[HN Gopher] What I Worked On
___________________________________________________________________
What I Worked On
Author : tosh
Score : 530 points
Date : 2021-02-16 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| gist wrote:
| This essay is very long. It would benefit from at least a summary
| at the top of each paragraph so you could scan through and read
| what you found interesting if you didn't have the time to read
| the entire essay.
|
| Quick check over 13500 words. At 500 word per page that's 27
| pages.
|
| I am coming up (again quick check) with 45 minutes to read this
| (including footnotes). [1] [2]
|
| Are 'Trevor Blackwell, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Daniel
| Gackle, Ralph Hazell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Harj
| Taggar' reading that many draft pages?
|
| [1] Could have used wc -c but used this:
| https://wordcounter.net/website-word-count
|
| [2] For reading time used this:
| https://capitalizemytitle.com/reading-time/27-pages/
| dang wrote:
| I read the whole thing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It didn't feel
| like 27 pages.
| foldr wrote:
| I'm not a huge fan of PG's essays in general, but this was a
| really interesting read. It's sobering how the tiniest details of
| someone's life can be so much more interesting than what they
| think of as their most important and original thoughts. Perhaps
| PG will be another Samuel Johnson (who's remembered primarily not
| for his work, but for Boswell's descriptions of his everyday life
| and conversation).
| mdorazio wrote:
| This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat
| navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However,
| I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and
| serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't
| even relate to it.
|
| He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college
| to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school
| because he felt like it, and only stumbled into an actual job
| because he was basically broke. Then he magically found an
| incredibly affordable NYC apartment and finally was in the right
| place at the right time to take advantage of the dot com boom and
| again lucked his way into leaving at the right time, mostly
| because he was burned out.
|
| Don't get me wrong, pg obviously worked hard on both Viaweb and
| Ycom, and self-taught a lot of the startup lessons that are now
| common knowledge. But if I wrote this story as fiction with pg as
| the main character, people would laugh at the absurdity of it.
| For people who don't think luck is one of the biggest factors of
| success, just read this essay.
| posharma wrote:
| Very well said.
| seunosewa wrote:
| That's because it's a honest essay, unlike most stories about
| founders, written for PR.
| Ariez wrote:
| While it's true about the schools, I don't agree with you on
| your other points. It seems like PG is cognizant of change
| around and within him.
|
| It wasn't by pure luck that he started Ycom, and it wasn't pure
| luck he started Viaweb. With viaweb he had a first mover
| advantage sure, but had already noticed tech and programming
| were interesting and changing the world. Ycom, as he said,
| angel investors didn't exist before Ycom. He almost created the
| term. Hardly luck.
|
| It's certainly true the moving around schools, the cheap
| apartments etc is just not possible today.
| neonate wrote:
| > as he said, angel investors didn't exist before Ycom
|
| Minor nit, but he said that about angel firms, not angel
| investors.
| jpfr wrote:
| If you wrote the story as fiction, most non-tech readers would
| find it boring. Somebody who is really interested in tech,
| driven and works all day, every day.
|
| For the tech-savvy readers there's a lot of stuff pg did that
| is not directly related to his material success, but oh so
| cool.
|
| For example his book on Lisp:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
|
| You don't write a book on Lisp because you want to get rich.
| You write it because you just do it for its own sake. And then
| he got rich immediately after publishing it.
|
| What a cool move. For the nerds who can read the signals.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I don't think anyone rejects the role of luck, or the role of
| well-off supportive parents in allowing a child to explore and
| expand their horizons.
|
| We just want to make a pile ourselves so we can give that to
| our kids.
|
| As a champagne socialist I don't want to take that opportunity
| of experience away from anyone, I just want to ensure everyone
| has such opportunities.
|
| I reckon we only need to increase global wealth by another
| couple of orders of magnitude and job done!
|
| :-)
| mattkrause wrote:
| I mostly agree, but it's unlikely he paid tuition for grad
| school; most PhD programs come with a tuition waver and a
| (small) stipend, in exchange for research/teaching.
| breck wrote:
| Who in the world doesn't think luck isn't the biggest factor in
| success? There are 100 PGs that were on the same path but got
| hit by a car, or early cancer, or killed in war, et cetera.
|
| Just because he was born on mile 10 when others born on the
| same day in a poorer part of the world were born at mile 1,
| doesn't mean that making it to mile 1,000,000 isn't impressive.
|
| If you think life is all about luck, and that where you are
| born is where you will die, and the decisions you make along
| the way are irrelevant, then that will probably be your fate.
|
| I read an essay where sure, someone won the ovarian lottery
| (like 800K people do every year by definition), but he then
| goes on to higher and higher wrungs, and frequently throughout
| the essay mentions people that helped him out to hit each next
| rung. Then once he was successful went on to help thousands of
| people directly, and many orders of magnitude times that
| indirectly.
|
| Lots of people are born a lot "luckier" then PG and then do
| nothing for others, or even worse try and pull the ladder up
| from those behind them.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| Luck may be one of the biggest factors of success but it's one
| outside of our control. So no need to pocket watch other
| people's luckyness;)
|
| I say this as somebody who always complains of being unlucky.
| What I've noticed is that luck plays a role, but you have to
| have the right mindset to take advantage of the opportunity.
| This is a very difficult thing to do and not a given by any
| means. Most people probably say they are unlucky but actually
| they were not good enough.
| [deleted]
| abraae wrote:
| Privileged yes, meandering yes, but according to a pattern of
| following things that were interesting to him.
|
| That's perhaps why he found himself in the right place and the
| right time.
|
| Takes some balls to live life like that instead of following
| the road more travelled.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Yeah this is what struck me as well. I and a number of my
| compatriots in high school had the ability to go to very
| prestigious institutions, but only a couple of us did - largely
| those from the worst off families economically as they were
| given full scholarships. None completed their degrees there
| however. The life of someone that privileged is pretty hard to
| relate to indeed, and that coming from someone who considers
| himself rather privileged in the first place.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > For people who don't think luck is one of the biggest factors
| of success, just read this essay.
|
| Luck has always been the biggest factor of success _in
| "superstar", high-visibility, bubble-powered fields_. You don't
| hear about all the people who _weren 't_ similarly lucky.
| gvb wrote:
| "Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too
| focused on looking for something else. They go to parties
| intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss
| opportunities to make good friends. They look through the
| newspaper determined to find certain job advertisements and, as
| a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more
| relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there, rather than
| just what they are looking for."
|
| -- Richard Wiseman
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yep. People have gotten the gray comment treatment in the past
| here on HN for expressing views like yours.
|
| I can't help but think that PG's life story draws to it a
| clique of people who are convinced there's a clear-cut recipe
| to success and that reading PG's articles will give them that
| recipe.
|
| Now let's be clear: there _is_ such a thing as "have enough
| brains to utilize opportunity when it lands on your shoulder".
| There absolutely is! And people have been failing at life for
| missing them. So I am not disputing THAT part of PG's skill-
| set. He obviously made a very good use of his luck.
|
| Some people have pointed at Eminem's success story as a better
| example. But I still disagree; Eminem was (likely still is) a
| genius at what he does but his success also came from
| influential people being present at a very niche and unknown
| event in a shady part of the town.
|
| So, again, luck. His iconic song "Lose Yourself" is IMO a good
| illustration of the concept.
|
| I think motivational stories about success will be much better
| if the successful people:
|
| 1. Make it crystal clear what background they came from;
|
| 2. Analyze how they made use of the plentiful opportunity that
| was thrown their way;
|
| 3. Coach people on how to maximally utilize an opportunity when
| it comes to you.
|
| Especially #3 is something that I think our hustle culture
| could use much more material on.
| dang wrote:
| I think we see what we're predisposed to see in these things.
| When I read the essay, what stood out to me was how long he got
| by with almost no money. Living on $7 a day etc.
|
| If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in
| something other than the Twitter putdown sense), it was more
| intellectual than financial. He has clearly always been single-
| minded about doing what he wanted to do / was interested in,
| and stubborn as hell about not doing what he didn't want to do.
| That mindset may be part nature and part nurture, but at least
| his upbringing didn't damage it, as many other people's would
| have.
|
| To me the key detail is not that pg nagged his father into
| buying a TRS-80, not that he learned to program with it, but
| that his father used one of pg's own programs to write an
| entire book. That's a hell of a success for a kid, and it says
| something profound about their relationship. Many of us had a
| similar path to the first two of those steps, but the third
| step branches somewhere different. Life-changingly different.
|
| Edit: btw, on the matter of luck, I always remember
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| I think it's so much more difficult these days to get
| significant success (jobs going away to AI, more competition,
| many of the low hanging discoveries and technologies being
| completed - I would love to make billions writing a chat app
| or simple CRUD database like Facebook!) that most of us are
| predisposed to focus on the luck part of things and not the
| hard work element.
|
| I agree with you - people are missing the fact that the
| author was able to live on a very meagre salary for years.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Agreed. An empowering upbringing is a factor with a huge
| weight. Upbringing that actively attacks the learned
| helplessness and never allows it to even show itself is what
| makes people confident and be able to utilize a good luck.
| aerosmile wrote:
| This is a chicken or the egg problem. Is the type of a person
| who has the intellectual capacity to invent the SaaS model and
| angel investing at scale just purely lucky to have the right
| timing for his inventions, or would that same person have
| invented something else in case that their life was time-
| shifted by a few years or decades or even centuries? People
| often say that once you're lucky, twice you're good.
| jll29 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing your personal journey, Paul. Those here who
| have followed some of your work will appreciate getting a
| connected narrative.
|
| Would you consider sharing some of your paintings as part of your
| essays?
|
| I particularly appreciate your strong desire to attain freedom in
| life (as opposed to, say, getting rich as a primary motive).
|
| What's next? You know how to do things at scale, perhaps after "Y
| Combinator" it's time for a "p Educator" [1]? Whatever your pick,
| I'm sure it will be worth following your journey onwards.
|
| [1] paideia or paideia is Greek for "education"
| nostrademons wrote:
| This is a good essay.
|
| It's interesting to contrast it with some of the
| psychological/self-help literature around being your "true self",
| where the true self is fluid and amorphous and avoids being
| rigidly defined. Or with Drew Houston's commmencement address [1]
| - "That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and
| the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to
| work. Sometimes that little voice knows best." Or Steve Jobs [2]
| - "Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can
| only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that
| the dots will somehow connect in your future."
|
| Don't ignore your emotions, particularly the niggling feelings
| that make you do things that seem to have no purpose in your
| grand plans but nevertheless draw you along. Don't ignore reality
| either - that'd be putting art galleries online - but oftentimes
| our subconscious has a better grip on reality than we give it
| credit for.
|
| [1] https://news.mit.edu/2013/drew-houstons-commencement-address
|
| [2] https://singjupost.com/full-transcript-steve-jobs-stay-
| hungr...
