chances to some percentage. This makes discussion between experts and public more difficult as public tends to think in binary terms.

b) While yes there are many public health measures we've known for 100 years (wash hands, have clean water, cook/boil/heat things to sterilize them, sneeze in elbow/Kleenex, wear mask, remove waste, etc etc), not all are equally effective against all vectors. What seems "Common sense" / "Logical" to a layperson like myself, may be more nuanced to an expert with experience.

I mean, for what it's worth, I'm 100% certain my dad, a year in, is still worse off for using a mask because of how he uses it. Many and especially older people around me reuse their masks for days and weeks , touch them constantly, put them under their nose for prolonged periods, don't squeeze/tighten them sufficiently, etc. Even if all that touching doesn't hurt, their belief that they're protected coupled with incorrect usage coupled with likely increase in risky behaviour is a net negative.

People can scream liberty and freedoms and personal responsibility, but I feel public health officials have to look at cold hard facts, of both disease but also people's actual behaviour (as opposed to some ideal non-existent form) and how it actually affects spread rather than how it logically intuitively should.

My impression is that importance of mask is well-studied and masks are regarded as one of the most important hygienic achievements right behind washing hands. These are cold hard facts. Everything else is political wiggle-waggling.

You may argue whether it is okay for a technocratic establishment to lie to people and manipulate them; but to pretend that they didn’t feed the public with half-truths is just ridiculous.

I think we have wildly different understanding; and mine is very much evolving - as I feel is everybody else's.

Masks right behind washing hands - honestly, until Covid, I clearly lived in ignorance and had NO idea that a) Surgical masks are tested and designed to protect others against exhale and b) N95 masks are tested and designed to protect occupant via inhale. Just that basic, yet absolutely crucial concept was unknown to me. I had very limited exposure to them across two continents and half a dozen countries, and it certainly wasn't part of my own education about most important hygienic achievement or practice across four different educational / political / health systems. That doesn't necessarily mean masks aren't crucial, but it perhaps doesn't make it obviously so either in context of daily public health.

And then we have the mucky complex detail of aerosol vs droplet vs surface, sizing and staying power, etc.

You are presenting / clearly strongly believe that (all?) masks are a binary, always-good, always-clearly-protective thing.

My understanding/interpretation is that it's more complex than that; I am OK with scientists, when faced with a net new illness, inherently evolving the opinion and recommendations. I guess this is where you see a "technocractic establishment lying and manipulating". I look at wildly different countries with wildly different values, framework, goals, assumptions, methods, and yes "political wiggle-waggling", and most of those culturally politically different scientists following broadly similar path of learning and understanding.

It is likely our frameworks and life paradigms are too different to come to an agreement - at some point we all, you and I included, fit inbound facts and perceptions into our root approach and beliefs.

The problem is they lost all credibility with the public for that very obvious deception.

Which deception? I did not indicate one in my post so reference to " that very obvious deception" is not clear to me.

note: "Evolving understanding/new facts" or "new/differing priorities" are not the same as "deception" to me. e.g.:

* Thinking A and Saying A; then changing mind and Thinking B and Saying B; are not a deception

* Saying "Because of X, A"; then later "Because of Y, B", because Y became more important than X, is also not deception to me

* Thinking A but Saying B is a deception to me (for reasons and intents that I may or may not agree with)

I'm with you. To me, it was pretty clear why they were making recommendations in the way that they did. There was no secret about why they wanted to limit the supply of masks going to the public at the start of the pandemic. They didn't know for sure how it spread, but they did know that the most important places to have masks were the hospitals. You need to be extraordinarily cautious there because every hospital worker that gets sick reduces the number of people available to deal with patients (and adds another patient). There was also concern about face touching if people not used to masks started wearing them, but I only recall seeing that being a concern when it came to sending children to school with masks.

Once the mask supply was able to meet demand and after they were reasonably certain it would protect against the spread of the virus, they adjusted their recommendations accordingly.

None of that is deceptive.

> 98% of people I talk to don't understand that surgical mask / cloth mask will do extremely poor job of protecting them

This was the line for a while, but since we now know that it's an airborne infection that basically accumulates when you're in close proximity to someone infected until it reaches a critical point where it can grow faster than your body can fight it off, the mask is the only thing that's slowing it down.

Masks (and good ventilation) are about the only thing that protects you - social distancing means nothing because coronavirus isn't confined to the larger droplets we thought it was. Mask-wearing seems to result in less-serious infections even when you catch it because your initial infection was likely by less virus.

edit: I think there was an official reluctance to admit that it was completely airborne because the constant attempts to reopen businesses (like restaurants) would have been completely thwarted if social distancing (and constant surface sterilization) were meaningless.

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 not like prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Worse is better and all. If you give them a cheat code to let them use a little more performance, give them a little more headroom, they'll take it. For all the jblows and muratori's in the world, there's a lot more people who don't care about perf and just want to make cool stuff. For better or worse.

This is related to programmers tribes.

Casey and Jon and from the engineering tribe. The cool stuff tribe is what I call the business oriented tribe.

But I think you're missing the point.

The technical merits of Mighty is a secondary problem.

Could you expand on what I'm missing? I'd love to hear your analysis (not sarcastic, would love to hear other people's thoughts)

Obviously not the parent commenter, but I’ll give this a shot. I think that Jon and Casey’s (and those of like mind) are not commenting on Mighty as a piece of individual tech, but commenting on the fact that Mighty as a product could even be in a position to exist.

I am most likely to phrase the general position (which I think Jon and Casey would support) put forth as follows: the problem a service like Mighty is trying to solve ONLY exists because the standards and practices of modern software development is fundamentally broken.

You even touch on this in your GP post about devs taking the shortcuts to ‘making something cool’. As the parent post calls it, the cool stuff tribe are those developers who will use available cheat code because they expect that doing so is acceptable.

Your GP post seems to try and counter the Jon and Casey position by saying that because developers just want to make things that they will and there is no concern for any impacts these accumulating decisions may have. I think the ‘you’re missing the point’ comment derives from here. You seem to be saying that Jon and Casey’s position is not palatable to devs because those devs are not concerned with performance and don’t like to be told to consider such aspects of the things they make. But, J&C’s point is that if the standards for developing software were not so broken then the position of the cheat code using devs would be uniformly decried as substandard and unacceptable. In a world where development standards were in line with J&C’s views Mighty would not be in a position to be a viable product because using the web via a native browser accessing properly developed web content would be a pain free and perform any experience.

"For all the jblows and muratori's in the world, there's a lot more people who don't care about perf and just want to make cool stuff. For better or worse."

And that it's mostly people who don't care about this on deeper level are why we have such a bloated ecosystem. Layers of bad code stacked on layers of bad code.

If there were more jblows and muratori's in the world, Mighty would have no reason to exist. The web would already be performant. That PaulG is bullish on Mighty strikes me as a pessimistic view and a bet that the underlying problem won't be solved.

Yeah I mean I'm not saying it's a good thing that Mighty exists or that it might succeed. I'm just saying that we shouldn't take pithy Twitter replies as evidence it'll fail.

> 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.

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game

That sounds like an odd use of "skin in the game". "Skin in the game" would be if that thing failed and then he gets skinned, basically. Being invested in something with potentially lots of upside and worst case a bit of lost investment isn't like that.

No, it literally means "being invested in something" regardless of the rest.

No it's not regardless of the rest. It implies actual risk. Some rich dude losing a dime is not skin in the game, unless the phrase is meant as completely meaningless masturbation. "Skin" implies an actual impact, otherwise it's just "in the game".

You are making it all about money but things like reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the game".

Like .. what? Will people spit at him in the streets, if the company fails? Will they come with torches and pitchforks to his house and yell "it was a bad idea to run a browser in the cloud"?

It's interesting that you need any of this spelling out, especially as you're so irate about a turn of phrase, but even the post you're replying to here is politely spelling it out for you. Reputation _is_ money when you're a VC. You appear to be arguing with yourself and making up things to be angry about.

Nope, but I understand it's more convenient to think that.

Nope, but I understand you want to carry on being the only one that thinks that.

Happy to be "the only one" :)

Mighty is such an obviously good idea, and if you've spent decades on the cutting edge of the web you'd understand why. People's demands for more powerful web apps are for all intents and purposes infinite, and it is much more pleasant as a developer to develop once, run anywhere, than to develop an app for low powered clients and a different one for high powered ones.

For me, the question becomes—if we must write applications to one target that's going to run on a server anyway—why oh why must it be web tech? The whole appeal of applications (not documents) in the browser was that they were (kinda, sorta) able to run on any platform. If your target is one browser on one OS, and you're writing an actual application, why would you subject yourself, your developers, and your product quality to an HTML + JS UI?

Write once run on billions of clients but scale to supercomputering power.

That will never happen. A large majority of people will never have mighty since it is expensive, webapps will continue to be built to render locally.

People already have a lot of power in their machines for their non-web apps, and it is enough to run web apps as well.

Define "powerful".

I'm rocking a 8 year old laptop. I also use NoScript, which means I'm pretty aware of what code webpages are actually running on my computer.

What I've seen is that the things that make it really chug have very little to do with how much actual functionality the website has. Beautiful CSS animations usually aren't too bad, either, even on my old computer. The real performance hogs tend to be things like scrolljacking, telemetry, and dynamic ad placement.

The interesting outlier here is gmail. Gmail fascinates me, because it keeps getting slower and slower, without, as far as I can tell, actually gaining any new capabilities.

> powerful

I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant.

In the non-multiomics world I also make browser based data visualization software (most recently worked on this, for example: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer). I want to load up 500GB and facet on multiple dimensions and then share the link and have it all run instantly.

I'm not talking about Gmail and Text editors here. M1s solved that.

> I want to visualize 1TB of single cell RNA seq data in a browser tab, then open a new tab, change some params, and share the link to a colleague. I want it to be instant.

But why? Wouldn't you be better suited writing a native application that would do this better? This seems like you're building a problem for this solution. Most people use a browser for Gmail and to read news. Your example already works really well on the browser on my phone

> But why?

Because cancer is incredibly complicated and requires incredible amounts of data, analysis, and *collaboration*.

The "but why" question was not pointed at visualizing 1TB of single cell RNA sequence data or collaboration. It was pointed at why you'd want to do it in a browser? Why wouldn't you be able to make links and share them from a native application that they can then open in their application?

Maybe I'm missing something in your problem statement but are you downloading all that 1TB in your browser window and changing parameters? If yes Mighty has to download that data too and considering that each user is sequestered, someone you're sharing this with will have to download all that too. If you're not and the visualization is running somewhere else and the result streamed to your system how does Mighty solve that problem?

This is slightly what I'm thinking, for that particular use case.

The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to the client strikes me as slightly unhinged. Even if we assume you can achieve a sustained transfer rate of one gigabit per second, it's going to take over 2 hours to get a terabyte shoved down to the client. I'm guessing, though, that the actual vizualization is nowhere near one terabyte. Data's going to have to be aggregated somehow, because no computer monitor can display a terabyte worth of information all at once. Even a 4K monitor would fall short by many orders of magnitude.

It would be much faster, and, I think, simpler, to keep the data on a central server, have it generate the visualizations, and push them down to the client.

> The idea that you're going to shove 1TB of data down to the client strikes me as slightly unhinged

Yeah which is why I asked for clarification from them because it seemed really weird to assert that as a positive for the app?

> It would be much faster, and, I think, simpler, to keep the data on a central server, have it generate the visualizations, and push them down to the client.

Yeah I completely agree but in this case, Mighty would have next to no advantage over just loading the visualization on your own machine. Hence, again the confusion about asserting Mighty as a means to an end

Yeah, agreed. I can see Mighty as perhaps being useful as a band-aid to deal with someone else's poor, resource-hungry design.

But if you're the actual app developer, I'm just not seeing a good reason why you would want to deliberately incorporate this technology into your design. Why farm the sever-side rendering out to a middleman when you could just... do server-side rendering?

> why you'd want to do it in a browser?

Distribution. There's only 1 magic platform that allows you to ship new versions at your own cadence to 100% of people.

Developing for just M1s is great, when all your users are on M1s.

I'm sorry but can you please stop speaking in riddles and be clear about how you feel Mighty is solving this issue? I'm genuinely at a loss about how this is solving your use case but your answers are only cryptic. I truly want to understand how Mighty might help to solve real world problems

How do browsers make something distributed? How are browsers the only "magic platform" that allow you this? How is Mighty contributing to solving this problem? How does M1 matter here

Gmail's so bad now that I only use "classic HTML" Gmail in the browser, and native clients (Apple's Mail, for example). I have no idea how they managed to make a relatively simple "web app" so huge and heavy. You could add all of full-fat Gmail's features to "classic HTML" Gmail for very little cost in bundle size and active resource use—though the result might not be an "app" in many folks' opinions, I guess. I just know navigating classic Gmail, with its "bad" full-page loads, is way faster than the "efficient" AJAX-style crap on normal Gmail.

Mobile Gmail's not just heavy—it's broken. Whatever stupid, misguided bullshit they're doing with scrolling makes it register clicks where they weren't intended if I'm not super careful.

