[HN Gopher] Interview with Patrick Collison
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Interview with Patrick Collison
Author : jger15
Score : 114 points
Date : 2021-03-08 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (noahpinion.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (noahpinion.substack.com)
| alexashka wrote:
| This is a solid example of book smart, real life stupid.
|
| He can link and quote what he has read until the cows come home
| but if his conclusion is always 'I don't know', then why even
| bother saying anything at all?
|
| 'What do you think about X?' 'I don't know. Also, here are some
| disconnected factoids I read on the topic over the past year and
| can link you to.'
|
| Excuse me, isn't that exactly what Google does, but much better
| than you? What have you _synthesized_ after all that reading,
| other than don 't know and it's complicated?
|
| People really can't seem to tell an aristocrat asshole who spends
| his/her days reading to impress others over people who actually
| understand a thing or two about the world.
|
| Here's a simple tip: if someone uses words like 'larval' when
| 'early' will do and it's not for comedic or literary effect,
| chances are extremely high that you are talking to an asshole.
| dang wrote:
| Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. No more of this
| please.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| steve-benjamins wrote:
| I think it's just that the smarter you are, the more likely you
| give nuanced answers.
|
| It's called epistemological humility but I'm sure you'll just
| assume I'm an asshole.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > chances are extremely high that you are talking to an
| asshole.
|
| Pot, meet kettle. Really, this drivel has no place on HN.
| pjscott wrote:
| > Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science
| Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're
| neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific
| tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe,
| etc. The "how" of science just really matters.
|
| One thing I worry about in the US is homogenization in the way
| science is done. You won't find all that much difference between
| how scientists operate in California versus how they operate in
| Massachusetts or Idaho or anywhere else. There's pretty much the
| same grant application process, same peer review process, same
| journals, same conferences. And that would be fine if we knew
| that we were doing things the Right Way -- but as it is, it just
| feels like putting all our eggs in one basket.
| Kye wrote:
| Can you expand a little? It's not clear what problem could come
| from having a standard process for funding, reviewing, and
| sharing science. I know there _are_ problems, like the
| replication crisis, but I 'm not tapped in enough to know
| if/how that kind of thing links to the way science is done.
| pjscott wrote:
| Sure! As an illustrative example, let's look a bit at the
| standard process for funding.
|
| One of the main parts of being a scientist, at least as
| measured by time spent, is writing grant applications.
| Scientists spend a huge percentage of their working hours
| asking for money from an elaborate, high-overhead funding
| system that goes to great lengths to try to avoid spending
| money on the wrong things. But in practice the correlation
| between attractiveness of grant proposals and the quality of
| the resulting research doesn't seem to be strong, meaning
| that this process might just be, at least to a first
| approximation, an ever-more-expensive random number
| generator.
|
| You can certainly imagine other ways to do it. Funding
| agencies could try allocating money at coarser granularity,
| e.g. larger grants shared among more researchers with much
| less specificity about how the money is to be spent; I hear
| this used to be more common many decades ago. Or they could
| do a quick-and-dirty screening for what 1-2 page research
| proposals aren't obviously terrible and send out money to the
| vaguely plausible ones at random [1], which would at least
| have lower overhead. Or you could have grant money allocated
| by individual people instead of committees, with less
| deliberation and guaranteed fast turnaround time to a yes-or-
| no decision, e.g. [2] and [3].
|
| In general there's usually more than one way to do something,
| and I worry about a monoculture getting stuck doing things in
| a deeply suboptimal way but unable to change. I could tell
| similar stories about the modern peer review process (a
| relatively recent thing, and arguably not very good at
| solving the problem it's meant to solve), or the persistence
| of bad statistical methods in a lot of fields because they're
| the standard that everyone expects, or various other things.
|
| [1] https://www.vox.com/future-
| perfect/2019/1/18/18183939/scienc...
|
| [2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09
| /em...
|
| [3] https://fastgrants.org/
| phtrivier wrote:
| > France today gets three quarters of its electricity from
| nuclear power.
|
| Yup, and one of the surest way to loose an election and / or
| media support in France is to ever mention the fact that you
| might _even_ consider this to be a not-entirely-terrible thing.
|
| Anyway, this person seems really interesting.
| gabagool wrote:
| > ever mention the fact that you might even consider this to be
| a not-entirely-terrible thing
|
| If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that nuclear power is
| unpopular in France?
| phtrivier wrote:
| It's... complicated, but in a nutshell, yes, it's unpopular .
| The closest thing we have to data would be polls [1], which
| shows that the view is now positive only for a minority
| (although the ratio is 47 / 53, so you might say it's
| "slighly" unpopular.)
|
| It's clearly became a purely political and partisan topic
| though ; the right-wing, older and upper class will be more
| favorable than the left-wing and youngster.
|
| The French Green party, the most "visible" NGOs, left-wing
| press and public media are (rather) openly against nuclear.