| breck wrote:
| The world is non linear, with discrete inflection points. Some
| of those points are outside of your control, but some are
| points where you made an important decision that correctly
| anticipated a non linear outcome. All positive non linear
| outcomes take time to compound, however, hence why you can't
| connect the positive dots until enough time has passed to look
| back.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| What do you mean by non linear there?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The distant past has a disproportionate effect on the
| future.
| sjg007 wrote:
| You meet someone who takes your life in a different
| direction.
| breck wrote:
| not this, but something like this: |
| | | |
| / | |
| | / |
| / | |
| | / |
| - | / \
| | -/ | |
| / \ | |
| | --- | ----/
| -\ | --/ -
| | |
| +------------------------------------+
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> What these programs really showed was that there's a subset
| of natural language that's a formal language.
|
| Don't take this as any fanboy stuff, but pg is still good at
| putting big thoughts in small sentences. Its a sort of mental zip
| function.
|
| Also this is why I still type into google things like 'rubik
| solve how-to' instead of my daughter doing "show me how to solve
| a rubiks cube"
| johnyzee wrote:
| Yes. He is a gifted writer, very succinct. Funny that his
| writing pursuits all seem to be incidental, like the Lisp books
| (per his own account), and the essays, which certainly played a
| part in his success.
| ssamkough wrote:
| This essay almost made me cry. Beautifully written and just
| explaining what he worked on and his reasoning behind it step by
| step. It really feels like he just followed that youthful, gut
| feeling every step of the way. Crazy.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| To me his story of going into painting in his twenties, while
| having never been interested in visual arts before, spending on
| and off time on it for years and eventually abandoning it in his
| forties sounds like a story of internal vs external motivation.
| He WANTED to like painting, because "he could create something
| eternal", "he wouldn't have a boss", he made himself interested
| in it, but in the the end his natural proclivity for
| conceptual/abstract (and not visual) thinking won over and
| computers and writing completely dominated his creative efforts.
| They must have been just intrinsically rewarding for him, as
| opposed to being "good on paper" like painting was.
| theunixbeard wrote:
| Great article, especially the ending sentence cracked me up.
|
| pg is such an inspiring person. Walking away from $2M per month
| at Yahoo. To now most likely being a billionaire from personally
| funding the YC LLC.
|
| And then spending 6 years just painting, coding, writing and
| raising a family. Living the dream.
|
| Sure Elon Musk is a "cool billionaire", but in my book pg is even
| cooler.
| breck wrote:
| > $2M per month at Yahoo
|
| I had to reread this like 3 times. "per month", "per month"!
| PG, pay me $100K and I will install some secret video game room
| somewhere on Yahoo's campus for you to hang out a little
| longer.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| Infinitely cooler. Where the hell is Elon Musk's "On Lisp"? :-)
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| What's interesting is how much of pg's early life was spent in
| preparation. Of course, it wasn't obviously preparation at the
| time, but art school + computer science PhD is a rare and
| effective combo. It's almost the complete opposite of the
| standard college dropout founder archetype. I recently read a
| hilariously titled book, "What Tech Calls Thinking" that's a
| pretty scathing analysis of the tech world. But one accurate
| point the author makes is that the college dropout founder
| usually doesn't have that much domain specific experience. Unless
| you come into college extremely well prepared, you're probably
| going to spend your first few years doing core and introductory
| classes. It's pretty unlikely you're going to get to the top 1%
| of a field within the first two years of college.
|
| With pg, it's at the complete opposite extreme. I mean, ffs who
| does an PhD and then decides to go to art school? I'm curious on
| whether pg believes he would have done well had he done a startup
| immediately after undergrad. Considering how much Lisp played a
| factor, I doubt it. What about post-PhD and pre-art school? I'm
| not sure either; the art school did have a strong influence as
| well.
|
| Another aspect that I liked was the duality of art and CS. I can
| relate to it, as I have a pretty big obsession with film and CS.
| Sometimes it feels like an endless tug of war between the two;
| one always distracting me from the other. It's fascinating seeing
| someone else handle that struggle.
| janvdberg wrote:
| Any chance pg publishes this as an audio file voiced by himself?
| It feels like a personal story, so it would be fitting.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| >Around this time, in the spring of 2000, I had an idea. It was
| clear from our experience with Viaweb that web apps were the
| future. Why not build a web app for making web apps? Why not let
| people edit code on our server through the browser, and then host
| the resulting applications for them? [9] You could run all sorts
| of services on the servers that these applications could use just
| by making an API call: making and receiving phone calls,
| manipulating images, taking credit card payments, etc....
|
| >The language for defining applications would of course be a
| dialect of Lisp. But I wasn't so naive as to assume I could
| spring an overt Lisp on a general audience; we'd hide the
| parentheses, like Dylan did.
|
| Well you damn near gave me a heart attack. Built the beginnings
| of something like that, a web app that builds web apps and a
| stream processor that builds stream processors, with apps/stream-
| processors defined in clojure:
| https://github.com/acgollapalli/dataworks
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| This story gives me so much hope.
|
| I too have meandered around in life. Although i've always
| 'Focused' and worked long hours, i've jumped between so many
| projects it's hard to keep track of them all.
|
| After HS i joined the air force for an enlistment, didn't care
| for it, tried college, didn't like it so i got a year long
| internship at tesla. Tried to go back to college for a semester
| but I hated it so i did another year long internship at Tesla.
| After my second internship they told me they could only hire me
| full time if i got my degree, so I went back to school. However,
| after a month I dropped out. Now i'm 26 and i feel like i have
| nothing to show for it. However, this essay paired with a book
| i've recently read called on Range gives me a bit of hope.
| monadic3 wrote:
| > But there's nothing like writing a book about something to help
| you learn it.
|
| This is the motto of silicon valley if I've ever heard it--all
| the good parts and bad parts smushed into a singular brand. The
| bad parts are pure narcissism; the good parts are more or less
| asking "am I doing harm by investing in this predatory business"?
| Unfortunately, the answer is mostly "yes".
| dang wrote:
| The "motto of silicon valley" is that writing a book about
| something is a good way to help you learn it? That's kind of a
| strange take. Lots of people who've written books, including
| good books, have made this observation btw. That's because it's
| true. I've heard some of them say it personally.
| alberth wrote:
| How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer
| science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university
| similar to PGs.
|
| I'm younger than PG and it wouldn't surprise me if I've forgotten
| that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the
| professor and certainly don't recall the small details described
| by PG.
|
| Just curious if I'm the only person who can't recall as vividly
| courses as PG can.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| Go have a beer with a college roommate. I bet the memories will
| come flooding back.
|
| I have a terrible time recalling stuff like this. But then I
| meet up with an old friend and I start remembering a huge
| amount of stuff I hadn't thought about in a decade.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Sounds like you need to start writing/journalling/blogging.
| It's amazing how it shapes your brain's ability to remember
| events.
| endergen wrote:
| I only recall things that I think about a lot, which tend to be
| when I learned lessons and it had an effect on my life's
| direction. That and anything I found really interesting I still
| remember. For reference, I'm 42, so it's been 2 decades.
| twiceinawhile wrote:
| PG remembers because he actively tried to remember it to write
| an essay. If you sat down and tried to write down your college
| memories, I'm sure you'll remember many things. Your memories
| are on the hard disk, you just have to bring it to RAM.
|
| Try thinking about data structures, programming language, AI,
| OS, networking, etc classes you took. You must remember
| something about the lectures. If not, certainly the projects
| that you worked on.
| PhillyG wrote:
| I graduated less than ten years ago, and I don't think I could
| immediately name all the classes I took.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I graduated undergrad 25 years ago. I can't randomly recall
| tons, but there is some random stuff I do remember -- like
| getting an F on my first test in Numerical Analysis, but then
| ending with the highest score in the class for the quarter
| (yes, a lot of people failed every test).
|
| But I still have my old course catalog and flipping through
| that, a lot of memories jump to mind in classes I totally
| forgot I had. So I think with some prompts you can probably
| remember a lot more than you think.
| wglb wrote:
| Many of my courses are deeply etched in my memories. Static
| Fields followed by Dynamic Fields in the EE department. A
| survey course covering Lisp, Snobol, and Prolog. A C99 class
| covering engineering traffic flow. My first Fortran course
| where I figured out how to get the compiler to spit assembly
| language. A course in General Semantics which vastly influenced
| my thinking. Linear Algebra course, which was the only college
| math course that I aced. The beginning circuits course learning
| about Kirchhoff's law. A control system theory class. And
| working with my eventual advisor who was studying control feed
| back systems that caused the Bonneville Power Administration
| network to oscillate in frequency.
|
| And there was a lot of non-class stuff that you seem to get
| just hanging around, like the Marshall McLuhan medium talk,
| Larry Atkins who wrote the champion chess program that ran on
| the CDC 6600 (No, he would insist, it is not Artificial
| Intelligence--just good engineering). Reading Dijkstra's paper
| "GOTO considered harmful" which was absolutely true in spades
| for Fortran II. Keypunching jobs for running in the batch
| processing mode of the CDC 6600. And seriously fun co-op jobs.
| munificent wrote:
| Reminiscing is an active process. Sit down and really spent
| some time reawakening those memories and you'll be surprised
| what comes back.
| williesleg wrote:
| Who the F is Paul Graham?
| bluefox wrote:
| Graham says Arc had to be frozen because other programs depended
| on it. Indeed, much of Lisp language design came about by demands
| of the applications that used it.
|
| So, is Bel finished or still changing? Are there other programs
| that depend on it? If Bel is developed "axiomatically", maybe not
| programs, but more thinking about the theory of computation may
| be its driver of change.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| In retrospect, knowing what you know now, what would you have
| done different, or really glad what you did in the past? Can you
| share an excerpt on translating some of this and how it might
| apply to us today - what would you encourage us to be doing now.
| lazybreather wrote:
| On a side note, Robert Morris served 3 years probation according
| to his Wiki. He also served community service and paid fines.
| Would be interesting details.
| staunch wrote:
| Some are lamenting that PG's work on Bel doesn't seem meaningful
| in terms of the practical programming world of building things,
| like many of us do in our jobs.
|
| But I think Bel is best viewed as PG painting with code. He lost
| interest in using acrylic and canvas, so he turned to his
| favorite paintbrush and canvas: vim and Lisp. And created art
| with it. And, at least for some people, Bel is beautiful art that
| provokes deep thoughts and insights. It's unquestionably his own
| signature style of art.
| deedubaya wrote:
| What struck me most about this essay is the privilege required to
| make it all possible. From educational institution to educational
| institution changing focus and whimsically studying other fields
| without much care for how to make a living or how it all would be
| paid for. Perhaps just omitted from the story because it wasn't
| relevant or doesn't need explaining.
|
| Kids these days sure don't have it so lucky, and if they do, well
| then they probably already hit the jackpot at birth.