The theoretical end you describe — one where we are all just writing web applications to run in Mighty - sounds incredible but ignores the reality. There will not be 100% or even close to 100% adoption of streaming browsing, especially if it costs $50(!) a month. And you can imagine everything else that will go wrong:

- mighty creates arbitrary APIs that allow more speed so now we have yet another build target

- it manages to become successful, so now competitors jump in and now we have multiple targets to build for.

- god forbid, competitors offer “free” versions that become even more invasive to your browsing

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how much cryptocurrency I can mine on Mighty, especially if they lower prices later.

He might also be talking about many more ideas too: Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible. You can criticize him for having skin in the game but you could equally commend him too: he puts his money where his mouth is.

I think this is other way around. He talks/write to promote his ventures.

He puts his mouth where his money is*

> Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible.

Well if you fund 1000s of ideas, some of them are bound to be successfull. There is no surprise there. That's basic maths.

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 much more humble and honest marketing about where it will be useful.

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 month so that Adobe can spend less on R&D optimizing their web apps.

I believe it will be a successful business by normal measures, but not live up to the hype and vision of its founders and investors. I think there will be market for a tool, especially with enterprises where people are forced to use a particularly slow web-app or need other isolation features.

But for other people? Can you imagine Adobe saying "Here is our product, now please purchase this third-party cloud service to be able to use it." They either improve their software or launch their own server-driven app to capture those $30. That's my take.

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.

So during their onboarding process they have a survey about your usage patterns. One of the questions is about speed of switching between tabs and one of the answers is "Tabs are switched very fast (<1 sec)"

I'm sorry, but 1 sec is not fast...

> “ People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client)”

This is the kind of asymmetric dismissal he’s talking about, and it’s not very good.

Dangerous? We run everything via cloud services and encrypted communication. “Sounds technically ridiculous” - so did probably every modern technological idea when it was new “you put your database in some other company’s servers?!”.

You’re mostly proving PG’s point.

We can still create and run programs on our computers. This is more important than you think.

Delegating power/freedom is dangerous, we're already delegating too much.

Yeah I mean I’m with you - I like local control and I think Urbit is cool because of this.

That said, the potential for mighty is real and dismissing it for these reasons is dumb. The same logic would have also dismissed nearly all modern wildly successful tech companies.

It's funny how this context changes the entire the article. I didn't realize that this was related to Mighty and thought it was a good "call to arms" for domain experts in non-tech industries to disrupt their markets.

It’s quite illuminating to see the very forum that PG created is calling him out on his shortcomings. Almost all the recent posts by PG were panned down by HN hivemind and PG seems to take no hints from the wisdom of the HN crowd. The case with MightyApp is the latest in the saga.

> Paul Graham is indirectly talking about

I find it strange that for someone that is a relatively immune from any real scrutiny, and constantly claiming to be a bold thinker, PG is always so coy in his writing.

I would find PG's recent stream of ego driven rants much more enjoyable and potentially insightful if he would just say what he's really trying to say.

He might be trying to add strength to his arguments by making them somehow more general, but since these pieces always seem very clearly about a specific bone PG has to pick, the result is they read as some of the most cowardly essays I've ever encountered.

Agreed.

He is trying to build a stronger case by using an elaborate straw man argument.

Turns out to be quite transparent and poor.

hahaha, fuck, I remember ages ago, maybe 2013, when people were trying to get me to buy into the "web 2.0" craze -- "Web is the future!", "web can scale!", "nobody will install apps!", "your stuff will be accessible everywhere!"

funny how they all turned out to be mixed bags. the best part? people telling me web apps are "lighter". even back then I knew that was a hot load of bullshit.

good to know the other shoe has dropped and we're really going full-circle to thin clients/mainframes, but shittier.

Perhaps he is indirectly talking about Mighty. We could still consider what he says here on its own merits.

Could perhaps the idea of a thin client inside a thin client not be an idea that could be further developed to be of use one day?

These "Mighty is bad" arguments are actually arguments in support of Mighty.

They are arguing that technology shouldn't need Mighty. The mere fact they are complaining about the state of the world means that there is a problem that needs solving.

> 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".

The main idea of the article is that when someone who is a domain expert proposes an idea that seems wrong, there is a chance that this idea is a great idea because why would a smart person proposes a stupid idea? They must've known something.

He says that in history, great ideas started like that. But he didn't provide examples. I didn't find the article practical because of that. It would have been a lot more useful if it provided contemporary examples that support the claims made.

I think there are enough examples for and against.

He does give the example of Copernicus, I believe Louis Pasteur would be another good example. PG does say he is speaking mostly of maths, sciences, etc.

But there are also many examples where the domain experts missed the opportunities, and somebody else stepped in.

The AirBnB gang weren't domain experts in hospitality. Coinbase founder wasn't an expert in finance (though he was an expert in security I believe), Collison brothers weren't experts in credit cards, doesn't look like the founders of DoorDash were experts in hospitality or delivery.

Not to say PG is wrong, there is good logic to not dismissing ideas, and finding nuggets, but I think the model is being overfit. Or perhaps one wild ideas by domain experts doesn't negate the potential for wild ideas from non-domain experts.

It turns out that security was the domain where Coinbase needed expertise.

Selling something and taking a commission is not exactly the nosebleed seats of high finance. Lots of people with expertise in setting up a web site, and enough finance to run a business, could have become Bitcoin markets.

Indeed, a lot of them did. Most of them got hacked, sooner or later, because protecting billions of dollars of value from adversarial forces is very, very difficult.

Coinbase didn't. Security is the hard part.

Very good point, and thanks for clarifying.

However, it still speaks to the initial point. Coinbase didn't have an insight as a domain expert which lead to their huge success.

It's also a common theme for Kent Beck, who "invented" extreme programming.

> i have good ideas, i just don't know which of them are good up front. hence, looking foolish is a prerequisite for looking smart.

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/kentbeck/status/11329885166594867...

This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin.

1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progression of the probability space.

Currently, It seems 40%+ likely that Bitcoin will end up as an accidental Ponzi scheme with a crash based on late adopters rushing out. But there is also still a 10%+ chance that it replaces gold as a currency hedge for the next 20+ years and 5+ percent chance that it becomes a first class currency.

For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?

I'm new at this, having just purchased some miners, but have followed the space using a similar logic. For the 10% view I'd consider the insane amount of institutional money chasing the entire value chain, which will not be shy about protecting itself.

The policy environment is still evolving; the FinCEN travel rule will put the hurt on crypto ATMs and the exchanges (to some degree). But it's good collateral, it doesn't (generally) have storage costs like gold, the growth of supply is well understood. Potential positive catalysts remain, including a US btc ETF, the impact of cme's micro contract, and geopolitical developments further constraining the supply of ASICs.

Its clear from the above that I view it more as a store of value than something you should spend as a currency. Ethereum-world (incl stablecoins) seems to have a lock on the latter. It will be interesting to see what happens when ETH shifts to POS.

People buy BTC so they can sell it for USD.

Most BTC sits idle in exchanges like coinbase.

Who in his sane mind would use an appreciating asset as currency?

Who exactly is a "domain expert" in bitcoin? The whole thing was created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago, and all of the so called "domain experts" are johnny come latelys who smelled a quick buck.

The whole thing was not created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago. The building blocks used in bitcoin have been around for many years before this in things like hashcash. Furthermore distributed consensus is a topic researched for decades. The term cryptocurrency uses crypto as a base which has been researched for centuries. Bitcoin is a novel constuction around crypto primatives relying on economic incentive to solve distributed consensus. There are clearly domain experts here.

In terms of the tech, yes. But that doesn't give you any insight into the market, which is what the comment I was replying to was talking about.

Andreas Antonopoulos, Vitalik Buterin, any of the core devs at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, anyone who has studied blockchain and cryptographic currency systems for the past 10 years, etc. Keep the wool over your eyes.

Let's not kid ourselves, this thin-client re-package is a marketing effort to push forward a paradigm shift that allows companies to grab more power and control of our 1's and 0's

... whatever value proposition it is packaged up in is just marketing and propaganda ... even if they charge money for it.

My favorite crazy ideas from Science are

- "Imagine, they're like really small animals, but the're too small to see! The're everywhere! They live on us, in us, around us! They are what makes us sick!" (Pasteur, germ theory of diseases)

- "You know how there can be mountains as huge as the Himalaya? Easy! In reality, all continents are really like small leaves floating on a see of magma, and they're bouncing into each other, and when they crash we get these huge mountain ranges and continents." (Alfred Wegener, tectonic plates)

- "You know time? Yeah, it's really different for everyone, and there isn't even a thing such as 'simultaneous'. I'm serious! Just imagine riding on a train and playing with a flashlight and a watch!" (some patent clerk in Switzerland)

More recently:

Seeing small things is difficult. Instead of making microscopes better, what if we made the samples bigger?

(Expansion microscopy)

There are two ways of looking at this:

1. PG is selling us something. 2. PG just open-sourced a part that seems like a component of the YC admissions logic.

I personally don't care if it's just 2) or if it's 1) and 2) - in each case I get to learn something new and for that I am grateful. Basically, they must have established that whenever they can't tell if you're right or wrong, they ask themselves how likely are you to know something that they don't. This seems obvious enough, but only after you've heard it explained. Also, it might be obvious to each individual to a different degree, so when you consider that YC applications are reviewed by a large group of people, it's almost certain that this is all codified in such a way that the reviewers are not just judging the startup alone, but likely also the founder independently of their startup. As you can tell, I clearly don't have any inside knowledge here and this is all just speculation. But if I were to submit a YC application, I would certainly ask myself now more than ever before how to make people believe that I am an expert in the field of my startup.

I think a lot of people - dare I say it, even PaulG - are missing the point of Mighty (or not putting it into words properly).

Mighty isn’t betting on the internet continually getting more bloated, or being better than a thick client. Even for a poor person working mostly in Figma, buying a decent laptop will be much more cost-effective.

What they are really selling is the equivalent of upgrading your laptop to a new model while it’s still running. Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches.

The two biggest threats to Mighty are Apple/MSFT building “snapshot” recoveries in new hardware (almost AMI-like), and real adoption of saving bookmarks, history and passwords to the cloud by signing in to Chrome (most I know are hesitant). As has always been the case in this industry, the hardware is irrelevant.

This isn’t game-streaming, where you unlock hardware economies of scale because most users play a tiny amount a day on average. Your browser is always on.

> Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches.

What a luxurious problem to have: would rather swipe my card and pay 50$/month than buy a new laptop - ugh!

I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box.

Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's often the curious outsiders that disrupt the status quo, not the well connected insiders.

Those are all excellent examples of the main reason why innovation can not be done in established businesses: the fear of cannibalizing the cash cow will stifle any real innovation.

Was the Playstation not revolutionary?

I don't think so, at least not in any technical aspect. Pretty much everything about the tech was a logical extension of industry trends. It began life as a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES similar to Sega's SegaCD for the Genesis/MegaDrive. Outside the technology, the low license cost and relative ease of developing for it built a sizeable and varied library of games, which I think was a major contributor to its success, but neither of those things strike me as particularly revolutionary.

Bell Labs is a counterexample to what you said. It developed the first transistor, photovoltaic cell, fiberiptic, lasers, cctv and some other things. Oh, and cellphones of course.

Ditto Xerox Parc and modern user interfaces, ethernet and and laser printers.

Agreed, it wiuld be more accurate to say it is not possible in companies that are optimizing finances short-term. Bell invested a ton of money with the hope it would bring results long term. I have yet to see a company's board authorizing that now...

It’s also just as often someone who’s worked in an industry for a while and has a bunch of good ideas from understanding the problems. We put the college kids making big companies on a pedestal but most startups are from people who know the domain.

You won’t find a revolutionary import/export company that doesn’t have some knowledge about the logistics industry. But you are more likely to be paying attention to new technologies as they emerge that might allow you to come up with the revolutionary ideas. I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older I’ve stopped spending my time fiddling with all my devices. As a result I’m less likely to realize when something new and exciting might be within reach, until it hits a higher point on the bell curve of maturity.

However, for everyone of those examples there are many counter-examples: Intel came out of Shockley, ex-IBMers went onto found several other companies (SAP, Peoplesoft,...)...

So Im skeptical of this outsider/insider characterization, IMHO it's almost always the individuals.

Yeah this feels like an example of a narrative that sounds compelling but could easily be overstated. How many breakthrough innovations have “insiders” made that aren’t as noteworthy because they are more expected? Google was given as an example by the parent comment. Google also made a lot of breakthrough innovations in the distributed systems and browsers space after their outsiders phase.

I agree. The iPhone is the perfect counter-example to this narrative: perhaps one of the most revolutionary pieces of hardware or software in the last 20 years, it came out of Apple, an established company at the time.

>Google didn't come out of Yahoo.

from my reading of the history of Yahoo they had plenty of good ideas that they destroyed because the problem was not domain experts but thinking they were in the wrong business (media!)

I agree 100%. The list could be continued indefinitely.

Less positively formulated, you could also say people outside an industry are naïve enough to start something people inside would deem impossible.