|
| Right-wing press and the industry is only slighly more
| favorable. Quite surprisingly, even the far-right movement is
| going "full nuclear" those days.
|
| A large part of the population is concerned by security and
| the handling of nuclear waste ; and too many believe that our
| nuclear plants are _contributing_ to global warming [2].
|
| The debate is not going to get better any time soon, as we're
| about to reach both the end-of-life of the 40-year-old
| plants, and... an electoral year.
|
| [1] http://www.odoxa.fr/sondage/nucleaire-lopinion-sest-
| retourne...
|
| [2] https://www.lepoint.fr/economie/rechauffement-les-
| francais-a...
| Wonnk13 wrote:
| I guess I've drank the koolaide whole, because not landing a
| position at Stripe is one of my larger regrets in the tech world.
| Oh how they've grown in the last few years! Curious how the
| culture is now.
| sroussey wrote:
| In the early days, when I was implementing Stripe and we were
| about to launch, he gave me his phone number in case anything
| went wrong or I had an emergency. And he answered (I think it was
| the middle of the night). :)
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I had the chance to briefly meet Patrick in Estonia some years
| ago when he came to our offices at e-Residency. He immediately
| struck me as an incredibly intelligent person that had a crazy
| mix of intellect, curiosity, and eq. This interview definitely
| solidified for me that he is probably one of the best, and
| underrated, entrepreneurs out there right now.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Underrated by the public but Paul Graham holds the Collison
| brothers in incredibly high esteem, lots of other SV people do
| also.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| My partner cooked for the very-early Stripe crew, and has
| shared some of her fond memories from that time with them.
|
| pc - No telling when we'll get back up to CA, but there's
| buffalo chicken mac 'n cheese on offer :).
| danudey wrote:
| Having worked with them in the past (when Patrick was a newly
| "on paper" millionaire and not a widely known billionaire
| visionary), I feel the same way.
|
| They're smart, sure, and have great ideas and execution,
| sure, but they're also just really, really great people, and
| fun guys to hang out with.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The one thing that stands out for me - and this goes for
| both brothers - is their modesty. There are a lot of people
| thumping their chests all day long about very minor
| achievements and these guys just plug away at what
| underpins a very large fraction of all e-commerce. Stripe
| one day will be really too big to fail.
| keithwhor wrote:
| Patrick is a great many things but I wouldn't include
| underrated on that list. I don't think anybody operating with
| or around him believes he's anything but one of the most
| competent executives on the planet today. If you surveyed 100
| venture capitalists and asked them the likelihood of Stripe
| hitting a $1T market cap, I think 99 would agree and one would
| be trying desperately hard to appear contrarian.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Yeah, for sure not underrated in the valley and by people who
| know him but I meant generally. I doubt the average person
| knows much about him or Stripe
| redisman wrote:
| The general public only cares about consumer goods. Why
| would they know anything about a payments processing CEO?
| The "star" CEOs are all from consumer goods - Steve Jobs,
| Bezos and Elon Musk are probably the only ones any American
| can name.
| keithwhor wrote:
| Stripe's not a publicly traded company yet -- it will be at
| some point -- and I get the sense that Patrick and John are
| enjoying the relative obscurity while they still can.
| preinheimer wrote:
| "relative" I think John was on some sort of an ad on all
| the transit signs in SF, maybe during Dreamforce a few
| years back.
| vvladymyrov wrote:
| I heard similar opinion recently about Square hitting $1T
| market cap too. Let's hope that market is big enough for both
| companies.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Almost 20 years ago, I met Patrick at a Lisp meetup in a pub in
| London where he talked to us about Croma, the Lisp he developed
| for Web use. I learned that he was looking for a Lisp machine,
| and as I had a Symbolics 3630 which I hardly ever used, I
| arranged for someone to pick it up and deliver it to him. I
| wonder if it still works and if he is still using it.
| pc wrote:
| Donald! It's great to hear from you. I still have your Lisp
| machine and in fact booted it last time I was at my parents'
| home in Ireland last year. Using one was quite formative for
| me... Lisp machines significantly elevated my bar for what
| developer experiences could be and, on some level, that whole
| line of thinking is what led to Stripe.
| kylegill wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! What a neat moment to observe a friendly
| in-person interaction, reconnected via the internet years
| later.
|
| To me it seems like this is an example of how "the explosive
| expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the
| internet" isn't limited to business opportunity.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| > Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science
| Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they're
| neighbors, and Italy certainly isn't lacking in scientific
| tradition -- Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe,
| etc.
|
| Interesting comparison, but I offer a different interpretation.
|
| First of all, unfair to compare CH (Switzerland) with IT (Italy),
| instead of IT to FR (France), DE (Germany), ES (Spain), UK
| (United Kingdom), countries of rather similar population size,
| economy, land mass, etc.
|
| If you look at the list of countries by Nobel laureates per
| capita [0], you find the following:
|
| CH: 4th; 27 laureates; 31.6 per 10M people.