|
| How many fewer pgs will we have tomorrow because of the financial
| burdens and inefficiencies of higher education today?
| king_panic wrote:
| Exactly 4 fewer pgs
| zuhayeer wrote:
| "It wasn't happening in a class, like it was supposed to, but
| that was ok"
|
| Summary of the college experience even today. You have to go
| outside the classroom to learn and do the most interesting
| things. But because those interesting things happen in proximity
| to a university campus, college is still pretty valuable.
|
| Also relevant: "In other words, like many a grad student, I was
| working energetically on multiple projects that were not my
| thesis"
| lawwantsin17 wrote:
| the world's most boring essayist.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| > My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just
| characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.
|
| My thought is a bit of an asides from the main essay content but
| this applies to real people as well as story characters, just
| because someone has feelings strongly doesn't mean anything other
| than that. A few of my strongest feelings about various things
| are rather mundane and at worst destructive. Doesn't make them
| deeper than a puddle.
|
| Strength of a thing is a bad proxy for depth, complexity or
| interest.
| hinkley wrote:
| "Suffering is not a personality," as the old advice goes.
| chrisaycock wrote:
| > _during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as
| practiced at the time, was a hoax._
|
| I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the
| popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call
| them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing
| or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources
| behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead,
| very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud
| computing and advanced type systems.
|
| > _the low end eats the high end: that it 's good to be the
| "entry level" option, even though that will be less prestigious,
| because if you're not, someone else will be, and will squash you
| against the ceiling._
|
| I wish every grad student had been forced to memorize this
| statement. Build something useable, not clever.
| dekhn wrote:
| I don't agree about grid computing. Many scientists got work
| done with it on aggregations of clusters. LIGO used pyGlobus to
| transfer large amounts of scientific data.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Absolutely. Things that were commercial failures were often
| huge successes in the scientific community. If you don't see
| why something is popular it's probably not because it's
| useless, it's probably because you aren't the intended user.
| Which is fine but a very different conclusion.
| mateo411 wrote:
| There were many cool things about grid computing and I think
| they got some of the abstractions right.
|
| However, there was a larger gap in what was actually possible
| and what people claimed was possible. You'll see this gap in
| other software. However, if you compare the difference to
| what AWS says it can do to what it actually does, that's a
| pretty big difference.
|
| The quality of the systems developed by a large company with
| of resources is going to be much better than a collaboration
| of different scientists and software engineering groups at
| different national labs and universities.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And the early beowulf cluster stuff was definitely breaking
| new ground, and is the direct ancestor of the most powerful
| supercomputers in the world right now.
| hinkley wrote:
| An alternative that seems to work is chasing grants, or defense
| contracts.
|
| But then the choice becomes "build something usable, or only
| work for someone who hired a 'grant writer' that is making
| 125-250% of your salary"
| alisonkisk wrote:
| I don't have the skill to be a grant writer, so I don't
| begrudge their pay. Grant writer isn't a job you get through
| nepotism.
| hinkley wrote:
| I knew someone who worked at a defense research group.
| Their head grant writer was pulling in 3x of the senior
| developers because he tried to quit and they had to make an
| offer he couldn't pass up.
|
| Usually you don't counter-offer at all, and you don't throw
| money at someone like that unless there's a damned good
| reason.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Rather than an outright hoax, I like the term "fad". There are
| fads in technology, some of which are directly inspired by what
| has become possible and some of which are mutations of of other
| ideas. Some fads have more worth or more longevity than others
| -- in the world of clothing, denim jeans are now a foundation
| on which to build; I might consider object-oriented language
| features to be similar.
| DataWorker wrote:
| Like stocks, you can buy ideas "low" and sell them "high."
| Some ideas are cyclical too, AI, mainframes/cloud, etc... And
| this extends beyond tech for instance "equity" is currently
| hot but that may be short lived which is unfortunate.
| sjg007 wrote:
| > the low end eats the high end: that it's good to be the
| "entry level" option, even though that will be less
| prestigious, because if you're not, someone else will be, and
| will squash you against the ceiling.
|
| This happens with jobs too.. especially software jobs. Nobody
| wants to do software QA, want to know how to get a software
| engineering job when the market is tight or otherwise
| inaccessible... software QA.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Things like grid computing or formal methods of software
| engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was
| able to use the results. Instead, very different formats of
| these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced
| type systems.
|
| The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth
| Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described
| as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite
| closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s
| and will probably be done in the 2020s.
|
| Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus
| on using Prolog-derived query languages for _everything_ ,
| which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked
| compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to
| concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of
| FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential
| overall.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| And target to play go ... well at least that objective is
| done.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is
| a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.
| nerdponx wrote:
| You can't have a master's in ML and seriously argue this.
|
| It doesn't even make sense, it's like saying marijuana is a
| hoax because my uncle smokes pot and still got cancer.
|
| Here are some alternative statements that make more sense
| (and contain more truth):
|
| * There is a lot of snake oil and outright fraud being sold
| to unwitting managers.
|
| * There is a lot of empty hype being fed to general public
| through the pop sci media and mainstream news.
|
| * Deep learning specifically has not borne fruit in all
| (edit: or even most) problem domains.
|
| * Lack of good quality data (and qualified people to analyze
| it) is a bigger problem than lack of advanced models and
| computing power.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Lack of good quality data (and qualified people to
| analyze it) is a bigger problem than lack of advanced
| models and computing power.'
|
| There's plenty of data and compute power, but what's often
| lacking in the ML field is precisely models that reflect
| reasonable priors for one's given use case. Good feature
| engineering (often relying on domain experts) is similarly
| underrated. You see this again and again when looking at
| how robust SOTA results are achieved. In a way, this means
| that good (non-"hoax") ML is ultimately a lot more similar
| to traditional statistics than most practitioners are
| willing to acknowledge.
| teataster wrote:
| While I wholeheartedly agree with your point, he said
| good quality data. I am currently working with real
| estate data. There is no way of knowing whether an entry
| in the database is a house or a house's floor. I had a
| project at a death insurance company (they pay your
| funeral). They had customers dying and coming back to
| life. You would say those are core business issues that
| should be dealt with.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Very good point and well-said.
| timr wrote:
| It isn't a hoax, but the OP is exactly right: if it were more
| usable, people would see it for what it is, and not for what
| the silly media narrative makes it sounds like.
|
| As long as your technology is only usable by a high
| priesthood, you can make it look like magic.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all?
|
| In the last 5 years, we have made incomprehensibly huge
| improvements in power and usability. It's an active field,
| and improvements are still coming at a steady pace.
|
| We have already revolutionized search, natural language
| processing & machine translation, image/audio/video
| processing, robotics, game AI, and advertising (for better
| or worse).
|
| And on top of all this, we have significantly reduced the
| "time to first useful model", and we have significantly
| lowered the math and programming requirements for building
| and implementing models. And now we have transfer learning,
| which lets any old Joe Schmo benefit from massive computing
| power and datasets to build small on-device models that
| blow away SOTA accuracy from even a few years ago.
|
| Oh, and the ML tooling ecosystem has become a substantial
| source of innovation in programming language design,
| "developer UX", and "data ops".
|
| What the fuck more do you want? The people who seem the
| most upset that ML isn't magic seem to be the most confused
| about what ML even is and does.
| timr wrote:
| > Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all?
|
| Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to _use_
| software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone
| if computers were controlled by an elite group of
| engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of
| us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats.
|
| > What the fuck more do you want?
|
| If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot
| simpler.
| dang wrote:
| > Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use
| software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone
| if computers were controlled by an elite group of
| engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of
| us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats.
|
| That's clearly not what nerdponx meant. Can you please
| stick to the site guidelines? " _Please respond to the
| strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says,
| not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize. Assume good
| faith._" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot
| simpler.
|
| That was a nice de-escalation.
| timr wrote:
| > That's clearly not what nerdponx meant.
|
| I disagree. I made a straightforward interpretation of
| what was written. Given what came after the part I
| quoted, you really have to stretch to interpret it
| differently.
|
| The OP _underscored_ the same point using profanity.
|
| I made a response that was clearly sardonic, attempting
| to be funny.
| oivey wrote:
| You can say, with your voice, "who won the Super Bowl
| last year?" to a device that fits in your pocket and it
| responds with its own voice with the correct answer.
| That's pretty accessible.
| nerdponx wrote:
| _Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use
| software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone
| if computers were controlled by an elite group of
| engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of
| us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats._
|
| What are you even talking about?
|
| It sounds like you're upset that cutting-edge technology
| still requires training & expertise to use and deploy
| effectively in industry.
| dang wrote:
| Hey, can you please not take HN threads further into
| flamewar? We're trying to avoid that sort of thing here.
| If a comment contains a swipe, please don't escalate.
| Also, it's good to check if there's something in your
| earlier comment that might have been provocative in its
| own right (which there was: "What the fuck more do you
| want?" is a hop flameward).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nerdponx wrote:
| Thank you for keeping an eye on things.
| colincooke wrote:
| There are many many practical example of modern ML
| (especially DL). Would be interesting to hear why you think
| those examples are not indicative of a field which is
| useful/not a hoax.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Word on the street is the level of superficially attractive
| papers with no merit is very high in ML literature.
| colincooke wrote:
| That is absolutely correct, but is sadly the case in a
| lot of fields. It doesn't mean that the practical results
| we see (AlphaFold, Imagenet Performance, NLP performance,
| Robotic control with RL) isn't amazing progress.
|
| Luckily due to so many people using ML these days, what's
| useful vs. fluff gets sorted out over time.
| skybrian wrote:
| Is AlphaFold a practical result? Winning a competition
| isn't the same as production use. It would be interesting
| to read about how it's being used.
|
| This is a good list of promising work, but showing
| practicality would need more explanation.
| beowulfey wrote:
| In theory it should be practical. The first generation
| has been adapted by other teams into excellent prediction
| servers that can be used now. The second gen is way more
| hush hush and has yet to be vetted, so we'll have to see.
| I am watching for news of it eagerly!