You could also look at the list of Google's failures.

Why are all your examples software companies? Certainly not because most of the world's revolutionary ideas are from programmers. Perhaps there are benefits to domain knowledge for coming up with revolutionary ideas in, say, biology or chemistry or electrical engineering or literature or political science or manufacturing or medicine...

I'm curious to see a list of world-changing ideas that came out of domain expertise and those that the essay claims could be dismissed because the person was not an expert.

AirBnB, which is perhaps pg's favorite company, would never have gotten into Y Combinator without Michael Seibel and the endorsement of the JTV crew. AirBnB simply would not exist today.

So I hope people don't read this essay and think, "I'm not a domain expert, so I'll give up on this idea." Somewhat of a dangerous essay for that reason.

I'd argue that for unique companies like AirBnB the founders become domain experts while they're building the company.

I figured that was subtext, and that we're not necessarily talking about what a hotel executive would think.

I don't think pg intended that crazy new ideas require someone to be a domain expert, just some expertise. Slight wording difference.

In the case of music, one could have domain expertise on audio files, compression and domain expertise about file sharing and domain expertise about younger people's listening habits. That's just having some insights into the domain, several as is the case with Napster. Music industry execs in those days probably had domain expertise on contract law, revenue sharing models, marketing and didn't have a clue about file sharing or audio compression.

Also want to mention the examples you mention seem to have not much "newness" to them to be "crazy new" in my opinion.

When I think of "crazy new" ideas, I think of things like stuff that came out of PARC in the 60's. If you go watch the Stanford 2 part series "How To Invent The Future" with Alan Kay on youtube [0] it goes into a lot of detail about them.

The challenge there with Xerox was they couldn't capitalize on every single idea that came out, just not logistically possible for a company to really do that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

SpaceX and Tesla came 'out of' PayPal.

> the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box.

I don't know about that... look at physics for example. You have plenty of experts who are total mavericks and then a bunch of outsiders spewing crankery and messing up on the basics.

He didn't say "the accepted circle". Just domain experts.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were domain experts - they were doing a PhD dissertation on mapping and indexing the web.

The other businesses you mention aren't all that crazy; they just needed good implementation.

Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics. You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telling this one story over and over again, a story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem.

The system, lol, I mean our culture and society, is very resilient to change. If it wasn't, it would be a different system. A part of the resilience, the reason it doesn't crash down into chaos and anarchy is because it rejects and ostracizes people with new ideas. It's by design, how it evolved. However, it also needs to evolve and grow and the people who do that have to endure.

Not all people who are on this 'Hero's Journey' are correct. Disney isn't addressing whether the crazy new idea is good or not, although in their media it is always a good idea, which is what Paul Graham is writing about. Their stories are addressing the journey a person endures if they have any crazy new idea that challenges their culture and society, good or bad. Whereas, Paul Graham is looking to quantify signals that a crazy new idea is good, something he should invest in. To which, I'd add asking if the person with a crazy new idea is honest, not only to other people, but more importantly honest to themselves, integrity. If a person can separate delusion from fact except for that one idea, that's a signal.

[0]https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...

I feel like Godwin saying this, but the other side of that coin is that's the same process that Joachim Feist's biography describes Hitler as going through.

You might be a Skywalker, but you don't know which one.

Also, Erich Fromm's, a German psychoanalyst, 'Escape from Freedom' which is a social psychology treatise on the rise of Nazism published in 1941 about how people innately shirk responsibility and the relationship between a person's freedom to make decisions and how much social and personal responsibility they assume.

The book is about how Hitler came to power but what I saw was a manual on how to become a very evil person. I remember thinking halfway through the book, 'Oh, this is why negging is a very effective seduction technique.'

(I looked up the word assume to make sure I'm using it correctly here and even in its definition power and responsibility are interchangeable which makes sense because there is a relationship in our reality between power and responsibility. Strangely, Fromm didn't use the word shirk in this context, I think I get that word from Dr. Seuss' 'Horton Hears a Who'. Probably a good thing that Dr. Seuss got to me first. That is the wisdom of the Disney folks.)

Similarly, I was going to say it's the story of Thanos.

"story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem"

I think Campbell's "journey" is about storytelling and the narrative journey, with a heavy dose of Jungian psychology, not about tech/science ideas. So I'd say it doesn't fit here.

That's the part that screenwriters often talk about. But his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, covers more than that and there are insights applicable to being a scientist.

A key insight is that mythology's interpersonal structures are special to people, and our minds are wired to see them everywhere. A neuro-Bayesian might call them a prior. As a result, if your role in society somewhat resembles an archetype, the public is likely to perceive you mostly or entirely in terms of that archetype.

Scientists are at risk of being pattern-matched to the Daedalus archetype. The public will ascribe all sorts of Daedalus-nature to you (even those who don't recognize the name) and you'll wonder "Why would they assume all those things about me???".

The book may shed some light what's going on and how to deal with it.

Interesting! I didn't read that book but a book derived from it, by Christopher Booker, titled Why We Tell Stories. I disliked much of it, it was very pretentious and reductionist and went as far as to suggest stories which deviate from the hero's journey are somehow flawed.

Maybe I should go to the source, thanks for pointing out there's more to it.

Newton's law of universal gravitation is quite useful even if not fully accurate. Psychologically and sociologically people especially children need to be informed and inherit a tradition which is done through story telling. Campbell points out that humans haven't changed physiologically in the last 10,000 years, what has changed are the traditions passed down by story telling. Contained in myths is more than how to tell a captivating and compelling story but also how to use symbolism, perhaps a more direct language than words. He says the myths, which people carry in their memory and thoughts as they go about their lives, serve four main functions. The first is dealing with the mystery of the universe and the human condition. Then it has a cosmological function to describe the universe and phenomena such as thunder and lightning which we now do with science. It has a sociological function informing people how to behave and act in their society and culture. And, lastly, a pedagogical function. Perhaps one day we can explain the mind and consciousness with neurology but like Newton's law, spirituality, symbolism, and mythology is very useful today.

In the context of Disney's use of mythological symbolism in their story telling, it has everything to do with tech/science. When children repeatedly watch movies like Marvel's Black Panther and pretend to be the character by dressing up, the characters become that child's identity. When they are faced with new situations like going to a new school or having to deal with bullying, they are informed how to deal with the situation by the memory of the story. In the Black Panther there is a fictional highly technologically advanced nation called Wakanda. This isn't just about telling a compelling story, it is deliberate informing girls especially girls of African decent of what their relation to the society they are born into is. The character Shuri is Head of the Science and Information Exchange. Someone at Disney decided to put a black woman in charge and this is the sociological function of the myth watched by hundreds of millions of children all around the Earth. That is a crazy new idea.

One thing these girls who grew up to become scientists will have to face is after investing 4 years in college and another 4 in graduate school they likely will be discriminated against because of the color of their skin or being female. The hero's journey is one of several mythological plots and it is the one these girls will need to be informed with at that point in order to prevent complete psychological breakdown when they face that challenge. Anyone with a crazy new idea whether it is in engineering, science, making movies based on comic books, music, or literature will have a similar journey.

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan

The Mighty App will either die or become a privacy nightmare. Because a browser can run arbitrary compute it will be abused, and if they don't want to die they will have to spy on what their users are doing to find abuse.

In the realm of entrepreneurship, I think domain experts who also risk tons of their cash on crazy ideas should be looked at even closer.

Y Combinator and Tesla were seen as stupid and crazy for a long time. Meanwhile I’ve seen a lot of domain expert entrepreneurs do really crazy things that lead nowhere when it’s VC money instead of theirs.

There are too many factors that'll decide whether it'll be success or not. I believe timings and luck are often overlooked.

iPhone certainly not the first touch screen display, Microsoft did have one, I believe. However Apple's timing was perfect, there was increasing adaptation of wifi connectivity and 3g, making it able to browse anywhere. Of course smoother interface and beautiful design also contribute big.

AmongUs was lucky they got advertisement from streamer, at perfect timing that was (is) pandemic and lockdowns.

Tesla can be considered crazy because they try to emerge with unknown product, with unknown market and unknown possibility of success. If we look at the past, Apple's iPhone was crazy too, because it was new product, with unknown market.

The first iPhone famously only had 2G cellular internet. At the time 3G phones were not ubiquitous but were readily available (had one as a mid priced Nokia flip phone), so I’ve always thought this was a fascinating aspect of the iPhone story. I bet the decision was made to go forward despite the product being slightly hobbled precisely because of timing.

The iPhone was an iPod that could make phone calls in an era when phones didn't do much beyond making phone calls.

So it was a no-brainer for those already carrying an iPod and a phone, even if it didn't do anything beyond being an iPod that could receive calls and texts!

The point of this is to have a simple heuristic to look at when filtering what might be become big in the future. There is no way to measure luck.

Timing would be hard, but I could think of some general ideas (behavior changes when theres a pandemic, assuming certain trends will go forward, etc)

He is an investor on this “crazy new idea” , I don’t believe him, he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the respect of millions , you don’t see them hyping crappy startups for a few bucks (billions* ) . I do respect the founders , and understand the have worked hard on this project , I just don’t think that just working hard on something makes it good , or whatever Paul Graham says is something I should accept as truth.

> he is just hustling his audience

And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.

yeah, good point. The saddest part is, I'm confident that people will buy into that "crazy idea" and before you know it, they have a 4B valuation. VCs always win, even when they loose.

In today's startup and VC ecosystem, they've already won. They don't have to ever become profitable, they just need to get money from their friends and connections, forever.

I don't recall who said this (if anyone does, please do share!), but it goes something like this: if you reach Series F, it means exactly what you think it means. Well, not anymore. It won't be long until we'll exhaust the alphabet for funding series names, and we'll go two letters.

And this is not even a critique of PG. It's just what the VC and startup ecosystem seems to have become. If anything, YC does seem to be a sort of counterbalance to this trend.

Sooo... it seems like you've got it all figured out. But from the bitterness in your voice, it doesn't seem to be the case.

I remember being at a similar point in my life - the success of other people seemed so different from mine that the game definitely felt like it was rigged. And of course it was rigged to some extent given the human nature, but there truly is a way to take advantage of the parts of the game that are a more of a level playing field than anything we've ever experienced since the dawn of humanity. And the first step towards getting there is to be less bitter and more inquisitive. If you think you got the VC industry all figured out but you can't get it to work in your favor, then clearly there's a mismatch in your thinking.

This is such an uncharitable read that I think it’s doing you a disservice.

I recommend imagining “what frame of mind or perspective would PG need to have to honestly believe what he’s saying?”

All of the people you mention are examples of the sort of folks the article mentions - domain experts with a "crazy new idea".

Unrelated to PG's post... I had no clue what MightyApp is so I went to their website [0]. When I scrolled to "Work without the fan noise" section on the homepage my fan started to work pretty hard. Haven't checked if they intentionally got the fan to work, but it was a nice coincidence.

[0] mightyapp.com

They could do the equivalent of those images comparing Full HD and 4K side-by-side, by having a button "with MightyApp" which reduces CPU load and makes your fan stop.

If this is about Mighty, the bad parts of it aren't technical.

- Even with today's concentration of information, there are several independent information sources left... and they want us to access them from a single point of failure?

- Who pays for this and how? How do I install my own ad blockers and anti tracking extensions on Mighty? Am I supposed to just trust them that they won't sell my advertising profile?

- What happens to the sites Mighty management disagrees with? Do they become inaccessible? Or they render badly? Especially since they're an American company and society is getting ultra polarized over there...

Exactly. The tech is farcical (surely even a proponent of them can see that?) but that's not really Mighty's fault.

It's bad because their strongest viable business plays seem to all involve leveraging their access to people's browsers in not-so-nice ways.

Founders: "Write that down"

I think there is some evolutionary psychology at play in people's bias against "Crazy New Ideas". A human hunting and gathering on a savanna with a crazy new idea is likely to be killed by a lion or starve. Sure the new ideas sometimes were breakthroughs but the idea-haver's peers likely experienced strong selective pressure to wait until there was good evidence that an idea was unlikely to get one killed before endorsing it and practicing it themselves.

In modern times we should feel more safe to have "Crazy New Ideas", we probably need them to solve many of the problems our world faces today. But we are biased against new ideas since our brains have evolved to see them associated with negative outcomes like death by lion or exile from the tribe. There is a lower risk of death by big cat today so people should feel more willing to have an celebrate new ideas.

There is no question that many important ideas sounded crazy at first.

The problem is that these ideas are a tiny minority of all new ideas.

The vast majority of new ideas are eventually proven invalid.

So just because an idea is rejected, does not mean that it is guaranteed to triumph.

> Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.

This is survivorship bias. He is not wrong in that yes, we should consider ideas from domain experts carefully and not be overly dismissive. But it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out.

Graham should know better, he talked about arc as the messiah for five years before getting beat to market by Clojure. Now they barely do proper language releases.

He doesn't say that crazy ideas by domain experts always work out. He makes two claims:

1) That if the crazy idea is from a domain expert, it deserves to be taken seriously. It doesn't deserve to be taken as gospel, but it shouldn't be dismissed outright.