|
| UK: 10th; 133 laureates; 19.4 per 10M people.
|
| DE: 14th; 109 laureates; 13.2 per 10M people.
|
| FR: 17th; 70 laureates; 10.6 per 10M people.
|
| IT: 33rd; 20 laureates; 3.3 per 10M people.
|
| ES: 43rd; 8 laureates; 1.72 per 10M people.
|
| In fact, CH is in the same ballpark as Sweden, Norway and
| Denmark. Smaller countries, richer countries, countries with a
| better education system overall.
|
| In addition to that, of the 20 laureates in science in CH, 4
| (20%) were born in other countries [1].
|
| This is not (as it might certainly appear) to be pedantic, but
| rather to show that interpretation of data can give us a
| different story, based on what we are looking for.
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_lau...
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou...
| draw_down wrote:
| My favorite part is when he calls "GEB" a slog. I think it's one
| of the most overrated books of the last 50 years.
| colmanhumphrey wrote:
| > Nobody in financial services thinks that real-time settlement
| is a bad idea
|
| Maybe this is referring to something else, but e.g. Matt Levine
| thinks it's a bad idea:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-26/money-...
| discusses how real time settlement on spot prices for electricity
| would be worse than the alternative.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-02-25/money-...
| discusses how real time settlement would require you to have all
| money on hand immediately, making trading more difficult and
| expensive. Also amusingly:
|
| > It is not unimaginable that the stock market could move to
| real-time settlement; you could put stocks on the blockchain
| hahaha.
| ivanech wrote:
| I think picking on the FAA is a little unfair. For the past ~20
| years, they've been enormously successful in overseeing
| commercial airliner operations - I think the last commercial
| crash in the US that killed all onboard was in 2009
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I think that's entirely the problem. I'm worried it's a sign
| that the FAA is no longer as effective as it once was, and the
| problems are going to quickly grow as time goes on.
|
| This is a guess, of course. Time will tell.
| wonder_er wrote:
| Just a few days, at the top of HN, was this post[0]: "FAA
| safety engineer goes public to slam agency's oversight of
| Boeing's 737 Max".
|
| It links to a Seattle Times article [1] that outlines (from the
| inside) systemic failures in how the FAA attempts to implement
| it's own mandate.
|
| That article would lead one to believe that it is in fact
| difficult to be _overly_ critical of the FAA.
|
| It has a stranglehold on innovation in the industry, and...
| well, just because you grew up with it (presumably) doesn't
| mean it's not the laughingstock of international aviation-
| oriented industries.
|
| The FAA is a trashfire. Persons who grew up in the USA don't
| have a benchmark on what it would look like for an agency that
| did it's job well.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26376549
|
| [1]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-
| aerospace/faa-s...
| markdown wrote:
| > I think the last commercial crash in the US that killed all
| onboard was in 2009
|
| The FAA approved the MAX and let it keep flying after the first
| crash because it wasn't Americans who died. They only acted
| after more died in a second crash and they could no longer
| pretend they weren't at fault for those deaths.
| pjscott wrote:
| This is what institutional decay often looks like! They can
| still carry out a set of procedures allowing them to do the
| same thing they've been doing for a long time -- but they get
| less efficient, less flexible, more ossified. They are no
| longer the FAA that figured out how to oversee airline
| operations; they're the FAA that follows the script left to
| them by their predecessors. Collison gives a nice example:
|
| > The avionics you see in cockpits are bafflingly primitive
| because it's so hard, slow, and expensive to get the FAA to
| approve new technology. As a result, pretty much every pilot
| flies with an iPad running sophisticated flight planning
| software -- their connection to a world that the FAA doesn't
| encumber.
|
| There was a time when the FAA was much better at dealing with
| new technology. There was a time when _all_ the technology in
| their purview was new. Something changed.
| stillyslalom wrote:
| iPads can run out of battery or get smashed in turbulence or
| fall prey to bugs/malware; old-fashioned steam gauges cannot.
| The FAA's regulations are written in blood - the aviation
| fatality rate has fallen sharply over the years [0] thanks to
| a combination of technological advancement and regulation.
| Aircraft builders are still free to do pretty much whatever
| they want within the 'experimental' category, provided they
| mount a placard informing occupants that the aircraft is
| experimental.
|
| [0] https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-
| Acci...
| cinntaile wrote:
| A bit of a shame that this is not available in audio format, it's
| quite a long read.
|
| I never used Stripe the financial system but I like that Stripe
| has a book division, the books they have published so far are
| right up my alley so keep up the good work.
| dbrereton wrote:
| There's a chrome extension called audiblogs [0] that can
| convert any article into audio format. Here's the audio version
| of this article:
| https://audiblogs.com/share/4ce7e9c6-0970-4fa6-8cdb-ac244104...
|
| [0] https://audiblogs.com/
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