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It's a fair question. Is DeepMind famous for its
| amazingly smart toys because it's useful similarly-smart
| stuff is secret? Or public but boring? Or doesn't exist?
|
| (similar for Boston Dynamics, and IBM Watson)
| nmfisher wrote:
| Have you used speech recognition (or speech synthesis)
| lately? It's incredible, leaps and bounds ahead of where it
| was a decade ago.
|
| Not everything in ML is as rosy as the papers make it out to
| be, but to call it a "hoax" is going way too far.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| I think the "hoax" is conflating ML with a general
| artificial intelligence
| aborsy wrote:
| There are a lot of things that look incredible, but don't
| constitute much progress scientifically.
|
| For example, a rocket landing on moon looks incredible. But
| I don't think physicists would consider moon landing
| notable progress.
|
| So, with data and compute you could do applications.
| btilly wrote:
| Do you have any idea how many areas of science were
| opened up by our attempt to get to the Moon?
|
| The range is literally from discovering that unit tests
| are good in software to discovering the Van Allen belts
| to learning about the geology and history of the Moon
| from the rocks that we brought back.
|
| Could we have learned more science by doing something
| else with the money? Of course. But it is a dramatic
| overstatement to say that the Apollo program didn't
| "constitute any progress scientifically."
| aborsy wrote:
| Yes, and I tell you very few if any.
|
| If you don't believe an anonymous person here, see what
| prominent physicists say clearly on this topic, e.g.,
| Steven Weinberg.
|
| This is not to dismiss experimental research which is
| quite important, but to distinguish (experimental or
| theoretical) science from product development.
| btilly wrote:
| Why don't we see what he says?
|
| In https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1037/1 you'll
| find that he is very critical of manned spaceflight in
| general, but about Apollo he says, "No, at the time of
| Apollo, the astronauts did do some useful things. They
| brought back Lunar samples. They placed a laser reflector
| on the Moon that has been used ever since to monitor the
| motion of the Moon with incredible accuracy."
|
| Earlier in the same interview he criticized NASA for
| canceling Apollo 18 and 19 because he wanted the science
| that would have been done, to be done.
|
| I guess he didn't say what you thought he said.
|
| That said, his criticism of NASA's efforts with manned
| flight isn't because he doesn't think that it is useless
| to go to the moon. It is because it takes a lot of work
| to get humans there, and robots can do the job much more
| safely and cheaper. Which also explains why he thought
| Apollo was useful. At the time the technology of robotics
| was much worse so humans were the only way to do the job.
| aborsy wrote:
| By the way, Edward Teller shared the same view.
|
| If I recall correctly, an interviewer asks him about the
| scientific impact of landing on moon. He says, "it was
| there, but it not that great" and "I think it was money
| spent on public amusement, and from all money spent on
| public amusement this money was best spent"
|
| I am not pushing this view; just a relevant comment.
|
| -- update, exact statement
|
| I think this was not money spent on science. It was money
| spent on an extremely important aspect of technology, and
| it was money spent on public amusement. And from all
| money spent on public amusement this chunk of money was
| best spent. [The scientific value], it was there but it
| was not very great.
| aborsy wrote:
| He is critical of manned space flight and says plainly in
| a number of his talks, recalling from the top of my head,
| "man spaceflight has costed such and such billions of
| dollars and has produced nothing of scientific value" or
| "this was sold to public as a scientific project but it's
| nothing of the sort", and that "it's all done on earth."
|
| He mentions one area, but then says, "but actually that
| could have been done much cheaper using unmanned robots"
|
| I agree costs are issue here; money that could have been
| better spent.
| whistle650 wrote:
| This feels like a very sterile view of science and it's
| actual history and practice. I was recently remembering
| how Marconi's puzzling success in sending a transatlantic
| wireless signal stimulated the discovery of the
| ionosphere.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I think it depends on what you call it. Instead of calling it
| AI or even ML you could call it pattern recognition or
| automatic model parameter estimation, but it doesn't sound as
| cool.
| ve55 wrote:
| Something can be both legitimately revolutionary/interesting,
| but also significantly over-hyped and misrepresented, often
| with strong for-profit incentives. Some recent good examples
| of this include progress in cryptocurrencies,
| decentralization, and ML/AI.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Sure, but many people disagree that ML itself is
| revolutionary. The basics of it were known (referred to,
| quite appropriately, as 'data mining') as early as the
| 1990s and perhaps earlier. We've added a smattering of new
| techniques since then, and compute power has been expanded
| via GPGPU, but there was no "revolutionary" shift in the
| field. Even multi-layer ("deep") neural networks are very
| old tech.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| As evidenced by gpt3 we still don't know the best way to
| use deep learning. More data improved the outcome
| dramatically. What else might surprise us?
| colincooke wrote:
| The smattering of new techniques seem to have made the
| difference between success on toy problems vs. being able
| to match or exceed human performance on many difficult
| tasks. So while naysayers are correct that "the math
| hasn't changed since the 90s!", enough has changed to
| make calling DL a paradigm shift accurate.
|
| For reference, I can now get an intern to images for a
| few hours, then train a black box algorithm to automate
| their efforts in another few hours. This algorithm is
| sensitive, brittle, and may have perfomance issues, but
| it's still already orders of magnitudes better than what
| took days or months of effort prior. That to me is a
| revolution, regardless of the math.
| tasogare wrote:
| > then train a black box algorithm
|
| This is part of the problem. Finding a the value of a few
| hyperparameters is hardly something I consider
| interesting science.
| gugagore wrote:
| In the recent success stories on images, audio, and text,
| it's not "a few hyperparameters" by any stretch of the
| imagination.
|
| That's like saying "finding the sequence of assembly
| instructions / nucleotides / ... is hardly something I
| consider interesting science"
| nerdponx wrote:
| Come on, really?
|
| Electric motors and lithium batteries aren't new either.
| So much for the EV revolution, nothing to see here.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| I assume you're being sarcastic, but there actually isn't
| anything to see. Plug-in hybrids blow any EV out of the
| water and will do so the foreseeable future. They're
| cheaper, lighter, just as efficient on short trips, and
| much more practical on long trips.
|
| Hybrid vehicles are the practical option today. Pure
| gasoline vehicles are outmoded and EVs are all hype.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Perceptrons are indeed old tech. But try training models
| for even something as simple as handwriting recognition
| using techniques from the 90s and modern techniques but
| with the same training set and compute resources. You'll
| get much better results with the modern stuff.
| khaldiamer wrote:
| > If you're curious why my site looks so old-fashioned, it's
| because it's still made with this software. It may look clunky
| today, but in 1996 it was the last word in slick.)
|
| Exactly when I was thinking about that.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| What a life. Love the 2nd advice very much.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| I have pretty much the same disorganized life story, except I
| didn't get rich, and I'm still trying to figure out what to do.
| meagher wrote:
| If you want to read with more readable (I think) formatting,
| check out this CSS proxy site I made: https://pg-
| essays.now.sh/worked.html
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I have set few websites to default to the reader-mode.
| http://paulgraham.com is one of them.
|
| Here is how:
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/c55fa4aqqu9mmph/CleanShot%202021-0...
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I find PG's website far more readable than Hacker News...
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Yes, it's baffling to me that pg still hasn't understood that
| the essence of the web is to let clients handle the formatting.
|
| Instead, he actively puts <br> at the end of each line to
| prevent exactly that.
| inbx0 wrote:
| Don't know if you are interested in feedback for the site, but
| IMO the low contrast of the gray hurts to read. I don't mean
| this as a knee jerk "all text must be #000 on #fff" reaction,
| but maybe something like --color-body: hsl(0, 0%, 10%) would be
| a good compromise.
| endergen wrote:
| Ha, I think Dark Mode would be more on hacker point!
| meagher wrote:
| Definitely https://github.com/tmm/pg-essays
| grayrest wrote:
| > If you zoom in on the Upper East Side, there's a tiny corner
| that's not rich, or at least wasn't in 1993. It's called
| Yorkville, and that was my new home.
|
| From my apartment at 83rd & 1st, it still isn't particularly
| rich. I thought it'd change with the new subway line opening but
| I haven't noticed much of a difference.
| BrandonM wrote:
| Awesome ending. Thanks for everything, pg.
| judofyr wrote:
| > Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so
| intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the
| code in my head and could write more there.
|
| I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It
| seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the
| end result was something which appeared on the front page of
| Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it
| mentioned in _any_ community which are actively working on
| programming language design (e.g. Rust, Zig, TypeScript). Maybe
| he 's happy with the result regardless of how useful people have
| found it, but surely it must be somewhat disappointing to see it
| go unnoticed by?
| guytv wrote:
| Bel is painting in code.
|
| Like all good paintings it goes unnoticed in its time.
|
| It might become a classic in the future, it might be forgotten.
| pyb wrote:
| As a Lisper, I had not been able to understand what Bel was
| when it was released, and still do not understand it after
| reading the shorter explanation in this post.
|
| Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just
| needs to be "sold" a bit better.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| As somebody who liked reading about Bel but gave up after the
| first paragraph of the source code, something to note is that
| (a) most new ideas are failures, (b) I'm happy for Mr pg for
| trying new things, I like when people try to do something
| new, without regard for success, (c) great ideas take time to
| be appreciated in full - it may very well be tha t Bel will
| be a great success, but once understood by people far smarter
| than me and (d) (importantly for me), I appreciate the
| reminder that the path least travelled can be the most
| rewarding and it reminds me not to lose heart in my own crazy
| projects. I really liked the quote that the intentions on why
| we do things is important - the going will get rough, but we
| will persevere if we do it for the right intentions (our own
| happiness).
|
| Bel will most likely not gain traction; but the fact that Mr
| pg spent four years and enjoyed his time developing it, makes
| it to me a highly successful outcome for himself:) outward
| Success is not a requirement for a successful project, the
| only thing matters is whether we achieved our internal goals
| on it.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| He probably made it for himself, not to change the world. Or at
| least you get that sense when studying it intensively.
|
| I'm not sure anyone else _has_ studied it intensively, but
| perhaps there are one or two.
|
| It changed the way I code, at least. I also snagged a few of
| the library functions for my own lisp.
| _Microft wrote:
| _> I 'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for
| pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years,
| and the end result was something which appeared on the front
| page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared._
|
| This is not unlike a doctoral dissertation. Invest years of
| your life and effort, produce nice results, have people cheer
| for you after you successfully defend it and then nobody cares
| for the results anymore.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| At least a dissertation is a school project where you learn a
| skill to use in future.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| The analogy is not great, because the f-expr-based Lisp
| Kernel [0] _did_ arise from a doctoral dissertation, and is
| far more interesting than Bel. The Lisp world has respect for
| Shutt 's work but not for Graham's, and that's not by
| accident.
|
| Edit: Hey, I'm just doing what you did. You started this
| comment thread by both posting a top-level comment, and also
| starting replies to other folks.
|
| So, uh, _have_ you read Shutt 's work on Kernel yet? Or are
| you just going to play this out based on optics? One of us is
| shilling for some rich fuck, and the other of us is reading
| historical academic work.
|
| [0] https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html
| bidirectional wrote:
| Well a more forceful version of your counter-argument would
| be that Claude Shannon laid the foundations for the
| information age in his thesis, rather than linking to some
| obscure Lisp work. But really, that wasn't their point --
| most theses go nowhere, the few that do are obvious
| exceptions to that rule.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Haha. Are you going from comment thread to comment thread
| putting down Bel while plugging other work?
|
| Okay.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| There's no onomatopoeia in the English language for the kind of
| laughter that I'm currently emitting. There have been plenty of
| technical examinations of Bel [0]; it's just not novel.