2) He's betting (but not stating as fact) that if you did blindly support the crazy ideas of domain experts, you'd be right more often than you're wrong.

This is not the same thing as saying domain experts are always right. Simply that all things being equal, you're better off betting on their expertise over your own ignorance. But even better than that is to look into the matter until you have sufficient expertise to properly evaluate their idea.

From TFA:

> Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do.

It's likely that you're both right. If something is biased 45% off of a coin toss, but gives 25x returns, it's still positive EV.

This is a part of VC and speculative investment that a lot of people gloss over. Success is the difference between being wrong 95% of the time and being wrong 97% of the time. (And, with Softbank around, sometimes it's the difference between being wrong 97% of the time and 99.5% of the time.)

Having crazy ideas seems to be a prerequisite for taking over the world with an idea. The alternative is having familiar ideas which are already pervasive, or having no ideas.

> it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out

Who believes that?

It would be survivorship bias if the author suggested a rule here - but this quote is only a statement that 'this can happen'.

Where the author suggest a rule: "Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value." - it is hedged against survivorship bias.

It seems people often have a weird "anti-bias" to believe that everything that goes on to be wildly successful was originally dismissed as ridiculous or impossible. First of all, it's not true. There are plenty of examples of ideas that seemed good to begin with and turned out to be good in practice. So something seeming ridiculous doesn't really count as an important quality in predicting success. Secondly, even if it were somehow true that all successful ideas seemed ridiculous, that still says nothing about how likely something is to succeed. What percentage of failed ideas originally seemed ridiculous? It's also an important question, but I guess one you don't need to answer if you're a billionaire and have a large audience of worshipers.

Sometimes a stupid idea is just that.

The problem is compounded by the fact that most of this is just a storytelling retcon anyway.

Mighty is trying to make your browser experience smoother, faster, whatever (saying nothing of the larger vision). That's obviously a good idea, and it's easy to tell a story about how the founders overcame huge technical hurdles to make it work, and so on.

But then Mighty is also obviously one of the ugliest, most inelegant ideas ever invented, which, in case it fails, can be used to point it how obvious it was.

So, yeah. Not sure there's much to be learnt here?

“Please work on new things and sell me your equity a pittance, so that I may become richer on a few home runs, while most of you fail miserably.”

Seems like the privacy implications of this are not worth it for any serious company.

I was watching Rudy Giuliani yesterday on youtube, talk about how the FBI accessed and monitored his iCloud account for over a year. Which included his privileged lawyer/client information. If they can do that to a president's lawyer, while he's defending the president. They can do it to anyone.

Do you have a source for that? It seems extremely implausible for a number of reasons.

Sure, Rudy made a video detailing the FBI breach of his iCloud account. [Starts at the 18:30 minute mark]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcjaaBcmUVg

Hmm, I think I meant "evidence" more than "source".

Did you watch the video? The FBI itself disclosed to Rudy's lawyer that they accessed his iCloud. Thats a post facto admission from the government itself. There's no good reason to think Rudy, a practicing lawyer for 40+ years, is making up statements of legal fact.

Article with statements from Rudy's Lawyer https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-feds-got-rudy-iclou...

Interesting, thanks.

> Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry.

I wonder if most people realize this? In my experience, it seems like a characteristic that defies intellect and education. Incredibly smart people are, if anything, someone's more dismissive of new ideas because of their confidence that it just won't work.

Related: when ideas are young, they must be nurtured like saplings. Too much criticism will kill them, they must be watered and fed to give them a chance.

> it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever

This happened to me when I was younger. I had an idea that could best be described as Uber, years before Uber existed. I worked hard on analyzing this idea, preparing all sorts of financials, enrolling in an incubator program to understand how to pitch, getting help everywhere I could.

The incubator held a pitch event that would be attended by a range of people from different professions and judged by a panel of their choosing.

I made my presentation. It went very well. Until one of the five judges essentially took over. Up until then I had received reasonable questions and offered reasonable answers. He chose to be brutally dismissive. I don't know his background but the guy attacked at such a level that no other judge asked any questions. It was truly distressing, to say the least. Once the firing squad treatment ended I said "thank you" and left the auditorium.

I must have been obviously fuming and the attack must have been obviously unfair to some in the audience because an executive from UPS (the shipping company) decided to follow me out and talk to me. After calming me down he said he though my idea was excellent, that it needed refinement and that I should not give up on account of that jerk. Still, I was rattled. Definitely.

I was too young and stupid to process that event for what it was: A jerk being elevated to judging startup ideas who was there to feel superior by hurting people. Again, I was too young to process that and I did not have anyone around to help me get past it. I quit. I abandoned that particular dream. All because of that one jerk.

Now, many years later, I wish I hadn't. I wish I had been equipped with the wisdom to dismiss him for what he was and move on. Again, too young, didn't have enough experience and this guy was at the right place and the right time to destroy me. And that he did.

Thankfully my career moved on. I have nothing to complain about. I sometimes wonder how much of that goes on in the startup scene. I wonder how many great ideas (or potential entrepreneurs) evaporate because of assholes who want to "seem clever".

A fast heuristic on the value of crazy ideas would be: a) is the premise of this idea based on the rejection or falsification of an established consensus or convention, and b) does this person (the proponent) survive?

A crazy idea is just betting a majority is wrong. What makes it smart is not about being right, it's that you have figured out how to make money if the consensus is vulnerable or wrong.

Some of the the biggest startups and plays of the last decade were bets against conventions and rich country taboos like letting strangers crash on your couch, driving strangers around in your car, straight women wanting anonymous hookups and the normalization of sex work, non-technical people using cryptography, working class people investing in alterantive assets - let alone understanding what a short squeeze is enough to execute one, watching movies on little laptop screens.

What makes an idea 'crazy' is that it is against one that people align with because the alignment itself means being aligned to power. Most of what people believe, they do so because it works for them, and by works I mean aligns them to what they percieve to be powerful. Most money seems to be made getting short weaker middle class conventions.

A crazy idea is making the call that an emperor has no clothes. I suspect the secret to getting short naked emperors is not so much a track record for upholding convention, but rather, a track record of suviving.

The problem with this is selection bias. When you say you've studied the "history of ideas", what you've actually studied is the history of notorious ideas that worked.

You have nothing remotely resembling a proper sampling of ideas. The ones that failed simply get forgotten

This video is relevant. They talk about "openendedness", serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems.

There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s

I watched this entire video and it's awesome. Their whole channel is a gold mine of information.

Yes, it's the best channel together with Yannic's channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew

I come every couple of days back for more.

This is article comes at a good time. I feel like the tech sector over the past 10 years has been focusing mostly on very safe bets.

It's been shocking for me to see how terrified multi-millionaires are to invest even $100K into a risky but potentially transformative project; instead preferring to pile onto the latest hot startups which other big investors are dumping their money into... Like a herd of sheep. This behavior underlies a lack of self-confidence.

When you have a lot of money, your odds of success are much better, so why waste it and act like a sheep? Is it because a lot of wealthy people nowadays come from lower classes and they've struggled to shake off the herd mentality which is so pervasive among the lower classes of society? They think they're playing the same game as before; with all odds stacked against them, but this mindset is counterproductive to a wealthy person. Once you have a lot of money, the game is rigged in your favor, not against you; there is no excuse to act like a sheep anymore.

If the majority of rich people keep acting like sheep, the system will collapse under its own weight from the sheer inefficiency. Capitalism doesn't tolerate deadweight; it shakes it all off sooner or later.

Now investors are realizing that if they want to only make safe bets, then they should just invest in Bitcoin or some other scheme with high network effects... Maybe now is a good time for investors to actually judge investments based on their disruptive potential instead of just looking to other investors to outsource decisions. If you just want to participate in a social scheme; just invest in crypto. If you want to invest in a business, then you can't avoid taking risks!

When I look back at video clips from the 1970s, there was a diversity there that has been sort of lost. Things got developed in smaller regions and if they were good enough, they got introduced to a larger world. So we got some variety without everything having to overcome a perception of "crazy."

Now we kind of think everyone is so connected that you have to be "crazy" to think X rather than realizing sometimes X makes perfect sense locally and it only seems bizarre to outsiders. "Crazy" often means it's a radical departure from existing ideas rather than an incremental improvement and there used to be more latitude for saying "Hey, let's import this idea from elsewhere that seems crazy here but it's proven and solid somewhere else."

And I think that's a challenge we need to work on. The world seemed really cool and exciting about forty or fifty years ago and I think that's because things were only starting to get connected. Now we are sort of over-connected and expected to all know what "normal" is, as if normal is the same the world over when it isn't.

I think there is a cost to that.

>The reason is that everyone is too conservative.

Everyone isn't too conservative: veterans in a field are conservative because they have earned the war wounds they carry. Which is why you tend to see "disruptive apps" targeting younger people. They don't have the life experience to understand, at first glance, why an idea may be extremely dangerous.

I'm young enough to remember being that way myself: Who cares if someone gets my bank account info, what are they going to do, pay off my student loans? Spend the $25 I have in my checking account? Oh no!

I abhor people who throw around the idea that someone in tech being "conservative" is somehow wrong or bad. They're conservative because they know just how much is at risk for the folks who don't know any better.

It's technological manifest destiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=36m48s

That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles.

But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive founders can solve much smaller problems at a rapid succession, whereas “conservative industry experts” simply wouldn’t even start because it’s too hard.

This. I started my company in my early 20s and had no clue how much work it would be due to my own naïveté. Indeed, we broke the problems down and worked through them one-by-one until we had a functioning business model. On the one hand, it would be a lot harder to start over knowing what I know now about how much work it takes. On the other, it would be a lot easier because I got a lot better at problem solving and decision making.

Yeah, I have absolutely less than zero interest in starting my last company again. That was hard, and I had no idea all of the problems I was going to run into.

I'm super excited to start my next thing, though, which is surely going to be way easier! ;)

Godspeed, soldier.

It's true, but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here. We tend to focus on the stories of successful founders. To some extent, those are even the only ones we hear about.

Because of that phenomenon, there is absolutely no incompatibility between the existence of disruptive startups, and the opinions of more conservative voices. Similar to how there's no incompatibility between the existence of people who win the lottery, and the opinions of people who don't play the lottery.

This is a good point, but I'd argue survivor bias doesn't really apply here - successful startups often have naive founders because they are otherwise considered 'too hard' by most people to start. It is simply hard to take down a massive incumbent, for example, so most people don't try.

Lots of startups fail, and a few succeed. I find it an interesting leading indicator that most startups who succeed have founders that are naive in some way.

Doesn't mean you can't win and not be naive, and obviously correlation doesn't imply causation, but the phenomenon is frequent enough that I don't think it's entirely baseless either.

> but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here

Hi HN, entrepreneurial scientist here. You have just given me an idea. Maybe I shouldn't be posting this buried in the comments but can always be reposted elsewhere.

"survivor bias"

This is a constant talking point in HN. It allows anyone to plausibly dismiss absolutely any advice from a successful entrepreneur (no offence to the poster here intended, they may be right - it's just that it can be used anywhere).

It's so powerful, in fact, that the only plausible retort is to look to serial successful entrepreneurs - Jobs, Musk etc. - as evidence that it's at least not entirely luck that leads to success. And even that counterargument is on shaky ground.

So what we need to do is to get more scientific. We need to know how many other startups were formed in that area, or with that idea, or just in general. I think this is totally doable. What we need is a bad ass business scientist in some university to take on this challenge. Actually, hell - this is a startup idea in itself. So it probably exists somewhere.

I would begin by monitoring all new company registrations in my home country (UK) and keeping a look out for tech startups. You can check their websites at regular intervals, look at Companies House metadata, and scrape news to classify them correctly. Monitor accounts returns to see when/if they trade, and fold. Although it'd take time to build the database, after a year I think you'd already have interesting observations.

You could also do phone interviews with (a sample of?) founders. The goal would be to get them to almost "register" themselves in the same way as a medical trial might be registered. You'll definitely have a problem with confidentiality, so you may need to delay the release of data by 10 years, or to release only aggregate data, or else to rely only on aggregating public domain information to infer activity and talk in general terms to founders.

Other sources of data: incubator batches, demo days, product hunt, advertisements placed by the startups, job adverts. I'd also do "exit interviews" with founders that are no longer registered as directors at Companies House, or when their companies cease trading.

If we can do this, we can start to get absolutely solid numbers on whether survivor bias is really a thing. Like, are their explanatory factors as to why Company A did well and not B, or was it just A was lucky? Because if B won because they took VC or because they launched earlier or whatever it is, then we can start to say - survivor bias isn't really a thing, because the best funded or quickest company wins. And here's the best strategy.

This data would seem so valuable to VCs and founders that you'd think you could make money from it.

And then we could put an end to "survivor bias" as an argument - which presumably would be the outcome (ah confirmation bias! i can't be that scientist) because otherwise it's disproportionately luck and we can all go home now.

