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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 a

by 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.
- breck 6y ago
  > 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 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.
  - aniforprez 6y ago
    > 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
    - breck 6y ago
      > But why? Because cancer is incredibly complicated and requires incredible amounts of data, analysis, and *collaboration*.
      - aniforprez 6y ago
        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?
dclowd9901 6y ago
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
NoGravitas 6y ago
I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how much cryptocurrency I can mine on Mighty, especially if they lower prices later.

by breck 6y ago

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.

breck 6y ago
> 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 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.
- aniforprez 6y ago
  > 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
  - breck 6y ago
    > But why? Because cancer is incredibly complicated and requires incredible amounts of data, analysis, and *collaboration*.
    - aniforprez 6y ago
      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?

dclowd9901 6y ago

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

NoGravitas 6y ago

I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how much cryptocurrency I can mine on Mighty, especially if they lower prices later.