|
| [0] https://lobste.rs/s/jec21l/thought_leaders_chicken_sexers
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| There's no techincal examination of Bel in that essay. It's a
| dismissive aside at the end, based on threads the author
| perceives in Graham's intellectual history.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| There's a couple good comments in the discussion thread. In
| particular, there's a comment halfway down the page which
| points out that Bel's original introduction [0] has only a
| few specific characteristics (metacircularity, long
| contemplative period before implementation, formal methods)
| and that those have been core concepts in the Lisp
| community for decades.
|
| [0] https://github.com/alephyud/bel
| dang wrote:
| If you mean https://lobste.rs/s/jec21l/thought_leaders_ch
| icken_sexers#c_..., that's not serious criticism. (And
| like the other article, is obviously motivated by some
| extrinsic animosity. Articles like that get reactions
| based on how people already feel. Those who share the
| animosity like the hit, those who don't don't.)
|
| pg's idea for Bel was to express _existing_ programming
| language constructs in the style of McCarthy 's original
| Lisp, so to complain that it doesn't introduce new ones
| misses the point. You can't make serious criticism
| without knowing what the project was trying to achieve.
| (Actually, IIRC, Bel does contain a couple of unusual
| constructs for a Lisp, but not because pg was trying to
| invent any. They came up as side-effects of making the
| program clearer and smaller.)
|
| Similarly, it makes no sense to complain that Bel isn't
| being used as a programming language. That's not its
| intent. Its intent is to be the minimal executable
| explanation of what a programming language is, in the way
| that McCarthy's Lisp explained what computation is.
| Obviously that would be unusably slow as a real-world
| platform. The important thing is that it runs at all.
| srcreigh wrote:
| Bel is an uncompromising excursion into the beauty of
| programming. His work is a consistent source of inspiration and
| encouragement for me.
| egypturnash wrote:
| All this time spent going in and out of the art world makes me
| wonder if there is any kind of art grant program going on in YC.
| dhskdhakdh wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that the art world's way of thinking
| didn't rub off on Graham. It's not clear to me that he ever had
| a genuinely creative attitude to art making. He didn't get the
| art world and it didn't get him.
|
| As a technical term, "art world" refers to the professionalized
| aspects of art production--and explicitly not the business of
| actually working on your art or training as an artist. It's the
| nonsense and PR side of art.
|
| When Graham says "Art galleries didn't want to be online, and
| still don't, not the fancy ones." it really doesn't reflect the
| reality of the most prestigious contemporary galleries like
| Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth. They are very online, but Graham
| clearly is just not keeping up with that. He might be thinking
| of some tiny stuffy and elitist gallery in New York, who knows.
| He is out of touch.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Art is my career and trust me, the "nonsense and PR side of
| art" is an important part of making it work. One I am
| absolutely terrible at and do the bare minimum I can get away
| with, because it's just not fun, and because getting good at
| it requires some very different mindsets from getting good at
| art.
|
| Anyway. I think Paul Graham should think about his time
| trying to be an artist, take some of the absurd amounts of
| money he's throwing around for YC and put, like, one
| company's worth of investment into a bunch of artists. I
| volunteer myself for the pilot program. :)
| mtalantikite wrote:
| > Well, how had I chosen what to work on in the past? I wrote an
| essay for myself to answer that question, and I was surprised how
| long and messy the answer turned out to be.
|
| As someone that is largely in the same situation, also actively
| looking for what's next after years and years of programming and
| dabbling in various arts, this actually seems like a great
| exercise. I write every morning when I wake up, have piles of
| journals I've written, but haven't explicitly sat down to write
| that journal entry. Thanks for the prompt!
| vonnik wrote:
| I think it's important that PG published this essay this week.
|
| And that he included projects that were wildly successful (YC) as
| well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel). To
| me it shows two things: 1) that some of the most successful
| people make miscalculations about what the world needs. 2) that a
| few of them, like PG, are courageous enough to admit that.
|
| Personally, reading PG's essays and then going through YC years
| later changed the course of my life. That is, the essays are one
| way to change the world for the better, and they are one he's
| very good at. I'm glad he's writing them again.
|
| For any one new to tech or startups, they will introduce you to
| new ways of thinking, and save you from a lot of mistakes.
| breck wrote:
| > as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted
| (Bel)
|
| Was traction his goal? I'm not sure about that. I think the ROI
| on Bel is extremely high. It only looks small if you compare it
| to something like YCombinator.
| RNase wrote:
| "cheap office space is no bargain if it's depressing"
|
| Truly, the most valuable take away of it all.
| breck wrote:
| The bit about aliens is fascinating. If we're living in a
| simulation Lisp seems like the best bet to research that thread.
| Like playing with chemicals or physics models were in prior eras.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > How should I choose what to do?
|
| But this long essay does not really answer that.
| trwhite wrote:
| I thought it was pretty obvious: Work on what you're interested
| in. You'll work hard on things you care about.
| probe wrote:
| _> "How should I choose what to do? Well, how had I chosen what
| to work on in the past? I wrote an essay for myself to answer
| that question, and I was surprised how long and messy the answer
| turned out to be. If this surprised me, who'd lived it, then I
| thought perhaps it would be interesting to other people, and
| encouraging to those with similarly messy lives. So I wrote a
| more detailed version for others to read, and this is the last
| sentence of it."_
|
| I loved the ending. The essay was primarily for him. It seems
| that some of the best writing, similarly to the best products, is
| when you yourself are the recipient.
| breck wrote:
| The end was a very golden braided beginning.
| codazoda wrote:
| I also find this a lovely way to write. It's much easier to
| write to yourself than to someone else.
| johnyzee wrote:
| Great read!
|
| Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building
| storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became
| a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first
| made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and
| sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-
| touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end
| resulted in the 6502 becoming the basis for so many early
| microcomputers, including the Apple II.
|
| I'm sure there are many similar stories that illustrate the
| wisdom of this, otherwise counterintuitive, approach.
| vram22 wrote:
| I did a fair amount of hobbyist programming on the Commodore 64
| and BBC micros in their respective BASIC dialects and 6502
| assembly language, and loved it. Only a bit later did I get to
| know of higher-level languages like Pascal and then C (though C
| is a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily
| negative ways*).
| vram22 wrote:
| > a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily
| negative ways).
|
| Meant "a somewhat lower-level _language_ than Pascal "
|
| Early on, I read in some book or mag that "C is a version of
| Pascal that is not afraid to get its hands dirty". Enthused,
| I immediately started exploring C (although came back to
| Pascal sometime later via Delphi). Did a good amount of work
| with it over time, including some successful product
| development work (that was deployed in multiple client-server
| projects as database middleware) and some interesting
| business projects.
| lackbeard wrote:
| > When I came back to visit for a project later on, someone told
| me about a new thing called HTML, which was, as he described it,
| a derivative of SGML. Markup language enthusiasts were an
| occupational hazard at Interleaf and I ignored him, but this HTML
| thing later became a big part of my life.
|
| This is hilarious writing!
| wglb wrote:
| >Markup language enthusiasts were an occupational hazard
|
| I did my time with that, and happy to leave it behind.
| desireco42 wrote:
| So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul,
| I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on
| it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and
| figuring things out.
|
| Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have
| all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind
| of not interested it all.
|
| If they do something, this is more to please me, as they are good
| kids, but they would spend all day playing Roblox and watching
| Youtube.
|
| Not sure if you have some insights that can help me be better
| parent and support them better.
| quacked wrote:
| Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem;
| you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children
| are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the
| concept of "antagonistic learning":
| https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin...
|
| If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar
| essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and
| why it's done poorly these days. I suggest you start with the
| essays and writing of John Taylor Gatto; his writings were
| ludicrously inspirational to me. Here is the first article I
| ever read that made me realize that I was a deficient learner
| and had never truly engaged in learning:
| https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
|
| Consider that Roblox and Youtube are essentially slot machines
| for dopamine. If you want to engage with your children as
| creative, disciplined learning machines, they must be weaned
| off of addictive superstimulus-coded platforms, which is damn
| near impossible given the tech demands of modern school. I
| don't have any advice for you on that front, except that the
| more time you can spend with them the better. Perhaps you can
| start by playing Roblox and watching YouTube videos with them
| (taking care to only offer them positive and genuinely
| interested feedback on what they choose to do), and after
| they've built you into their habits, begin steering them
| towards more productive activities.
| dang wrote:
| Btw, HN doesn't have DMs and your email address isn't public.
| (It's on my list to make that explicit on the profile page.)
| So if you want to be contactable, you need to say how in your
| About field.
| quacked wrote:
| Hey, thanks. I'll do that.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| You are made for this, they are not. Nothing else.
| Accessibility has nothing to do with it. I had access all I
| wanted, still loved it to death. Couldn't stand not spending
| time on hacking. It's in the genes or something.
| breck wrote:
| I had to do the same thing and thought that was funny. I still
| remember I had been saving my paper route money for a while and
| my dad took me out on a walk and after some silence him saying
| "Breck, I've decided to help you buy the computer.". They put
| in 50% and I paid 50%. Even then had to do a payment plan with
| the kid in the city who could build computers on the cheap.
|
| Nowadays I let my 2yo play with my some old laptop that is
| 100,000x more powerful than the first machine I had.
| sjg007 wrote:
| I have the same problem. One thing to try to get them to do is
| build their own Roblox game with you or maybe build some
| compute machines inside Minecraft. My kids also want to make
| their own you tube channel so I look at it as broadcasting
| experience, story telling, and they also Facetime with their
| friends while playing so they get socialization as well.
| petercooper wrote:
| Same, but I've realized my kids aren't me, and most people
| aren't me. Most young children I encounter are not innately
| fascinated by computers and itching to get programming ASAP in
| the way that I was. But they don't seem to be autistic like I
| was/am either.
|
| I've tried to introduce them to Squeak, robots, and various
| such things on offer nowadays as gateways for children to get
| into tech, but the curiosity isn't there just yet. This is
| fine. They are into other things that _I_ wasn 't into at all..
| like dancing, sports, or just being kids! :-)
| hackflip wrote:
| The 80s-90s was a small window in time where computers were
| becoming powerful enough to do cool things without modern UX
| hiding all the implementation details.
| Epokhe wrote:
| Prevent your success from spoiling your kids. Your kids
| probably are not jealous of anything they see because you
| provide them anything they want. I think a parent should think
| and figure out how to create a challenging environment for
| their kids. Not just artificial challenge like games. Real
| challenge that will shape(and I think improve) their
| personality.
|
| I'm not a parent so I can't give concrete advise, just sharing
| my thoughts.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| It sounds like you're doing the opposite of what your parents
| did. They resisted giving you a computer which made you want it
| more intensely. Whereas you gave it to them freely and are
| probably subconsciously pressuring them to get interested in it
| (e.g. your last sentence says "help me be better parent and
| support them better" but I think what you really meant was
| "help me figure out how to get them interested in computers")
| which is making them perceive it as work or something forced on
| them and are therefore rebelliously opposing it.