Ah, there was some guy on a podcast, I think Sam Harris or Tim Ferriss, that was writing a book and / or publishing on exactly this type of research. They reviewed like 500 some startups and how they failed (or succeeded) it was one of the first scientific based studies like that... would love if someone browsing could comment the name if this rings a bell, I'd have to hunt it down...

I don’t know what this is, but I want to. I think parent’s comment is a fantastic idea.

>> That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning

I think you overstate your case with the word "often". It is far more often that what they're building never amounts to anything. Even the most successful founders typically bat less than 500

You're right, but misread what I meant (and/or I was unclear!). I meant that when founders win it is often, at least partially, because they were naive when they started.

I did not mean to imply all naive founders win; that would be absurd. :)

This reminds me of people who have children very young and by the time they realize in their late 30s how crazy the idea of a 21 year old being the sole example of how a human should behave, the children are now adults. Some things best done with youthful ignorance I suppose.

There is a difference between thinking something is a bad idea because it's hard and thinking something is a bad idea because it's dangerous. Your Stripe example is an example of something that was hard. Mighty is an example of something that is may not actually be hard but is most likely dangerous.

The problem is that early on dangerous and hard are sometimes synonymous; people argued Uber was dangerous, and in some cases, it was - relatively unvetted drivers driving people around the city without a taxi license. But now it's changed how we move about the world.

It's hard to predict how the end of a startup will look from the beginning, but ambitious ideas often look dangerous, scary, hard, or impossible at the beginning.

It's not necessarily true. Some people are conservative and have forgotten the reason why.

From the article, PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously predicated on the person having deep domain expertise.

I don't think anyone with deep domain experience in banking would say "Who cares if someone gets my bank account info"

How exactly do we identify these domain experts? This also implies crazy disruption comes from within, which doesn't explain why successful companies are the ones getting disrupted. My only conclusion is that PG wants us to trust him or that his theory is a whole lot of smoke.

> PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously predicated on the person having deep domain expertise

Depending on what you mean by "seriously". It's not that a crazy idea by a domain expert is certainly the future - but they might be right 1 out of 10 times, compared to a crazy idea by a nobody who might be right 1/1000. Given the potential large return of crazy ideas, it's worth the time to investigate in more detail.

I feel like the same thing can be said about Boring Old Ideas. If the person who is speaking to you knows what they're talking about, there's good chance that they've identified a gap/opportunity and you should listen to them.

This seems more like an exercise in listening and trust than whether the idea is crazy or novel.

Might as well introduce this project here: https://planetarysunshade.org

We are domain experts, and are developing the support of domain eminences. It's an umbrella organization for anyone working on space-based climate intervention. Happy to chat with interested parties.

That is kind of reaching for the stars. Or shall I say last straw argument. I think a much easier winner is if you have a domain expert in one area and bring his or her knowledge to another field. A Designer who creates a web app to design logos. A fitness guru who develops a Drink. A car maker who builds space ships.

as PG has gotten richer, astoundingly so, I feel his writing has become of lower quality and less general utility. But, that's fine. I don't have to read it, but I do still adore and re-read his older works.

That being said, it's amazing that mental gymnastics all VCs these days will go through to make something that's completely nonsensical seem like it "could" make sense. e.g. NFTs and Andreesen Horowitz

I believe there is another factor, a bit more subtle, but I wonder if it is more pervasive.

Humans need to act. In order to act we need to believe that our actions are actionable. Anything, anything at all, that leaves us unable to act is a threat to our survival. A bear jumps out at you. Being unable to act because you don't know whether to play dead or run is deadly. Being unable to decide whether to wear a mask or not is deadly, even if both choices are both right or wrong. Maybe not said well, but when you consider all the actions you take in a day and what would happen if we could not decide.

As a side effect, I wonder if simply voicing ideas or bringing into view concepts that challenge the certainty we each require in order to get through a day, is in fact threatening.

Ironically, I'd dismiss this if it wasn't PG saying it, but this has survivor bias written all over it. No one remembers the ideas that were dismissed by domain experts that did not make it. This is the exact same argument that says college dropouts make the best CEOs.

This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app.

To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app.

I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope.

It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized here.

There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a CS401 style project.

This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation' being the funding system or creatively working around regulatory/legal hurdles.

I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage behind legal paperwork).

It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound, innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies.

These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically demotivated but financially motivated group.

I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here.

Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially sound and inspiring companies.

Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was at least some recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.

Indeed they are recompiling Chromium but that doesn't make it any more exciting tbh.

The VCs are just following the money. We're at the tail end of the economic boom brought on by computers. Until we have another paradigm-shifting scientific discovery, computers will be used to more efficiently match up existing assets (AirBnB) while serving ads and content that decays our social bonds/infrastructure (Facebook).

If there was less money in the system a lot of these quasi-innovative companies would die, or not even get off the ground. But there is tons and it is leading to the misallocation of a great amount of time, energy, and intelligence - at the cost of future generation's standard of living.

Paul Graham addressed this in his previous essay "How People Get Rich Now":

    The best way to envision what happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on top. Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able to punch right through the middle.

    The edges of the pond were pure tech: companies that actually described themselves as being in the electronics or software business. When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you meant. But now startups are punching right through the middle of the ice crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and TV networks and car companies.

That "pond" metaphor only works if anyone and everyone getting rich anywhere in the world all happen to be doing so at the companies that are popular topics of conversation within the Valley bubble.

Otherwise, what the fuck is he even going on about?

Unpopular opinion: the use of "tech" or "high tech" to describe many of today's tech companies is a misnomer.

For me, a tech company is a company that leverages advances in applied sciences and mathematics (computer science included) to create new, innovative solutions.

While there are certainly companies that are innovating in fundamental technologies and making that a cornerstone of their businesses, the vast majority of tech companies are little more than conventional businesses with some digital business automation plumbing. Innovative business models are still innovation - don't get me wrong - but they're not technology innovation.

It made sense to call e-business "tech" companies when the web was fresh and new and everyone was innovating, but these days, very few are pushing the envelope on the technology side. It's pretty well accepted that any business needs electronic technologies to work now: at what point do we stop calling every company that builds an app tied to a database a "tech" company and just call them an "[insert vertical here] business"?

I definitely agree, but with one exception: a fair amount of these companies have reached such a scale that they actually have to invent or at least develop new tech in order to run their business. Facebook and Twitter, for example, aren't primarily "tech" companies, but because they operate at such an insane scale, they regularly develop new tech that allows them to continue and grow. So the tech part is more or less vertical integration - not their primary business, but also definitely not negligible in terms of innovation.

I guess the question is: how close does technology R&D need to be to the core business to be a "tech" company? I don't have a good answer. Major automakers dump tons of money into R&D, but we'd never call them tech companies.

I was hoping he was going to provide a list of examples.

> Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.

Funny how he says this but then later goes on to mention Darwin. Perhaps we could say part of the natural selection of new "big things" is if they (both the ideas and the people) survive the early dismissiveness and criticism. I would welcome criticism from highly experienced and conservative people, because if you can respond meaningfully and survive - you're probably on to something.

"I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math, engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example, crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain experts in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to get legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts upon. Perhaps no one could be."

Weird. Math, engineering, and the hard sciences are the few places where it is possible to positively say an idea won't work.

I really wish PG would actually talk to some historians. History of Science is an extremely deep field with tons of professionals who have spent their lives studying this material. His overview is shallow. The only history book he cites is from fifty years ago!

It is so frustrating. There is this huge wealth of content available and a large group of people who'd want nothing more to be able to share what they know about the history of science and instead we get think pieces based in hunches, feelings, and generalities. The historians are right there! They want to talk to you!

You should use this opportunity to recommend an especially high-quality introduction/overview of modern history of science, approachable by a curious outsider.

Diving straight into books can be hard, since academics write for other academics.

But I recommend works by Paula Findlen and Tom Mullaney highly! Mullaney's work pushes back against a whole bunch of myths about the chinese language and its effect on technological innovation. Findlen's work covers both the history of technologies but also the technology of communication and the nature of information in the Renaissance period. Mullaney is weirdly involved on social media so that can be more approachable and Findlen's work is on the readable side for academic history.

The world is so much more complex than "a new idea is created from the ether, people criticize it, and then a paradigm shift happens and it takes over the world".

Philosophy of Science: the Central Issues (Curd, Cover, & Pincock) is a decent although limited aggregation

Thank you.

A very smart man, PG himself, once said [0]:

> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before.

PG started writing essays about what he knows well (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well.

[0] quoted here https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm from there http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html#c8508

I see little evidence he would want to talk to them, indeed his way of life is an insult to their discipline and their discipline is a threat to his way of life

Consciousness of history is inoculation against the sort of "thought leadership" PG sells

I personally know an unusual number of historians of science for a software engineer. If PG approached them with an open mind, I'm very confident that they'd love to talk to him. Historians do history because they love their topic so much that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and low pay. They want nothing more than to talk about the things they study.

> Historians do history because they love their topic so much that they are willing to suffer an abusive career and low pay.

Yes, incidentally people like this are probably not easily swayed by the minimally researched thoughts of a venture capitalist

I hope he talks to some historians but I fear he may intuit this and avoid it, consciously or not

I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their work with engineers!

> I hope your historian friends have a habit of sharing their work with engineers!

They do! There are growing collaborative projects between the humanities and software all over the place today.

That's cool! Always thought that would be fun to work on.

Being actually-correct about one's historical analogies and still making them work (or even finding that they don't! Gasp!) is harder than repeating "common knowledge" tales or fudging things to fit your narrative while writing with the same bold voice you would if you were actually-correct.

Not to pick just on PG—that's more common than not, really.

I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him.

Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.

I don't think he gets hundreds of likes because he's amazing (though some of what he's written has been). It's because his writing is an insight into silicon valley and VC culture. Even when I completely disagree with his opinions they're interesting to read because they give an insight into how him and many of his peers think. And as someone interested in this industry that's fundamentally interesting even when it's not great. Arguably more so.

I think this may be an American thing. People as successful as PG, Musk, Bezos, Gates etc become demigods, for a majority of people. Cults are created around them. They can never be wrong and so on.

As a result, the opposition arises too: the people who dislike these demigods for the same reasons their followers like them.

I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now.

All of the attention around these guys seems like an extension of celebrity culture. I know Europe (in particular the UK and France) have a somewhat large culture around celebrities and their opinions / comings-and-doings, but the US is on a different level.

These founder-cults seem like the cults around the Kardashians (or whoever), but for guys who couldn't care less about movies but really want to be rich.

> I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now.

I agree there's much less business related worship in Europe. I also worked a couple of years for a successful "startup" (it's a public company so hardly a startup any more), and wouldn't be able to name the founders. I've also been visiting HN for a good while and have no idea who PG is, beyond that he apparently is some boss at YC and likes to write controversial blog posts.

We do get our share of Gates/Bezos/Musk news but lots of it is quite critical, I don't think anyone sees them as role models.

You should offer some criticism about what he wrote. Dismissing something because of who wrote it is just as ineffective as liking something because of who wrote it.

I think that's the curse of our social media. At best you get a binary Like/Dislike mechanism, at worst just Like. There's no contextualization of those choices.

In this case, PG's writing is directly related to the discussions around MightyApp even though he doesn't disclose this fact. I think that's important because it's seemingly a conflict of interest being passed under the auspice of objectivity.

I also think it's important to discuss MightyApp, not for it's merits but for it's implications.

Unfortunately social media doesn't offer a "look at this shit" button along site the like button. I venture to say if they did there'd be a lot fewer likes.

Upvotes don't mean that something is perfect or worthy of worship. It means that something is interesting or (partially) insightful.

This essay is a frustrating read, because you can feel his condescension towards critics (oh, they must be envious, or taking cheap shots), and you get a window into his headspace in which he believes that his way of examining the world and arriving at substantially the same beliefs is the only correct way.

But to be quite honest, many PG essays fit this same basic structure, whereby some venture or belief of his is introduced in a slow-burn way, with lots of short sentences light on content as if trying to sound off-the-cuff but way too authored to sound convincingly so, and then a dispassioned but complete teardown of the critics of the idea. A subversion of an appeal to historical authority thrown in for good measure. He always comes across as the understated luminary whose low opinion of the clueless hordes or meddling schemers below him is emotionlessly obvious, and anyone who disagrees is clearly a meddling schemer because of envy or fear or some other existential insecurity, because his seldom-mentioned achievements ought to speak for themselves about the supremacy of his approach.

But what's especially frustrating about this essay is that it's clearly precipitated by the dismissive public reaction towards the Mighty app -- an observation shared by many others in this thread -- but this is intentionally unacknowledged by him, presumably so that he can pontificate about the bravery of weird ideas the envy and fear of others on his personal blog without soiling the name of a business venture he backed. But it's also evidence that with a simple Twitter beef, you can get under his skin -- a sad fact you'd be forgiven for doubting if you hang on every word of his essays.

You are aware this is his website, right?

A large proportion of people are here specifically because of PG and his endeavours, of course he's going to get lots of upvotes. Even if you don't agree with him, he's worth listening to, particularly if you have any aspirations to join YC.

Weird pop psy in the middle of this article. Forgive me if I don't just take your word on millions of people's motivations with no data or argument.

