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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

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

stephc_int13 6y ago
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.
- bsedlm 6y ago
  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.
  - stephc_int13 6y ago
    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)
  - razorfen 6y ago
    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 :)
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      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.
      - freeopinion 6y ago
        Is it true that chromebooks outsell other laptops?
    - dunkelheit 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle 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.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    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.
    - stephc_int13 6y ago
      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.
    - gwright 6y ago
      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.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        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.
  - freeopinion 6y ago
    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".
- bewo001 6y ago
  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.
nojs 6y ago
I wish he would say this in the post!
- Igelau 6y ago
  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".
fsociety 6y ago
Not to mention the privacy concerns of allowing someone else’s machine to proxy all of your web requests.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  Yeah, that's the point, this is why this "tech" is not what we want/need.
  - intergalplan 6y ago
    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.
    - stephc_int13 6y ago
      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.
      - intergalplan 6y ago
        > 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.
        stephc_int13 6y ago
        In short, yes. But being acquired is probably only seen as a salvage plan at this stage.
deleted 6y ago
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cmiles74 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk
- ProAm 6y ago
  Opera Mini did it first.
  - iscrewyou 6y ago
    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.
- twobitshifter 6y ago
  Silk, Puffin, Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Maxthon - are all predecessors.
  - stephc_int13 6y ago
    Well, this idea of a remote browser has some predecessors but the true lineage goes back to VT-80 and mainframes.
dotdotdotdot 6y ago
> 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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  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)
yifanl 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  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-startup-knotel-went-from-a-1-6b-valuation-to-filing-for-bankruptcy/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/a-look-at-how-proptech-sta...
- Kye 6y ago
  The Behind the Bastards series on this was great.
vgchh 6y ago
- 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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  - 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.
- wraptile 6y ago
  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.
  - stephc_int13 6y ago
    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.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    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.
adenta 6y ago
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.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  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?
dunkelheit 6y ago
> 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.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  >>"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)
hardwaregeek 6y ago
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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  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.
  - hardwaregeek 6y ago
    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)
    - throwaway17_17 6y ago
      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.
elcapitan 6y ago
> 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.
- drcongo 6y ago
  No, it literally means "being invested in something" regardless of the rest.
  - elcapitan 6y ago
    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".
    - uglygoblin 6y ago
      You are making it all about money but things like reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the game".
      - elcapitan 6y ago
        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"?
        drcongo 6y ago
        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.
breck 6y ago
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.
- intergalplan 6y ago
  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?
  - breck 6y ago
    Write once run on billions of clients but scale to supercomputering power.
- username90 6y ago
  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.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  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.
suhail 6y ago
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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  I think this is other way around. He talks/write to promote his ventures.
- alonmower 6y ago
  He puts his mouth where his money is*
- blocked_again 6y ago
  > 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.
deleted 6y ago
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heipei 6y ago
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.
- valine 6y ago
  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.
  - heipei 6y ago
    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.
  - nthj 6y ago
    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.
john_minsk 6y ago
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...
fossuser 6y ago
> “ 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.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  From a privacy perspective alone, it’s a terrible idea to give a company your browsing data. That is dangerous and certainly not best practice. The critique is valid.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  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.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    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.
choiway 6y ago
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.
FlyingSnake 6y ago
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.
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> 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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  Agreed. He is trying to build a stronger case by using an elaborate straw man argument. Turns out to be quite transparent and poor.
citrusybread 6y ago
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.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Perhaps he is indirectly talking about Mighty. We could still consider what he says here on its own merits.
dannyphantom 6y ago
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?
nl 6y ago
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.
randomsearch 6y ago
> 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".

stephc_int13 6y ago

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.

bsedlm 6y ago
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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  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)
- razorfen 6y ago
  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 :)
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    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.
    - freeopinion 6y ago
      Is it true that chromebooks outsell other laptops?
  - dunkelheit 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle 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.
- vidarh 6y ago
  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.
  - stephc_int13 6y ago
    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.
  - gwright 6y ago
    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.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      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.
- freeopinion 6y ago
  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".
bewo001 6y ago
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.

nojs 6y ago

I wish he would say this in the post!

Igelau 6y ago
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".

fsociety 6y ago

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

stephc_int13 6y ago
Yeah, that's the point, this is why this "tech" is not what we want/need.
- intergalplan 6y ago
  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.
  - stephc_int13 6y ago
    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.
    - intergalplan 6y ago
      > 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.
      - stephc_int13 6y ago
        In short, yes. But being acquired is probably only seen as a salvage plan at this stage.

deleted 6y ago

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cmiles74 6y ago

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

ProAm 6y ago
Opera Mini did it first.
- iscrewyou 6y ago
  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.
twobitshifter 6y ago
Silk, Puffin, Opera Mini, Opera Turbo, Maxthon - are all predecessors.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  Well, this idea of a remote browser has some predecessors but the true lineage goes back to VT-80 and mainframes.

dotdotdotdot 6y ago

> 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.

stephc_int13 6y ago
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)

yifanl 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago
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notsureaboutpg 6y ago
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-startup-knotel-went-from-a-1-6b-valuation-to-filing-for-bankruptcy/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/a-look-at-how-proptech-sta...
Kye 6y ago
The Behind the Bastards series on this was great.

vgchh 6y ago

- 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.

stephc_int13 6y ago
- 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.
wraptile 6y ago
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.
- stephc_int13 6y ago
  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.
- Igelau 6y ago
  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.

adenta 6y ago

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.

tsimionescu 6y ago
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?

dunkelheit 6y ago

> 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.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
>>"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)

hardwaregeek 6y ago

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.

stephc_int13 6y ago
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.
- hardwaregeek 6y ago
  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)
  - throwaway17_17 6y ago
    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.

elcapitan 6y ago

> 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.

drcongo 6y ago
No, it literally means "being invested in something" regardless of the rest.
- elcapitan 6y ago
  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".
  - uglygoblin 6y ago
    You are making it all about money but things like reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the game".
    - elcapitan 6y ago
      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"?
      - drcongo 6y ago
        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.

breck 6y ago

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.

intergalplan 6y ago
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?
- breck 6y ago
  Write once run on billions of clients but scale to supercomputering power.
username90 6y ago
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.
mumblemumble 6y ago
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.

suhail 6y ago

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.

stephc_int13 6y ago
I think this is other way around. He talks/write to promote his ventures.
alonmower 6y ago
He puts his mouth where his money is*
blocked_again 6y ago
> 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.

deleted 6y ago

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heipei 6y ago

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.

valine 6y ago
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.
- heipei 6y ago
  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.
- nthj 6y ago
  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.

john_minsk 6y ago

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...

fossuser 6y ago

> “ 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.

solosoyokaze 6y ago
From a privacy perspective alone, it’s a terrible idea to give a company your browsing data. That is dangerous and certainly not best practice. The critique is valid.
stephc_int13 6y ago
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.
- fossuser 6y ago
  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.

choiway 6y ago

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.

FlyingSnake 6y ago

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.

baron_harkonnen 6y ago

> 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.

stephc_int13 6y ago
Agreed. He is trying to build a stronger case by using an elaborate straw man argument. Turns out to be quite transparent and poor.

citrusybread 6y ago

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.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Perhaps he is indirectly talking about Mighty. We could still consider what he says here on its own merits.

dannyphantom 6y ago

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?

nl 6y ago

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.

randomsearch 6y ago

> 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".