|
| I know it's a truism but I think it's worth appreciating how
| rebellious kids can be. At least that's how I was. Tell me I
| can't do something, I will be obsessed with doing it. Tell me I
| have to do something or I should do something, I lose all
| interest in it.
|
| Or they're simply not interested in computers.
|
| Or you can try inspiring wonder and fascination and fun around
| computers.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I think it's probably more to do with being interested in
| things. I was really interested in computers and being online
| when I was young. I didn't have my own computer, my parents
| bought my sister one even though she didn't like or use
| computers, and I was always competing with my dad to use his.
| Later, I'd be vying with everyone for the phone line, to the
| point where my parents got an extra phone line, and (by then
| we had two computers) my brother and I would be always trying
| to use both phone lines so we could both be online.
|
| Now, as an adult, I have more computers than I could
| reasonably use (I originally wrote "more than I could want"
| but that isn't true). I still use computers all the time and
| I'm pretty much always online. I love it and I expect to
| continue to going forward and, hopefully, expand my
| connection to computers and the internet, as technology
| permits.
|
| My kids are too young to have an opinion on computers, and
| part of me is kind of concerned they won't have an interest
| in tinkering with computers or programming as I do. My father
| is an amateur radio enthusiast and I never really connected
| to that hobby. Maybe my dad trying to pressure me into
| studying the books (or maybe the requirement to study books)
| kept me from getting into it. Maybe I just had different
| natural proclivities. If my children show an interest in
| computers I won't restrict their access (except for not
| allowing them to use Windows). If they're into something
| else, I'll enable them (provided it's a healthy interest).
| We'll see.
| cuspycode wrote:
| Very much worth reading overall, and this especially caught my
| eye:
|
| _You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to
| paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can
| still be noticing new things after days of trying to write an
| essay about something people usually take for granted._
|
| I don't paint, but I did a lot of drawing in my younger days, and
| I noticed the same thing. And I do understand how this type of
| insight can be abstracted and be transferred to different
| circumstances. So I think art is very important, for reasons that
| are not always obviously apparent or easy to articulate.
| munificent wrote:
| One of my favorite things, perhaps _the_ favorite thing I got
| out of landscape photography was that while I was doing it, I
| was dialed into the seasons, weather, sunrise and sunset times,
| and light like never before. Everyone sees the sky all the
| time, but I really _saw_ it.
| samcgraw wrote:
| > I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and
| probably still are: short stories.
|
| This is a bit tangential, but if anyone is finding themselves in
| a similar spot and looking to sharpen their short story writing,
| I built a site called Storylocks [1] - it's a collaborative
| fiction app for aspiring authors to write serialized fiction just
| for fun.
|
| [1]https://storylocks.com
| inetsee wrote:
| This takes me back. I first started studying programming when I
| was 14. I had discovered a programmed-instruction test book in
| the library that taught machine language. Not assembly language,
| machine language. You had to write out the instructions as
| numeric values, and the addresses as numeric values too. I even
| did a book report on the book, which forever cemented my nerd
| cred. Fortunately, my family moved the next year. I am still
| astonished that the library had that book. The town I lived in
| had a population of about 10,000, and the primary business was
| growing oranges.
|
| Later I bought myself a TRS-80. The less said about that
| computer, the better. In my opinion, it deservedly earned the
| nickname Trash-80.
|
| I bought one of the first IBM PCs. It cost more than four times
| what I paid for my first car. At my first job after graduating
| college I worked with a DEC PDP-8. It had all of 6k bytes of
| memory (the odd number is because it had 4k of 12-bit words).
| While I was there we upgraded the memory (6k more bytes for
| $5000, 32k bytes hard disk drive for another $5000). Occasionally
| I will compare the performance to cost ration of my current
| computer to my old IBM-PC. My current machine cost me about $1000
| in parts, and it has 8G memory, and 4Tb hard drive. That's 8,000
| times as much memory, and 400,000 times as much storage as the
| IBM-PC. And the IBM-PC cost me $3500.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| > One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is
| how well it's worked, for me at least, to work on things that
| weren't prestigious.
|
| You might be able to reinterpret this through the lens of the old
| saying about how, during a gold rush, the people who "made
| shovels" made most of the money while a few miners got all the
| press.
|
| We don't usually hear about the folks making provisions or
| shovels. If you dig into Seattle history, you may learn about how
| early Seattle was financed in part by providing raw materials
| after San Francisco's fires (apparently parts of downtown Seattle
| are fill dirt used as ballast for empty lumber barges traveling
| back from SF), but things got really interesting after the
| Seattle Fire. The reconstruction was financed in part from being
| a jumping off point for the Yukon Goldrush. Most colorfully, by a
| particularly successful Madame (as in brothel). If you're not a
| local, you'd never hear and probably never care about such
| things.
|
| The supply of people who want to go on an adventure is far more
| reliable than the supply of profitable outcomes for those
| adventures. Most salesmanship is already about selling a story,
| not a product, and there are few stories sexier than an adventure
| you haven't taken yet.
|
| The checks clear whether the customer is batshit insane or on to
| something great (in which case, you played a small part in that
| and might benefit from having done so).
| mywittyname wrote:
| > If you're not a local, you'd never hear and probably never
| care about such things.
|
| Regardless of whether or not you're a local, the Underground
| Seattle tour is definitely a must-do if you ever find yourself
| there.
| hinkley wrote:
| The tour is not entirely scripted. Each guide seems to have
| their own favorite anecdotes that they will offer. You could
| probably take that tour every few years and learn something
| every time.
| netman21 wrote:
| I know some people don't re-read. But I do. And I have read Moon
| is A Harsh Mistress well over 20 times. Yes Paul, it ages well.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Quote: "This was in 9th grade, so I was 13 or 14"
|
| You went to school at 4 years old?
| biztos wrote:
| If you start 1st grade at 6, which at least in my day was
| normal, you'd be 14 in 9th grade.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| You start after you are already 6 years old therefore during
| your 1st year in school you go and make your 7th birthday. Or
| at least this is how school works in my country. If you are
| born after the school starts you are not allowed to school -
| as technically you're still 5 years old.
| kazinator wrote:
| People start school at as young as 5, and sometimes they skip
| grades.
|
| I was still 14 going when starting grade 9, no skipped grades.
| DC1350 wrote:
| This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of
| people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far
| in the future because I feel like it's way too easy to ruin my
| life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class
| difference?
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| Definitely a class difference. From the essay
|
| > Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years
| of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80,
| in about 1980."
|
| Based on a quick search, the price was probably about
| $1200-$2000 inflation adjusted dollars.
|
| I grew up in probably a similar environment, my dad was also a
| physicist, and I also had access to computers from a young age,
| and I was encouraged to explore interests in technology,
| science etc, without pressure to make sure I found a successful
| career. Over time I've realized that paradoxically, a culture
| of _not_ valuing money /success is actually a marker of being
| upper class, because 1. You are quite likely to succeed even
| without any specific plan if you are well educated 2. The risk
| of financial ruin is not the same if your friends and family
| are financially stable enough that if worst comes to worst you
| would always have a place to sleep.
|
| Because this safety net does not involve any assistance except
| in the darkest timeline, it's very easy to forget that it
| exists as an invisible insurance that not everybody has. I wish
| everyone did.
| dang wrote:
| I think you might be overestimating how much money pg's
| family had; I'm pretty sure they were squarely middle-class
| (e.g. the next sentence reads "The gold standard then was the
| Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough," and that took "years
| of nagging"). Strictly from a class point of view his
| background would have been risk-averse. But your point about
| the intellectual environment seems solid.
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| I think people have different definitions of "upper class".
| Maybe "Upper-middle class" would have been a better term,
| since pretty much everyone in the U.S. calls themselves
| some flavor of middle class. But my point is is that most
| people are not doing nearly as well financially as a
| mathematician/manager working at Westinghouse modeling
| nuclear reactors[1][2]. For example, 70% of americans have
| less than $1,000 of savings[3].
|
| [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/work.html
|
| [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html
|
| [3] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/12/18/the-
| percentage-of...
| dang wrote:
| I agree. The question is whether they were above or below
| the financial threshold where kids know they'll be fine
| no matter what they do, and so are freer to take risks
| and pursue their interests. That's a popular argument to
| make about entrepreneurship being a class privilege, for
| example showing up in many comments in this thread. I
| don't know where that line is, but my impression is that
| people making this argument usually draw it somewhat
| higher than Westinghouse engineers and middle-managers
| (except maybe when they want the line to turn out
| somewhere relative to a particular person they're arguing
| about).
|
| Perhaps they were close to the line on one side or the
| other. My sense is still that his intellectual background
| was much more significant than this factor, but that's
| based on my own experience. Even though my upbringing was
| at the poorer end of the middle class (raised by a single
| mother who was a nurse), I didn't grow up risk-averse--
| and I also got the computer (a better one than a TRS-80,
| and totally not appreciating what my mom must have
| sacrificed to buy it). What I lacked was intellectual
| relationships or mentorship of any kind.
| DC1350 wrote:
| What do you think about the idea that it's a generational
| mindset? What motivates me more than anything else is the
| fear that I'll never own property, and I'll have to live
| with roommates or a have a very long commute for the rest
| of my life. It's hard for me to get over this because it
| looks like that's just mathematical reality. There's not
| many careers that provide a decent lifestyle anymore so I
| don't have the opportunity to fail. I want to be wrong
| though
| dang wrote:
| My guess is no better than yours, but FWIW I doubt that
| it's primarily generational. I think people tend to
| overestimate that factor generally, plus the current
| generation also has some advantages over earlier ones,
| not just disadvantages. I think the causality arrow more
| likely goes in the other direction: i.e. not that you
| have this fear because of the generation you were born
| in, but rather that the fear is influencing you to see
| things in these terms. I hope that doesn't sound overly
| psychologizing. It's actually good news if so, because
| you can't change when you were born, but it's possible to
| work with fear.
| [deleted]
| perfmode wrote:
| check out "the middle class curse" for a class-based reflection
| on this
| nostrademons wrote:
| Link? The best Google result I could find given context was:
|
| https://www.thefearlessman.com/the-curse-of-the-middle-
| class...
|
| but there was a full page of different results under that
| title so I'm not sure it's what you were referring to.
| cam0 wrote:
| That is essentially it - the upper class has the confidence
| (and safety net) required to take big swings, and the lower
| class has nothing to lose. The middle class has been
| conditioned to live conservatively.
| robocat wrote:
| Some people live without fear for their future and explore
| their world.