The alternative, of course, is when a plausible person expresses an implausible-sounding idea which turns out to be, well, wrong. For instance when Noam Chomsky presented his theory of Universal Grammar[1] which managed to impede and derail the study of linguistics for decades[2].

[1] - This is my own personal opinion supported by no evidence whatsoever.

[2] - Again, an outrageously subjective statement without an ounce of evidence to support it.

Chomsky’s followers are not as powerful as they used to be so you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a linguist. That said, this objection does not directly contradict Graham’s point. There are issues with Chomsky’s theories, but they are non-obvious and we learned a lot along the way. Would it have been reasonable to have dismissed these theories out of hand? Maybe but we false positives and false negatives exist as a trade off, and we would miss things if we try to lower our false positive rate too aggressively.

  A new idea is a beautiful and fragile thing. Attack people, not ideas.

Explains those attacking pg instead of his ideas. I guess.

Reasonable domain experts sometimes keep proposing the same idea, because it would be so cool. e.g. onlive, gaikai, stadia. Investors overlook the latency problem (BTW starlink might solve this) because of its compelling business advantages. Aka wishful thinking.

Analogous to Chesterton's fence (reforms should not be made until reasons for the current system are understood), paradigm-breakers could say upfront what new insight makes their idea plausible. This also makes for compelling and exciting marketing.

I really like the section on paradigms, particularly how they "vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them".

On the one hand, becoming proficient in the current paradigm makes it harder to see other ways (in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few), not least of all because of its cognitive load. On the other hand, without that proficiency, you can't stand on the shoulders of giants.

My favourite type of dismissal is:

"X is a stupid idea that nobody asked for and it will never even work. Besides we already have Y[1], so this is nothing new."

[1] Where Y is some product that foreshadows the functionality of X and is already successful among some set of users, although has some incidental limitations that prevent its growth

The title is misleading. I went into it thinking I will find some new crazy ideas, but there were none.

Sounds like an essay to state Arthur C. Clarke's "First Law":

  When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

...which really just boils down to "it's probably possible".

Here are the three:

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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.

I wonder if the backlash to Mighty and the resulting defensiveness will cause it to persist longer than it would have had it announced earlier or gotten less friendly feedback. Presuming it doesn’t get the widespread traction it was hoping for.

> The rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value of the outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x better

This is the primary point here - the "crazy idea" may (and likely does) have a low probability of being correct and succeeding, but with an outsized reward it may still be worth pursuing. This is, almost by definition, the correct way of looking at it.

Also note that he's talking about crazy ideas from "reasonable domain experts", not your run of the mill crazy.

This is not just a response to Mighty - he's been talking about this for years.

The problem I immediately see is that you have to qualify your domain experts. If it's someone you personally know, perhaps it would apply - otherwise you're opening yourself pretty wide to domain experts out to scam you.

Right. Examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially treated as implausible, and nevertheless worked out are plentiful, but so are examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially venerated as the miracle way of the future, and turned out to be complete BS founded on deception.

And because the second group fails (or were outright scams) the record of all of them is lost. We know about the HUGE venture capital failures like pets dot com, but there were thousands more in the $1-10m range nobody cares to even document. Similarly throughout history. The "crazy ideas that actually worked" are talked about because of how rare they are.

One area PG missed is someone, exceedingly bright, who gets interested in a totally new field where they have little or no expertise.

Using first principles they announce a bold and crazy idea. Say like Elon Musk and rockets. Sure he read some books and recruited people with domain expertise.

If you remember his story he tried to buy Russian rockets, they didn't take him seriously because he lacked the domain experience. So he was forced to take an even greater risk and build his own rocket. Doing something previously the province of only large nation states. Still he was able to pull it off.

The comments here have taken a different turn from what I came here for.

Anyway, is there some relatively unknown startup that everyone thinks is crazy at the moment? Like Twitter of 2007? I remember blogging their demise back then.

I can't speak to Mighty's potential, but this essay is quite good.

As one anecdote in support of its argument, I have an acquaintance who co-founded a startup about 10 years ago. Much like Dropbox's early skeptics, I didn't understand how this business solved any real problem that couldn't be trivially addressed in a multitude of other ways.

I was puzzled as the business continued to grow and open offices around the world, and I was astounded when they were acquired for many multiples of the minimal VC investment that they eventually accepted.

WeWork?

Heh. Not far off, in my opinion.

The carnivore paradigm is a great example, Paul. It's infeasible to diehard carnivores that one could live (and thrive) without animal protein. We evolved as humans on animal protein. Our deep addiction to this results in massive environmental damage using modern technologies to raise and hunt (obliterate) animal populations at scale- 77 billion land animals and 2.4 trillion fish annually. I'm betting on Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and all the new startups in the plant/lab meat space!

Great article. What most people are not taking into account with Mighty is that new ideas like this rarely stay the same...who knows what product/use case it morphs into? Maybe the browser implementation takes off, maybe it pivots to an OS rather than just Chrome...maybe becomes a backup / cross device solution. Maybe something that we haven't even thought of yet becomes possible with new technologies like 5G coming on board. We don't know.

Let my people try - humbly, a startup founder

I think most "crazy" ideas seem that way given the current constraints in that point in time and it's the domain experts that see the changing landscape which will make them viable.

It's hard to remember, but there was a time that YouTube seemed "crazy" as it was assumed that bandwidth costs would swamp the viability of any video startup.

See also: almost all the "dumb" early web startups that weren't dumb, but mistimed the market (Webvan, ePets)

The issue is that domain experts often have crazy ideas outside their domain. Typical example is a technical expert or a scientist having a crazy business idea.

These two parts seem contradictory:

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

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

I feel like he's prematurely dismissing the idea of dismissing an idea based on who proposes it because of who he's imagining doing (proposing) it, if that makes sense.

I'm currently dealing with explaining why we should at least try and understand Stephen Wolfram's "a project to find the fundamental theory of physics".

It is a very unconventional view certainly and one which I suspect many "reasonable" experts from the field might term a crackpot idea. But Stephen Wolfram is an expert himself and so I suppose Paul Graham's test stands.

should be prefaced with "within the context of american capitalism", because i don't think such views on personal ego and taking credit apply universally. There were a lot more crazy ideas when experimental science wasn't there to debunk them. And many science fields even today are lacking ideas, not methods, but not necessarily for fear of being ridiculed.

"Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead."

That's the VC business model in a nutshell

>People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested interest in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example, that some of Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen.

Nah man, it's because every time they’re asked about security they say “yes we did an audit no we won’t release the results”? I don’t know about you but I’d like to keep my passwords to myself

New Ideas aren't crazy. Crazy Ideas are crazy. That's why people say it won't work, because it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy because the person proposing it hasn't made a good enough case for it.

Getting people to agree with a new idea is about salesmanship. If people think your idea is crazy, you suck at sales. Coffee's for closers.

I wonder why Chrome's "Reading Mode" is not activated in Paul Graham's website. I really get used to read articles in Reader Mode, with the same style, background color, font size and without any other distracting elements of the page. His website font size is 13px, which is pretty small. So I copy+paste to Obsidian and read there.

Domain experts may lie, they might be sure that idea will never work but still propose it in order to increase company valuation, get funding, etc.

Example: self-driving cars. Probably, experts that work in this field are confident that self-driving cars are impossible even 100 years in future, but working on self-driving cars gives them money.

The most important idea like this in the world right now is expounded in the book The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton which everyone should read. MMT fits this article exactly except for the fact that PG says it doesn’t extend beyond “hard sciences”. It also extends to the dismal science

I believe the technology behind Mighty is amazing, the people involved are amazing, the experience for it's users will be amazing.

I believe the underlying reason for HN's reaction to Mighty has almost nothing to do with any of the above. To the contrary, most of us probably feel that Mighty will be a raging success. But we don't actually like that at all. When I reflect on my own thoughts, the reasons my initial reaction is pessimistic are:

1. If Mighty makes badly designed/architected apps "fast", nobody will fix the underlying issues.

2. The internet will be amazing for the folks that can afford to pay $30-$50/month and all others will have to live with a sub-par experience because of #1

3. Some other company will come along and try to subsidize Mighty for all those that couldn't afford it but they'll monetize by advertising and further personal data collection.

4. Further lack of control over core software on our personal computers.

I fear that one day I'll visit a website with a message saying "This website runs best using Mighty".

There were similar sentiments when RSS blogs started moving to medium. Medium is amazing! but at some point medium needed to introduce a 3 item limit.

More and more of the internet which a lot of us remember as this open thing that no one owns is being siloed into privately owned.

Unfortunately, that timeline probably why Mighty will go big - the business model is a trojan horse for a very lucrative global surveillance business, which challenges and likely surpasses current businesses ("social media" and "search engines").

HN and the tech crowd at large is cynical but also naively ethical... missing how ideas can be profitable because we're really thinking in terms of bettering society. Exploitation is where the real money is at.

medium isn't amazing - it's probably one of the _worst_ ways of putting writing on the web. pastebin is better than medium.

The idea of using reasonable domain experts as a filter to implausible-sounding ideas seems obvious for hard-technology and scientific problems. But what about entrepreneurial ideas that provide a social service, such as Uber or Airbnb? Were the founders "domain experts"?

What's interesting is both of those examples are relatively removed from the "original proposition" - Uber was "ridesharing" and now is "taxi on demand" and AirBnB was "couch surfing" and now is "unlicensed hotel".

He has a different essay explaining the Stripe founders were not experts at all when they started. I think there's multiple paths to success and change

Thomas Kuhn. I feel sorry for the guy. His work is the basis of so much armchair worldview building about the modern world and is relevant to a cultural practice of science that died out 200 years ago.

I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone use the word paradigm shift anymore.

I bet this is built using.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

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.

On a technical note, is there really no https on Paul's site? The link is http, and changing it to https throws an certificate error https://imgur.com/a/1rnsGnM.

What would be the purpose?

> They also vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for new ideas impossibly high.

I enjoy this style of writing. Seemingly simple but packs a lot of meaning (like JoelOnSoftware back in the day).

"If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous" - my reaction would be to ask: that's unexpected to me, what is different?

This entire article seems like some pretty obvious stuff that most people understand very well, wrapped in a veil of apparent profundity.

First of all: it makes one very large assumption from the beginning that is never mentioned: "I, pg, can confidently identify a reasonable domain expert".

That's basically a fallacy: this is the hardest thing to be sure of and Dunning Kruger applies heavily here (both for the apparent domain expert, and also for the person listening to their idea, who considers themselves such an excellent judge of the speaker's expertise).

Beyond that, there's nothing profound here: any "average" person, when listening to a person they trust (and "trust" here means they believe that this person is competent, i.e. is a "reasonable domain expert"), will heed their ideas, and be more likely to consider the "crazy" ones. Paul is not unique nor advanced in this regard.

The unstated problem is knowing whether you're good at identifying experts.

> Everyone is too conservative.

Interesting. Do VCs outperform the S&P 500 in general?

>"Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1532 -- but it wasn't till the mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion shifted in its favor.[4]"

Isn’t this pretty much what Thomas Kuhn said in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions back in the 60s? At one time that was hailed as one of the most important books of the 20th century.

Everything Paul wrote about in this post resonated with me. He avoided any examples, and looking through these HN comments, it's clear why. A lot of people assume that his experiences are specific, but no, there really is a culture of shooting down crazy new ideas.

I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of, "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy idea might have generated such a personal attack.

Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable.

There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with: incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be rejected immediately.

I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are important starting points, but after that the only thing that matters is hard work.

My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless, the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before checking them against the winning numbers.

> He avoided any examples

Because most people following HN knew about what SPECIFICALLY he was talking about.

This was a reaction, not something that happened out of nowhere.

I think the biggest problem of these statements is that you don't hear much of terrible ideas which failed initally.

I think Mighty is a reasonable hotfix on the face of it. Having said that, if the question is "How do we make the web less slow", the actual solution must be reducing inefficiencies in the web apps themselves. Mighty seems like the equivalent of saying your room is tidy because you've shoved all of your clothes in the wardrobe. It'll work but what happens when we need a Mighty for Mighty or something like that.

I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.

This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.

Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!"

It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which crashed and burned.

Of course some of these ideas - a minority - turned out to be successful. But a little digging shows success was not about the quality of the tech, and more the quality of the marketing, with some occasional monopolist strong-arming.

In fact this is very much the US model. Take an okay to good idea, hype it into the stratosphere with a massive marketing and brand recognition campaign, and sell it at an inflated price.

If you're lucky you can pitch it as a B2C Veblen lifestyle good or a B2B strategic corporate necessity. Win.

That's very different to debating the tech itself purely on intrinsic technical merits.

In a very literal sense it's a different argument happening in a different space. It's neither helpful nor clarifying to imply it isn't.

