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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

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.

baud147258 5y ago
> 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?
- baud147258 5y ago
  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
te_chris 5y ago
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-dude 5y ago
  The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's & gov's who want just that : centralized control.
  - dd36 5y ago
    Yes. Unless they can figure out how to be free to consumers.
easton 5y ago
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?
- merwanedr 5y ago
  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.
- suhail 5y ago
  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-future-of-computing/ https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
  - stephc_int13 5y ago
    >most desktop apps are web apps. Not yet.
    - stingrae 5y ago
      for the average user, they are.
      - boredtofears 5y ago
        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.
qshaman 5y ago
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.
- dang 5y ago
  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?
mbesto 5y ago
> 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-1.png?w=700 https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  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.
s3r3nity 5y ago
Don’t forget my favorite: “Slack is just IRC with clever marketing.”
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  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.
dunkelheit 5y ago
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 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.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  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.
  - sombremesa 5y ago
    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.
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      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).
clpwq 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
networkimprov 5y ago
Gmail is a better Eudora/Outlook, not a better SMTP. TMTP is a better SMTP. See link in my profile.
justicezyx 5y ago
> 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...
FlyingSnake 5y ago
> 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.
dd36 5y ago
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.
ta_ca 5y ago
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 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441

baud147258 5y ago

> 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?

baud147258 5y ago
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

te_chris 5y ago

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-dude 5y ago
The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's & gov's who want just that : centralized control.
- dd36 5y ago
  Yes. Unless they can figure out how to be free to consumers.

easton 5y ago

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?

merwanedr 5y ago
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.
suhail 5y ago
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-future-of-computing/ https://blog.mightyapp.com/mightys-secret-plan-to-invent-the...
- stephc_int13 5y ago
  >most desktop apps are web apps. Not yet.
  - stingrae 5y ago
    for the average user, they are.
    - boredtofears 5y ago
      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.

qshaman 5y ago

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.

dang 5y ago
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?

mbesto 5y ago

> 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-1.png?w=700 https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...

fighterpilot 5y ago
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.

s3r3nity 5y ago

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

rsj_hn 5y ago
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.

dunkelheit 5y ago

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 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.

aerosmile 5y ago
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.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  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.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    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).

clpwq 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

networkimprov 5y ago

Gmail is a better Eudora/Outlook, not a better SMTP. TMTP is a better SMTP. See link in my profile.

justicezyx 5y ago

> 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...

FlyingSnake 5y ago

> 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.

dd36 5y ago

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.

ta_ca 5y ago

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 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441