|
| Edit: PG wrote something relevant:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
|
| The mindset is commonly trivialised as a class[1] issue, but
| that is easily debunked because people from poor, middle-income
| or rich backgrounds can live like PG has. Different wealth
| levels lead to different explanations for why someone lives
| more conservatively. Rich people are often trapped by social
| ranking or lack of motivation even though they have a financial
| backstop in theory. It is commonly said that the middle-class
| are the most trapped, yet plenty of middle class tune out and
| go beat their own drum. Poor people sometimes have nothing to
| lose, but perhaps they have to run two jobs just to stand
| still. The poor generally lack the opportunities (such as
| access to a PC or University) but sometimes make up for it with
| motivation and in some first-world countries they can freelance
| while on the dole (common with artists).
|
| [1] class in the sense used within US English.
| eschulz wrote:
| It could be either, but with pg I feel as thought it's just a
| personality thing.
| tqi wrote:
| I think class does have a lot to do with it. It's not (just)
| the obvious reasons, like having access resources to start new
| ventures or having a backstop in case things don't pan out. For
| some there is a feeling of responsibility for your family, from
| the very beginning, that informs every choice you make.
|
| If it were just me, I know I can live cheaply and get by if I
| have to, and therefore could afford to take on high risk/high
| upside ventures. However the reality is, in the back of my
| mind, I'm thinking about whether I can support my parents as
| they age. Whether I can pay for an occasional vacation for
| them, or maybe a nicer house. These are things they would NEVER
| ask for, and I know they can live just as cheaply as me (if not
| more so). But I can't help feeling like I owe it anyway. And so
| I take high paying, low variance jobs.
| alexashka wrote:
| It's a class thing.
|
| It's not that it's easy or hard to ruin your life financially -
| if your parents have the attitude of 'go live your dreams, be
| happy', then there is no financial ruin, because the only ruin
| in your mind, is not getting to live your dream.
|
| People who have the 'dream' attitude tend to come from families
| who lucked into financial stability. In some sense, this is a
| story of a family that's been winning lottery tickets in life
| for multiple generations without realizing it. Of course Paul's
| blissful ignorance is what enables him to live as he has and to
| write and publish this very essay.
|
| I mean, what makes this essay worth reading, other than that
| it's Paul Graham? It's typical lottery ticket winner hubris to
| think 'I randomly stumbled into everything good in my life' is
| worth writing about in the first place. Oh well :)
| hinkley wrote:
| My kids have one set of grandparents who will not let them
| fail, even if something happens to us.
|
| There are good, respectable degree programs that will get you
| a job where you never lay in bed worrying about money. But if
| you want to be rich? You may have to take a bigger risk on a
| more prestigious program that not only looks good on the
| resume but introduces you to a social network of other future
| (or current) rich people.
|
| If that doesn't work out for you, you've saddled yourself
| with a huge bill. If your parents can't help you pay that
| off, you're completely fucked. Especially since they've made
| sure that you can't discharge those loans via bankruptcy (and
| _that_ is class warfare).
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Bankruptcy discharge and payday loans. So sad to see it
| waged and no one knows it's happening.
| mplewis wrote:
| Frankly, Paul Graham has a lot of money.
| DC1350 wrote:
| I know he does now but I'm talking about the earlier sections
| of the essay. He mentions taking time off from art school to
| work because he needed more money. What's interesting to me
| is how he just decided to go to art school, study philosophy,
| or work on projects that had nothing to do with his career
| when he wasn't already financially secure. The common
| narrative around really successful people is that they work
| really hard in a few focused areas but it seems like he just
| did whatever he wanted to and somehow it all just worked out.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| Wikipedia shows him as getting a BA from Cornell.
|
| So is 'art school' Cornell?
|
| Also he's 56, which means he still comes from an era where
| you might be able 'pay as you go' through college. So as to
| the question of 'was it money, class, or generational?' I
| think the answer is 'all three'.
| jonas21 wrote:
| No, RISD - which is about as "art school" as art school
| gets.
|
| The middle section of the essay describes PG's time in
| art school, which he attended after graduating from
| Cornell and going to grad school.
| ISL wrote:
| One can certainly suggest survivorship bias in this sort of
| situation. Another commonality I've found with very-
| successful people: they work _really_ hard, but they might
| not be aware that they 're working much harder than others.
|
| Two anecdotes:
|
| 1) A pianist in my high school was Eastman or Julliard-
| bound. One day, I watched her sight-read a new piece. It
| was beautiful. As someone who struggled mightily sight-
| reading single-threaded trumpet parts, I asked, "How do you
| sight-read like that?". The innocent and frank reply: "Oh,
| I'm just having fun to see what it sounds like."
|
| Sometimes (not always), people can be on another level.
|
| 2) The truly outstanding see themselves as normal. I think
| everyone sees themselves as normal. Freeman Dyson, from
| [1]: `I asked him whether as a boy he had speculated much
| about his gift. Had he asked himself why he had this
| special power? Why he was so bright?
|
| Dyson is almost infallibly a modest and self-effacing man,
| but tonight his eyes were blank with fatigue, and his
| answer was uncharacteristic.
|
| "That's not how the question phrases itself," he said. "The
| question is: why is everyone else so stupid?" '
|
| I've never thought that Dyson said this with any malice,
| simply as an honest reflection of his experience.
|
| For me, if I want to get something done, I have to work
| really, really hard on it.
|
| [1]
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-
| dan...
| vixen99 wrote:
| If I can add to what you've written. 'I have to work
| really really hard on it'. And that's the point, isn't
| it! 1. Sight-reading is a talent that develops, to one's
| own astonishment, with intense practice. It really does.
| The story goes that Liszt sight-read the Grieg Piano
| concerto but we should not forget that he worked like a
| dog in his earlier years and then redoubled his efforts
| at 17 (already with a reputation) when he heard Paganini
| in Paris for the first time one night after which he took
| his technique apart and rebuilt it with the result
| (another level) we know about. 2. Freeman Dyson spent his
| school holiday from 6am to 10pm, working through 700
| problems in Piaggio's Differential Equations. As with
| Liszt for music, "I was in love with mathematics and
| nothing else mattered". Of course there's such a thing as
| outstanding talent and genius but amazing things can
| happen if the focus is on application rather than
| debating whether one is possessed of these qualities
| which rarely exist without the former.
| kenjackson wrote:
| And some successful people pride themselves on how hard
| they work. There's a story that Jay Williams tells about
| Kobe Bryant. Jay is playing Kobe the next day and they
| both happen to end up in the same gym the day before.
| When Jay gets to the gym Kobe is already there working
| out. Jay works hard and sees Kobe is still there. Jay
| eventually wraps it up, while he sees Kobe still working
| out that evening.
|
| The next day Kobe has a great game, and after the game
| Jay asks Kobe something like, "Do you work out that long
| all the time?" (can't remember the exact question) -- to
| which Kobe says, "I just wanted to let you know that no
| matter how hard you work, I'll always outwork you".
|
| For a lot of successful people their joy is their work
| and they take pride in being great, but still working
| harder than everyone else.
| josemwarrior wrote:
| maybe, his mindset leads to money, dunno
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's nice to see even pg goes through phases of "I have no idea
| what to do next."
|
| By the way, bel is underrated, and I say that not as a pg fan.
| The ideas in it are novel, because of its simplicity. The
| scheduler in particular is elegant.
|
| I suppose I should have taken some notes on what surprised me the
| most. But, basically, the idea of using a stack as the source of
| truth for all computation was both ... strange, and obvious
| afterwards.
|
| The main annoyance is that I can't flippin' find a working
| version of it anywhere. I've asked him on Twitter to no avail.
| The code clearly works; it's correct in every detail, as far as
| I've found. I implemented most of it, but there was a distinct
| feeling of "there must be a version he never put out."
|
| But of course, that's how you'd feel if you'd been yelled at
| every time you release things, so I understand why he might not
| want to show something that isn't perfect.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Bel has nothing not in Scheme, Kernel, Clojure, or SBCL. You
| might be participating in hero worship.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Eyeroll. Try a more substantive comment and we'll talk.
|
| Clojure in particular has nothing like what bel has. No
| program does.
|
| I don't claim it's novel, I claim it's a simple solution to a
| hard problem. Possibly the simplest.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| You first. Bel claims to do what Kernel does
| (metacircularity with everything first-class) but isn't
| open-source, doesn't have a solid whitepaper detailing its
| theory and practice, and is clearly just a rich dude
| spending his unlimited time on fun things.
| taxcoder wrote:
| Unlimited time? Do tell! How do I unlock this super
| power? Even when I have taken several months off there
| was always more to learn than time allowed. One's time
| does not scale at the same rate as his money.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Aha. You're jealous of his money and freedom. That makes
| more sense.
|
| You can achieve what you want out of life too. If you
| want freedom and fun things, then pursue it! Throwing
| bitter swipes at someone's years of work is... well...
| are you sure you want to spend your life this way?
|
| To your point: a solid whitepaper is a fine thing, but it
| matters more what you can _do_ with a work than how it's
| described. The substance comes first.
|
| Bel isn't about first-classism. It's about creating the
| simplest implementation of a multithreaded metacircular
| lisp. It's fully open source, though it doesn't run.
| skybrian wrote:
| You just summed it up in a way that sounds more
| interesting than anything else I read. (I started reading
| the specification and got bored before getting to
| anything about multithreading.)
|
| Maybe writing a solid _abstract_ would have helped?
| yawn wrote:
| Holy low effort comment, batman!
|
| The first sentence offers no proof of how any of these
| individual languages address what you're trying to
| communicate. I'm not saying you're incorrect...it's just,
| like, offer _something_. The second sentence is unnecessarily
| snarky and adds 0 value.
| geofft wrote:
| The burden of proof is generally on the positive, not the
| negative. If someone thinks there's something in Bel that's
| not in those languages, they can say what specifically they
| think that novel thing is. Otherwise there's no basis on
| which to have a discussion beyond "Bel is really cool!"
| dang wrote:
| The GP comment was a shallow dismissal, which breaks the
| HN guidelines: " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals,
| especially of other people's work. A good critical
| comment teaches us something._"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| The novel thing about Bel is that it attempts to express
| a full programming language in the same axiomatic way
| that McCarthy's Lisp expressed computation. I thought pg
| explained that pretty clearly.
| guytv wrote:
| I started reading it, and could not stop. Very well written.
|
| I hope the sub-text I picked up is all in my head, and that
| everything is fine.
|
| May PG live long and prosper :)
| cdelsolar wrote:
| yeah I also thought some terrible announcement was coming at
| the end, but I think he's ok
| profsmallpine wrote:
| It's interesting to me to hear about Paul's 20s and to contrast
| it to my own. He seemed to have a good grasp of some internal
| compass - jumping from art school to Interleaf and all of the
| other twists and turns. I seem to get a path in my mind and then
| experience the need to not make any changes until that path is
| finished. There is a certain rigidity that I don't allow myself
| to get part way through something, to then evaluate with this new
| knowledge, and then to iterate on the idea, even if it means a
| totally new direction. I hope to be more open to some twists in
| my 30s, staying open to the things that I feel like I need to go
| try.