> Just read some vintage issues of Byte

I still have the AI issue of Byte[0] and there still aren’t any robots that can draw for shit. /s

[0]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04

I don't think most crazy ideas crashing and burning is good enough to disprove the thesis. Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things. I think if you look for marketing you'll find it, so even ideas that win on technology can look like monopolist strong-arming if that's what you're looking for. Also not all ideas that win on technology are the very best the technology could be, they are often the right compromise that's a good deal better than what they competed against. Windows for instance did a lot of strong arming monopolist tactics but was also the clear technical winner on PC for ease of use for much of its existence. I don't think the monopolist tactics would be enough if the average joe found it too hard to use.

>> Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things

Even by your own math this is a bad idea, with 1 in 100 leading to a 10x improvement we'd be better to stick with what we've got.

That’s not how math works. 10x improvements don’t necessary capture 10x revenue. And 100 experiments don’t necessarily cost 1x revenue each.

The word “idea” might be the problem. “Business plan” or “business strategy” might be better? Even “mission strategy”?

That encompasses the idea and how to get it executed and what resources are needed to get it to be sustainable, over what timescale.

This applies to business but also charity, non profit, political efforts etc.

Notice I didn’t mention profit or even revenue. These days ideas can go a long time being supported by investors who see the strategy.

For example I am thinking of YouTube, Tesla etc.

But there needs to be a strategy. Like a rocket launch or starting a campfire there might need to be different stages where the idea to the uninitiated looks very different at each stage, but it’s all part of the same master plan.

For example. Uber was a taxi firm + app at first. Peer to peer came later.

If so that suggests it's the right attitude to have.

Not the first time, not the last time. We were misogynists when we were criticizing Elizabeth Holmes. It comes with the territory.

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. This is strictly a business analysis. If we can't have a civil discussion about these things without being accused of being sexist, or envious, or whatever other pejorative people use to redirect criticism or probing questions, then we might as well not have a discussion at all because we all know how these things go. The comments write themselves.

Having said that, it's tiresome to have the same pile-on garbage of negative comments every time a PG article is posted. The last 4-5 of his articles invite so much backlash and scathing kneejerk rhetoric, I wonder why these people use HN forums at all.

> 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—but perhaps it's cynical to insist on it.

This is largely just how human memory works, but I pay close attention to it because it deeply affects this community's perception of itself, and that is a big problem because such false feelings of generality skew sharply negative.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

p.s. I completely agree that we need to have substantive discussion about these things.

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.

Are you sure that a community idolizing the utterances of a winning gambler isn't what makes everything worse?

There are many things making things worse, and one does not rule out another, so that question is a bit of a distraction. I'd like to know what you think you gain by being so mean. Surely that's not the kind of person you want to be?

The idea that this community "idolizes" PG is trivially disproven by glancing through any recent thread on his writings, including this one.

There is some irony in invoking ad hominem arguments while claiming my critique is a distraction. I'm simply acting as an arbiter of which intellectual sausage makes the world worse, just as you are. We have different opinions about which wurst is worse. If your view of reality is that these people don't idolize a gambler masquerading as a philosopher, then I'd absolutely love to agree with you if I could.

I suppose you could say that my question were an ad hominem argument if it were an argument, but it's not - it's a question. Your comments shocked me by how mean they were, even relative to the other stuff that I read on here. And I have vague memories of having been shocked in the past by how mean you were on other occasions—I don't remember anything specific, but I have a residual Pavlovian wince about it. All of that made want to ask you why.

You're getting a bit semantic in defending what you certainly know is ad hominem misdirection. But if you want to double-down on it, it doesn't faze me. Your contention is that it is more important that I, a random commenter on the internet, am psychoanalyzed than to consider the substance of the argument I made. Your concern was how it was presented, not its content. I'll take that as a concession that the argument had enough validity that you'd prefer not to address it.

I answered your argument in my initial reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070820): pg isn't saying that all crazy ideas by domain experts must be true, so a flagrant counterexample doesn't prove anything. Indeed, flagrant counterexamples are to be expected, since almost by definition, crazy ideas will have more variance than conventional ones.

The problem is that there wasn't really much of an argument there. You converted his point into something stupid that he didn't say, and then did a bunch of name-calling. Since the "argument" was so flimsy and the name-calling so mean, I asked why you would bother to do that. I'm still interested in the answer, even if the answer is that you don't think you did that. It's not really personal, I'm just curious. But yes I understand how it could come across that way.

No, your reply was a flagrant straw man. "every such idea must be true" != "confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill." A straw man is where you're evading an argument by pretending it's something it isn't.

I certainly didn't "convert his point" into anything more "stupid" than what he said. In a somewhat farcically stereotypical way, this venture capitalist argues he makes decisions -- better than a coin toss presumably -- based on the notion that "domain experts" know what they're talking about. My contention was that venture capitalists don't pick winners better than a coin toss at all. They are simply gambling. When they win a jackpot, they construct a fiction that the win was predestined on some rational basis and not simply chance.

(Persisting with your ad hominem, by the way, isn't working.)

This is one of the major problems with PG's essays---he frequently assigns the worst possible motives to the people he disagrees with.

gman83 did the same: "This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism."

but did he do it incorrectly, or frequently?

Your just not a domain expert on ideas though. Just look at all the words he wrote on ideas. You should be more open to his absurd belief in the idea of Mighty App being a game changer.

Please don't be snarky or take HN threads even further in the flamewar direction. No matter how you feel about $person or $subject, it's bad for community to pee in the swimming pool this way. It encourages the more discerning swimmers not to stick around—and we're trying for something else in any case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The problem with education is that u r always taught to look for the right answer someone else discovered long time ago. Coming up with crazy ideas means u were either a bad student, or u have a post-doctoral education. It is hard for anyone in the middle to come with crazy ideas (unless u worked with someone crazy coming up with crazy ideas requires a certain training or exposure, it is very difficult to learn on ur own

> Having new ideas is a lonely business

Although true, there is a general anti-religious tone here that helps feed into HN culture. Thank you Paul.

Biggest mind shift: Instead of asking why it wouldn't work, ask what would it take for it to work

As someone who writes notebooks full of completely new, bad ideas, this comes naturally to many of us

The essay seems to be about startups. It could use more examples to illustrate the point.

Taking this article at face value, the idea Graham is talking about, already has a name: jootsing (jumping out of the system) coined by Douglas Hofstadter. I’m familiar with it from Daniel Dennett’s excellent book Intuition Pumps.

A feature of ground breaking ideas is they contradict established wisdom, but that’s also a feature of most awful ones. The latter greatly outnumber the former. For every brilliant mind contradicting and redefining a discipline there are a multitude of clueless ones who lack basic knowledge of that discipline producing total crap. Think Einstein vs thousands of crackpots who don’t understand kinetic energy and momentum are not the same thing.

For this reason Dennett points out that the presence of jootsing is not a valuable metric to assess an idea. He goes on to say as it’s unhelpful advice to give to someone attempting to produce a valuable concept. He compares it to teaching someone how to invest by saying “buy low, sell high”. Yes this is a feature of a successful investor, but in and of itself, quite unhelpful.

Unfortunately, saying “my ideas jootses” isn’t saying much.

> 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?

Whatever Might is or becomes, I am sure it will have an app store.

> When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence.

I mean, this is basically QAnon, antivaxxers, creationists and trickle-down economists in a nutshell. That said . . .

> Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be.

By default I assume I'm in the wrong. There's just so many domains of knowledge, the probability of me having enough depth of even more than a handful is highly unlikely. The hard part is distinguishing those who are domain experts, and those who are not, when you are not a domain expert.

> If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world.

And I love viewing everything as a mental model, because, well, it is, plus models are plastic: they can be changed. Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" comes to mind.

The thing is, most crazy new ideas are just that: crazy. For every great new invention there is the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil.

It's very difficult to differentiate between an innovative idea and claptrap. Genius is difficult to recognise because it takes a genius to develop the idea in the first place.

> the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil.

I think you are being overly pessimistic by several orders of magnitude.

Any recommendations for books about how new ideas happen?

I wish somebody would take my wild ideas seriously.

I'd love to hear them. My email is in my profile.

I missed your reply will respond soon, been away just got back.

Does Thiel count as reasonable?

Don't scroll down.

Let's try something fun and imagine Mighty (and similar RBI services) were the only browsers available when finally Google, Microsoft and Mozilla launch their own browsers. Imagine the headlines:

"Run your own browser for free, forever, without having to sign up or put in your credit card!"

"Run your own browser, even when your network connectivity is bad!" -

"Run your own browser to access resources on your corporate intranet that are not available on the Internet".

"Run your own browser, you stay in charge of your data, login credentials and browsing history!"

"Run your own browser which efficiently caches resources locally so you only have to download them once instead of a constant 4K video stream".

Getting ideas is easy. Getting ideas other people want to spend money or time on is something quite different.

Even if you get an amazing idea, the chances of it being a good business are small. In fact, some of the best businesses didn’t start out with good ideas. Instead, they started out being considered stupid, wrong, childish, irrational, useless, too easy, too hard, impossible, unethical, unsustainable and we could go on.

If you get an idea that turns out to be a great business, chances are that others would have told you it’s a bad idea you might even yourself at times think it’s a bad idea and almost give up.

The difference between an idea that looks to be a complete failure and one that is wildly successful is often a matter of months. On top of that, most businesses fail even if you have a stellar team and for many not-so-obvious reasons (more about that in the next essay) It’s just hard to know if your idea is great or not or if it just sounds great. So how do you make sure your idea even has a chance of making it? Having worked with hundreds of startups, investors, and founders over the years, we decided to put together a list of principles that can be used to come up with ideas that others want to pay for.

1. There are 3 categories of ideas that potentially could be turned into a business.

Ideas for a solution to a problem

Ideas for fulfilling a need

Ideas that create new demand.

The safest business ideas are solutions to problems. The world is filled with problems. Finding the right problem to solve is often harder than the actual solution. The questions become more important than the answer. The next safest business idea category fulfills an existing need but in a better/cheaper way. Whether a dating service, an email client or a new type of insurance. Finding an underserved market is normally the way in. The riskiest, but potentially most fruitful of them all are ideas that create new demand. These are products or services no one knew they needed before they tried them. Computer games, songs, movies, fart apps, and most social networks belong to this group. Make sure you know which category you are in.

2. Questions you can ask yourself or others: “What problem in your industry would you pay for someone to solve?” “What annoys me that I would be ready to pay for?” “What in my life feels like it could be better?” “What are my friends complaining about?” “What are my friends excited about?” “What has changed over the last 3–5 years?” Ask questions that are open-ended and don’t come with an obvious solution.

3. Once you’ve found an idea to pursue ask yourself: “Are there any existing solutions out there?” “How big is the problem/need?” “Why hasn’t this been solved so far?” “What kind of problem/need is it? (i.e. Legislative, technical, financial, etc)” “Do I have the skills or knowledge or intuition or perseverance to pursue this?” Keep asking questions and don’t be afraid of the answer. The right questions asked today can save you months or years of work down a path that leads nowhere.

4. Define your competitors much more broadly. You will often be asked, “Are there other companies out there doing what you are doing?” The answer most of the time will be yes. If you don’t find anyone, you most likely aren’t defining competitors wide enough. Oftentimes competitors aren’t doing exactly what you are doing but are perceived by customers as if they were. If you define competition too narrow you risk missing what might be inhibiting your growth. If you define too wide then you might find potential market places you weren’t even thinking about.

5. Don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas with others. In the beginning, most great ideas don’t look different than bad ones. Chances are that even if your idea turns out to be a unicorn, no one will notice. In fact, if you are on to something, chances are you will often have to pay people to work on it for you. Reversely if you get an idea that sounds great and everyone loves it, chances are it most likely already exists or it just that, a great idea, not a great business. So unless you’ve found the cure for cancer and then probably instead should patent it, don’t be afraid to share ideas.

6. Fight for your ideas. Ideas are like newborn babies. Extremely fragile in the beginning but with great care and nurturing they can turn into amazing mature businesses. Make sure you give your idea enough time to grow but not enough to turn into a bad teenager.

7. Choose ideas that keep you motivated. Many early-stage startup founders make the mistake of just looking for a good idea rather than something they care about. Most ideas aren’t going to work out, so for most of us, a higher goal is needed. Something that makes you want this idea to exist and be successful. Something to keep us going when thing’s are looking the least likely to succeed. A lot can be done with perseverance and grit, make sure your idea is worth it. There is a lot more to this than what we’ve covered here but as you can see there is a lot more going into ideas than just getting them. So make sure you’ve spent enough time on your idea.

Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up.

What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?), getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring.

I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well, it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come from years of insights. People without years of experience will be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine) will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is interested in.

With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It was the equivalent of "You like money, too?" . PG, you should stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.

> There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring.

Indeed. Venture capitalism is still capitalism, with all its abuse and exploitation.

Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course.

As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.

If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.

As of November last year (let alone anything since re: distribution), US governmental agencies paid $2.5 billion to Moderna to develop the vaccine and buy doses (and there already had been work done by Moderna on mRNA vaccines).

As of July last year (again, let alone anything since), US governmental agencies had paid Pfizer $1.95 billion.

So, basically, the government spent billions for something they then distributed 'for free' to the taxpayers.

That's an interesting example to pick for 'capitalism'.

The companies you just mentioned all got Paid at whatever market rate they/the market set.

