merwanedr

According to some people on Twitter, this should've been deleted lol

This is really cool, but I can't wait for a classic HN comment like:

-HN midwit: "Who names a company after a fruit?". -Erik and Kyle: "Well..."

Ha, for a minute I thought Google actually built a Cloud-native OS. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't really see the use-case for this. Sounds like it could be an orchestration solution for schools or bootcamps at best. What's incredible about real cloud-native operating systems is that "OS" is merely an acronym. The reality is that companies like Mighty are working on cloud-native computers, where even hardware upgradability is handled without you having to pay attention.

The endgame is that you don't have upgrade your laptop anymore, not just install apps fast.

Yes! I don't know if it's related but some emails I've recently sent went to spam in other people's inboxes.

They had to comply, and that's a downside of centralization. Use PGP and Tor if you want true privacy.

"Knives are a bad technology because you can use them to stab people, ergo knives shouldn't exist."

Ethereum is winning every crypto/blockchain narrative. This is super impressive and proves, once again, that real value is where devs are.

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.

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.

Working on multiple Figma instances while having things like Notion and Slack in the background is a real-life situation for a lot of people nowadays. Even a $3000 MacBook Pro suffers to handle it, but you could easily do it with a 2013 Macbook Air via Mighty. Think of it as renting a new computer. Also most entry-level users have to run these for work/school but can't on cheap hardware.

The whole idea is that your browser is increasingly shifting towards becoming your operating system. Think about it, people spend the majority of their time on Chrome or Desktop apps wrapped in Chromium (Electron). If you consider Mighty to be a cheap supercomputer, not an expensive browser, it makes sense to pay $30/month for that. People pay SuperHuman $30/month for better email when they can use Gmail for free, but the truth is that SuperHuman gives you much more than an interface. Even better, Mighty isn't limited to power-users. Eventually your physical computer will merely serve as an interface to your real computer in the cloud.

On Ethereum, executing a function on a smart contract means you're doing computation and maybe writing data, which involves both CPU and disk. The amount you pay for running this operation is denominated in gas, and is determined by things like iterations, memory used, data written, etc. The end user doesn't get all of this separately, but instead gets a unified computation price. Maybe it sounds unclear at the current scale of Ethereum (which can only perform basic operations), but at a larger scale, we could unify the cost of remote computing in a single metric.

> For a given finite calculation, one can ask how much it would "cost" in ETH, also giving one a reasonable metric for how much modern-moment computational power is required from the ETH network

Exactly!

The idea is to use Ether as a unified and simple unit for computation cost in a sense that it can become a recognizable metric. Just like instinctively thinking "this is cheap" when you see something priced at $0.01, you could think "I can run this" when you see something priced at 0.0001ETH.

I don't understand how this post made it to top 10. Ironically, it even mentions that the company just raised their series A. I have a lot of respect for repl.it as a company and amjad/haya as founders. Surely there's a lot of jealousy and envy in the air.