Hacker News Reader

Comment by e19293001 | Hacker News Reader

e19293001

When I'm feeling down or burned out I used to read "Good and Bad Procrastination"[0].

When I need inspiration I go read "How to Make Wealth"[1].

During my day job where I'm required to study specifications, I found "The Feynman Technique"[2] to be useful in understanding the subject quickly.

From time to time I also read "The Best of edw519: A Hacker News Top Contributor"[3].

I just repeatedly read articles and posts that I like:

[0] - http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

[1] - http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

[2] - http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/10/26/mastering-linear-algeb...

[3] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160304034949/http://v25media.s...

View on HN

In regards to [1] on wealth, what are your (and everyone else's) thoughts on the following:

> But a very able person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.

That's saying that you'll make more money if you go work (or start) a startup, whereas I've seen some opposite sentiment on HN (don't have specific links, sorry) where people say your expected monetary returns will be higher at GOOG/FB or other big companies because of the high failure chance of startups.

I think Gates, even if he had to give an exclusive license to IBM for DOS, would have come up with an operating system for the other computer companies demanding one. Paul Graham is wrong on how this would have played out.

Gates already had the business model in place for licensing basic to computer manufacturers. It's easy to see he would have extended that to some DOS-like operating system.

Indeed he went onto do precisely that with Windows, leaving OS/2 to IBM and failure.

PG called this one wrong. Gates would still have come to own the industry as he did, whether or not the DOS deal with IBM was exclusive. The computer industry was always set to expand and Gates was always the guy to meet the demand. Gary Kildall had shown by this stage he didn't have what it took to pick up every commercial opportunity offered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com