| cool-RR wrote:
| This was an amazing read. Thank you Paul.
| nojvek wrote:
| I've started writing at-least one thing every 2 weeks, and pg's
| essays have been a huge inspiration. Also amazes me how little
| the site look has changed over the years.
|
| There is something about writing, hitting publish and have
| readers. The joy of creating something other people consume. It's
| the same thing that still makes me want to be a coder, even
| though all my friends I grew up with have become managers. They
| proly make more, but I can't quite give up the joy of producing
| things.
| smlckz wrote:
| > I also started to think about other things I could work on.
|
| I'd like to suggest PG to dive into the theory.
|
| From what PG was working on (on Bel), a great "continuation"
| would be to study category theory, type theory, especially
| dependent type theory.
|
| I really wonder how is it like to debug (dynamically typed) lisp
| programs, with errors described as effectively encrypted given
| the current hype around statically typed system programming
| languages.
| tosh wrote:
| > I wanted not just to build things, but to build things that
| would last.
| increscent wrote:
| For me the theme of this narrative is that PG always relentlessly
| pursued what he wanted: AI, art school, Florence, Lisp, etc. He
| would often find out after pursuing those things that he didn't
| really want them, but that was helpful feedback. I'm usually
| stuck wanting things but not pursuing them so I don't know if I
| would really want them. It seems better to take initiative and go
| for it.
| boreas wrote:
| This is why I found this essay very interesting but not very
| useful. I don't have trouble identifying interests, I have
| trouble pursuing them with the intensity of a PG. I don't mean
| this as a criticism at all. I don't think it would be possible
| to write an essay that would solve this problem.
| sjg007 wrote:
| What do you think is stopping you?
| boreas wrote:
| I simply don't have the personality to work hard. In
| general, I don't believe people change after adolescence.
| Therefore I am most focused on contentment with the person
| I am, while nudging myself gently towards greater
| discipline. Meeting myself halfway, so to speak.
| cam0 wrote:
| That's a personal problem, and one that I also have struggled
| / still struggle with.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I don't share the sentiment here. I find the essay too long and
| boring. I usually enjoy reading his valuable essays but this one
| is too much about his life which is not that interesting to be
| honest, given I don't know him personally. But that's OK, not
| every essay needs to appeal to everyone.
| [deleted]
| psim1 wrote:
| I agree with you. He seems so enamored with himself as an essay
| writer that he does too much writing and takes too long to get
| to any point.
| abhinav22 wrote:
| Unfortunately I would have to agree. It reads like a note to
| self vs an essay for public consumption
| blcArmadillo wrote:
| > If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project
| that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then
| it's getting in the way of another project that is.
|
| I get that this is true but for me personally I feel it's what
| holds me back the most in life. I rarely finish projects, not
| because I get bored with them but because I always think some
| other project would be a better use of my time.
| pnathan wrote:
| This is a very good essay. It feels that pg is more reflective
| now than he was a few years ago. In particular, he is calling
| attention to how the dice fell; how things worked out well.
|
| I'd be interested, as a purely personal matter, in seeing a
| painting show of pg's work. I came to painting long after I came
| to programming.
|
| I'm almost 40. This statement:
|
| > If you can choose what to work on, and you choose a project
| that's not the best one (or at least a good one) for you, then
| it's getting in the way of another project that is. And at 50
| there was some opportunity cost to screwing around.
|
| is a true one, and, frankly, has been more and more impressed on
| me for the last five years or so.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Agreed. When you start thinking "I have 25 years of work left
| to do everything I want" the phrase "I do not have time for
| this s**" becomes part of your everyday vocabulary. Not in a
| cynical way, rather you realise the time for playing and
| exploring is over; now is the time to get it done.
| wwarner wrote:
| know what? this is a pretty damn fun read.
| francoisp wrote:
| I dont know what this does to you, but every time I read a PG
| essay I get an urge to write. This is a very virtuous habit, that
| allows one to have continuity.
|
| Thanks PG again for a nicely written arc (pun intended), for the
| somehow diffuse encouragement to write a log, and good luck with
| what comes next! (if you come up with an august (both meaning
| implied, the month and the adjective) clubhouse written in bel
| with only a text interface, please send an invite my way) :-)
| cheers, F
| 0898 wrote:
| I don't have much to add to this discussion except to note that
| PG has impeccable punctuation but doesn't capitalise the days of
| the week. Odd.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Meta observation. There was another post on HN about a self-
| autobiographical career summary. The comments for that one (I
| Really Blew It, Chris Crawford, founder of GDC) are quite
| different compared to these ones. Both people have wikipedia
| pages, but their personalities are quite different.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this
| exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective
| place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize
| the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting
| losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly
| frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a
| system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some art classes
| and because they were not for credit, I just flowed and drew (
| https://lingxiaolingdotus.firebaseapp.com/art ). Tbh I felt more
| alive placing some hasty marks on paper than I ever did doing
| "research" in a lab.
|
| "I'm only up to age 25 and already there are such conspicuous
| patterns. Here I was, yet again about to attend some august
| institution in the hopes of learning about some prestigious
| subject, and yet again about to be disappointed. The students and
| faculty in the painting department at the Accademia were the
| nicest people you could imagine, but they had long since arrived
| at an arrangement whereby the students wouldn't require the
| faculty to teach anything, and in return the faculty wouldn't
| require the students to learn anything."
| fttx_ wrote:
| Your art is beautiful, thanks for sharing.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| >It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just
| playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it
| straight" and getting endlessly frustrated.
|
| This essay gets linked to a lot on here, but you might be
| interested in Rao's "Sociopaths/clueless/losers" taxonomy:
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| Yeah I discovered the essay around that time and found it to
| be true in a deeply unsettling level.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| I fear I'm one of these unsuspecting losers...except I guess
| that comment makes me suspecting.
|
| IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in
| the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where
| someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.
|
| Your art work is beautiful by the way.
| samstave wrote:
| FYI, I really like your art - most specifically the beetle. Do
| Want.
|
| Would love to see some landscapes, along the lines of japanese
| / chinese landscapes - as that the feeling I get from your
| style.
|
| More insects though. :)
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| Thanks! And yeah I took Chinese painting when I was 7-8 so it
| stuck with me. And yeah the beetle was a request from friend,
| it's still on the shelf at her house :)
| yters wrote:
| Ironic pg passed up philosophy in his search for immortality. Not
| only is that a focus of philosophy, even in today's materialist
| worldview, but philosophers are some of the most ancient and best
| preserved thinkers. The ideas of the ancient greek philosophers
| still hold sway today, even in popular culture, see Plato and The
| Matrix, or how the US government is organized in checks and
| balances to preserve liberty. In fact, pretty much every other
| aspect of society could be said to be downstream from philosophy.
| igravious wrote:
| pg has a whole essay[0] where he dismisses practically the
| entirety of Western philosophy and the value or use of the
| study thereof.
|
| consider the difference between,
|
| "All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy
| courses and they kept being boring."
|
| and,
|
| "All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy
| courses and I kept finding them boring."
|
| recasting the first as the second puts some of the onus on the
| author, pg is too good of an essayist and too thoughtful a
| writer to inadvertently overlook this distinction.
|
| and consider the whole paragraph beforehand,
|
| "Though I liked programming, I didn't plan to study it in
| college. In college I was going to study philosophy, which
| sounded much more powerful. It seemed, to my naive high school
| self, to be the study of the ultimate truths, compared to which
| the things studied in other fields would be mere domain
| knowledge. What I discovered when I got to college was that the
| other fields took up so much of the space of ideas that there
| wasn't much left for these supposed ultimate truths. All that
| seemed left for philosophy were edge cases that people in other
| fields felt could safely be ignored."
|
| that last sentence is a remarkably dismissive throwaway
| statement.
|
| just because something doesn't have value for you or you don't
| see how something might have value for you, you don't need to
| make out that it has very little intrinsic value.
|
| [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
| yters wrote:
| Yes, pg comes across as remarkably uninformed about
| philosophy. But, it is a general tendency I notice among
| programmers, including myself, to dismiss philosophy as vague
| speculation. The accusation is as old as Aristophanes' play
| The Clouds mocking Socrates for his questioning of the status
| quo. Yet you don't condemn bumbling absentminded professors
| to death, as Aristophanes did to Socrates during his trial. I
| believe the dismissal of philosophy has a deeper cause,
| perhaps because it poses uncomfortable questions.
|
| Regarding PG's essay, I don't think it is fair to say
| metaphysics is a failed project. For instance, deeply
| thinking about whether things can be infinitely divisible led
| to the concept of the infinitesimal, which led to the
| discovery of calculus. If any field of math can be said to be
| useful, calculus surely is. None of our modern IT would exist
| without it, nor things like rockets, flight, material
| engineering, etc. Yet calculus is based on the non physical
| notion of infinite division that Aristotle discussed in his
| metaphysics.
|
| As for Plato and math, in Meno Socrates leads a boy to
| understand the existence of irrational numbers, which the
| Pythagoreans had executed its member for discovering. So not
| only are ancient Greek philosophers discovering deep useful
| mathematical truths, they are also speaking truth to power at
| the same time. Imagine if math were outlawed under threat of
| death!
| slibhb wrote:
| He doesn't come off as uninformed. Plenty of philosophers
| who were well informed have variously proclaimed the death
| of philosopy or that philosophy is useless or that it has
| reached the end of its usefulness.
|
| Hume foreclosed on the possibility of metaphysics
| altogether. Kant disagreed but considered all metaphysics
| prior to him a failed project. Since Kant we've burrowed
| into the human mind and into human language. It's not clear
| that this has borne fruit. It's also not clear that it
| hasn't. But informed people can disagree.
|
| > Regarding PG's essay, I don't think it is fair to say
| metaphysics is a failed project. For instance, deeply
| thinking about whether things can be infinitely divisible
| led to the concept of the infinitesimal, which led to the
| discovery of calculus. If any field of math can be said to
| be useful, calculus surely is. None of our modern IT would
| exist without it, nor things like rockets, flight, material
| engineering, etc. Yet calculus is based on the non physical
| notion of infinite division that Aristotle discussed in his
| metaphysics.
|
| I think your perspective is perfectly valid (and well-
| represented). You're saying "even if metaphysics is
| impossible, the pursuit of metaphysics has proven useful".
| Fair enough.
| yters wrote:
| Alright, I will abrogate uninformed to misinformed. The
| latter is worse because it blinds PG.
|
| Yes, exactly, Aristotle's project was supremely
| successful and one of its fruits is the calculus that
| underlies modern science and technology. How is that for
| immortality? I'd like to see PG discard that part of
| ancient philosophy.
| [deleted]
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