Just because it was the government that paid them, why isn’t that capitalism?

Socialism and Communism is when you tell people what they’ll charge for the greater good of the people. At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country.

Edit: not only did those companies get paid to invent it, but others got paid to make it, and yet others got paid to distribute it (pharmacies etc).

>> 'at whatever market rate they/the market set'

Really? I would have expected something a bit higher than $20-$25 a dose, given the limited supply (it was pure research at the time), and COVID was decimating the country (so extremely high demand). I mean, a single dose of insulin, requiring no research, and no protective IP, and costing cents to produce, will run you or an insurance company hundreds of dollars. Given the huge demand, and the non-existent supply at that time, there is -nothing- in the market that would have capped the price for the vaccine at $20-25, except either human good will (which is not a market factor; again, see insulin), or the very real threat of government action.

>> At least that’s what it is to me, someone from a former communist country

And voting Republican is what Democracy means to plenty of people living in the US. If we actually go to what the dictionary definition of socialism is, rather than a particular interpretation or lived experience of something called it, it's "(a political system wherein) the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole".

The governmental decision to offer something for free to everyone is a socialist one; the use of government regulation as an implicit threat to pay what is reasonable to offset cost, rather than what the market could dictate, also speaks to socialism. Yes, it was a private company that produced it, but both the exchange and the bulk of its distribution are very much being carried out by government, and even where not, are being very tightly regulated by government. All of that in response to community need and desire, not merely the strictures of the market (which otherwise would have seen a major profit opportunity).

Appreciate your comment, it’s good learning for me to hear a different opinion.

I might have extrapolated the benefits of a capitalist system too far.

But the main point still stands I think, the response to the above comment and the fact that it is very much those strong incentives that drive much of the innovation in our society today. It is not someone forcing someone to do something or pure good will that lead to these results.

That I can agree with. Ensuring people can reap some benefit to their efforts is important. The problems with capitalism that I personally have tend to be around places that people are able to reap benefit from other people's efforts unduly (i.e., billionaires), or from other people's needs unduly (i.e., shareholders making bank from healthcare).

> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.

Most vaccine development occurs in academic research institutions, even if the large-scale manufacturing is then taken up by the capitalists. For example, the Covid vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca was created by and innovated upon by a vaccine research group in Oxford University, who are obviously not in it for making vast wads of cash. And in general, it's the state who funds vaccine development, and the state who buys the vaccines.

On the broader subject of medicine, capitalism also gives us harsh enforcement of supposed 'intellectual property rights', stymieing the availability of medicines in developing countries. Fortunately, it looks like this will be waived for Covid vaccines, thanks to some government intervention. But it shouldn't have to be this way. Jonas Salk had the right idea when he released his polio vaccine freely to the world, to benefit all, without profit motive.

> As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year.

You realize Cuba also produced a vaccine within one year. So did China; though some people consider Dengism a kind of capitalism, so who knows, good for you, maybe.

All governments are slowly and inexorably moving towards a synthetic mix of capitalism and socialism. The problem in the US is _unfettered_ capitalism, which has metastasized into an attempt to capture the ENTIRE vertical stack of any business enterprise. That's the whole play of VC money today: find a segment of the economy to monopolize, run everyone else out, and then extract ALL the profits, from top to bottom. In my opinion, we need GDP-adjusted limits on how large a company can be, in several different dimensions.

And the fact that he states that he uses the word in the right way doesn't make it right. In fact, I find the use of the word paradigm quite shallow and disconnected from the Kuhnian definition.

>And the fact that he states that he uses the word in the right way doesn't make it right. In fact, I find the use of the word paradigm quite shallow and disconnected from the Kuhnian definition.

Perhaps because Kuhn doesn't dictate the definition of paradigm (and in general, the originator, etymology, etc. doesn't dictate use), the language community (the speakers of a language) does.

The whole SV/VC thing is just a big shallow marketing scheme to get young people buy into bad deals because they are brainwashed into thinking it's the cool thing to do. Have been there, done that, regret it. It took me years of being outside of SV to realize how brainwashed I was by comparing myself to the media and people around me.

> It took me years of being outside of SV to realize how brainwashed I was by comparing myself to the media and people around me.

The media doesn't represent normal people, and there are different regions of the country with very different norms, cultures, and beliefs. I know we are social animals heavily influenced by those around us, but it's also important to reflect and try to determine if those influences are right or productive.

There is a thing I realized a few years ago about about VC.

They are not in the game to fuel innovation, contrary to what they pretend.

They are in the game to protect old-money against innovation.

Capital is the most conservative thing that exists. Any little sign of trouble and it flees. VC is not different, they just play the odds and invest in a way that the money is guaranteed back, but the optics is that they are "taking risks". They then lobby to have the goverment take that risk away, lobby against employees having power to never have any risk and so on. Capitalists are the most risk averse people.

I like this. Could you point me to some history of capital or a source of your understanding of this?

"Crazy new ideas"? A VC, Graham, is praising crazy new ideas?

After I sent some hundreds of emails to Silicon Valley, NY, and Boston venture capital firms with nearly no positive feedback and nearly no feedback at all, I concluded several points:

(1) VCs won't invest in, consider, look at, or pay attention to crazy new ideas. Might guess that one reason can be that when the ideas are deep technically the VCs don't have the expertise to evaluate them, but the VC rarely seek evaluations from technical experts either. Net, VCs don't want to invest in crazy new ideas and hardly value ideas at all.

(2) My best guess is that most of all VCs like to invest in traction already significant and growing rapidly. The traction most desired is after tax earnings, but also good enough can be pre-tax earnings, revenue, or just Web site traffic.

(3) VCs also like the traction to be in a big market.

(4) VCs also like a team of several founders: Maybe the VCs are afraid that a sole, solo founder would get into human relationship problems as their company grew, and the team of several founders helps alleviate that fear. Also with several founders, if the VCs don't like the CEO, then the VCs can fire the CEO and promote one of the other founders to CEO.

E.g., I have had at least two crazy new ideas for new businesses:

The first idea was new and much better than anything else for real-time monitoring of health and wellness of servers and networks. I had running code and some quite good results on a variety of real data. The idea would not have had the potential of building a company worth $10 billion but might have built one worth $500 million and, maybe, with more advanced versions of the product, continued to grow. I gave a talk at the main NASDAQ site in Trumbull, CT, but apparently no VC had any interest at all. So, I went ahead and published the work; so, at least it was good enough to pass peer review!

Second I have an idea, and 100,000 lines of .NET code apparently ready for at least initial production, for a huge market and that, if people like it at all, and there is various evidence they will, should be worth $10 billion, maybe 200 times that if I further develop the work and people around the world like it a lot, and there is some evidence they might.

The idea makes powerful uses of some poorly known and understood advanced pure math (maybe understood by fewer than 10 computer science professors in the whole world, and only a tiny fraction of pure math professors will look for or see the connection with computing or business) and some original applied math I derived likely beyond over 90% of computer scientists.

But apparently no VC in the country is interested at all. Same for YC, the NSF IIP, etc. But, and really I designed this project this way, I don't really need funding now and won't if the traction grows. I've had some delays from unpredictable outside interruptions but am about to return to the work.

I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.

> I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.

This is actually true. The model of VCs requires that they take extremely high risk with extremely high upside. But their job is to derisk as much as possible. They derisk market risk, technical risk, and operational risk.

Get the traction, and the money will follow.

There's more than one crazy new idea floating around, checkout cituzenshareholders.com reimagining of capitalism and their (ok, our) crazy, yet feasible, plan to democratize corporate governance. With $40 trillion in shares owned thru collective investments Larry Fink's wish for a new form of shareholder engagement will come true!

In 2013, I mentioned to a recruiter that Go would be huge by 2015-2016, and the jagoff argued with me from their zero domain expertise. I told them to piss off and never contact me again because they signaled they were stupid, ignorant, and unable to listen.. which means I had no use for them and they were a liability.

Looks like pg discovered consensus vs non-consensus ideas[1], good for him.

[1] https://medium.com/entrepreneurship-at-work/non-consensus-ba...

Why are you all upvoting this shit?

Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact.

You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.

You created an account just to say this? Damn, commitment.

Well, I don't want to get my usual account banned for expressing such apostate views. They're very protective of their cult leaders round here.

What are your views then?

I do not think that the problem is with the content, moreso with the unnecessarily aggressive tone. Shit, cult ... - HN generally rewards civility and does not like sliding towards Twitter mode of operation.

Imagine if people could completely change their idenitites every time they said something. It would make conversation and discourse as we know it impossible.

It would make the idea you created an account to express invalid. You can't criticize Paul Graham if he can say "That wasn't me, it was Gaul Praham".

If your ideas aren't good enough for you to stay by them with some form of consistent identity, do not express those ideas. Think about them, develop them and then communicate them when they no longer embarrass you.

powerfull people can silence you in so many ways. they will always have a platform, you won't.

you also got discourse backwards. you should be judging the arguments presented (which in this case not much), not the persona.

You actually add credibility to his writing because you make it obvious that you don't actually have a counter argument.

How can you effectively counter an essay with so many empty generalizations and broad assertions? It would be like debating jello.

Well you could say that instead of going after the author.

Burden of proof, my dude.

I recall "Dr. Gene Ray" defending the credibility of Time Cube on similar grounds. There wasn't enough of an idea presented to even have an argument about.

Fully agreed. A lazy article all-round. Where are the examples? Where are the pitfalls?

Is the insight merely that some wacky ideas turn out to be right sometimes?

Yeah, sure so how can we tell in advance? How is this actionable? And his answer is: listen to reasonable domain experts. That phrase is doing some real heavy lifting there...

Pretty much all of his articles are similarly lazy (edit: and usually articles from other top SV folks). I'm always astonished that people upvote his stuff. I've come to think of it as an HN tax: we get a well-moderated forum with otherwise good content and in return we have to scroll past one extra article every month or so.

> I've come to think of it as an HN tax

That's a great way to put it!

All this stuff about Copernicus, Darwin, Galileo... You're not revolutionizing our understanding of humanity's place in the universe... You're buying companies that make filesharing apps and (often untaxed) hostel booking websites.

You are being unfair, its not any better then most HN articles, fits here just fine if you ask me

I agree that it fits here just fine (more than a lot of the crap that hits the front page) but I also agree with the OP that the “cultism” is annoying, not that I expect anything else given his association with the company that created HN.

pg is one of the people introduced me to lisp and i think lisp is the greatest idea in computer science. so his ideas have some weight for me, but lately the disconnect is quite unbearable. he is again picking the wrong side in history.

will these supervillians ever stop? nothing less than world-domination is enough.

microsoft tried to own everything about computing, they largly succeeded. they even infiltrated schools and still every pc is sold with windows-preinstalled.

then came google/facebook/apple... and they all want to own the entire internet.

unity wants the entire gaming/gamedev/computer-graphics. i am sure there are schools out there have unity classes, just unbelievable. "unity-developer" is the norm in job titles now, and i have never once heard "photoshop-artist" in the title of a job description.

this particular case is no exception.

ok, most logical conclusion is i too am envious.

can the font size be smaller? please

And the text a little more to the left

Paul's writing inspired me to start a porn studio. Thank you Paul!

PG posts hit HN like The Force

Here's a crazy idea for you: use SSL on your website!!

Should probably credit Thomas Kuhn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...

Check footnote number 2?

I will admit that I missed that but its barely enough. The whole piece is basically a paraphrase of Kuhn.

Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often on HN.

I'm not sure what you are down voted. It's a very legitimate question.

People ask for the same thing for politics, and for various subjects. So how many different "hide" filters should we create?

Then there's the classification problem. Is post X really about politics? It's not binary.

The only solution that would even approximately work would be to add a block list of domains to peoples' profiles. That way, if you don't want to see anything from paulgraham.com, and I don't want to see anything from HuffPost, we can each do that. But even that only approximately works. I've seen articles posted here that are Twitter comments on Paul Graham articles.

Or, the absolute simplest solution: Skip over the articles that don't interest you. It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line.

It could be very easy. Just hide all posts from that specific website, a very easy filter, not classification problem.

> It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line.

Well if it's that easy, then why is there an hide button on HN in the first place?

It really is that easy. And, I don't know why there's a hide button. I have never used it that I recall; I had forgotten that it existed.

From the footnotes

>3] This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may have an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always flying on instruments

On the contrary, it is everybody else who is flying on instruments. The sperg sees straight.

Maybe he meant to say we're observing the rules via mental systems(instruments) we developed to "fit in" instead of whatever neuro-typs use.

I interpreted"flying on instruments" as employing an abstraction-layer (insulative, enculturated, solipsistic even) vs direct-observation.

So for some context, "flying on instruments" is considered much better in flight. A fair number of novice pilots kill themselves because they get lost in clouds and get emotional and think they aren't level anymore.

The instrument tells them they are level, but they get paranoid and either stall or crash because they don't trust that the machine is more reliable than their emotions, even when it's drilled into them.

A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a lot of virtues is:

When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?" because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work, then what are the implications?"

Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it will be a huge and valuable business."

For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives? Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."

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