What I Worked On
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
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...
Equally plausible is that we only write quotations from the people whose dots serendipitously connected.
No, not for great wealth perhaps, but using myself as an example - the fact that I'm in my own apartment across the country from where I grew up, with an engineering job, that pays well enough for me to afford an expensive pocket computer cum telephone to write this on - anyone of those things alone would have blown the mind of 18 year old me - all three of them as one combined train is astonishing in hindsight. If I look at all the just that I've done in the last 20 years, I'm ought to be astonished, I've been stupendously lucky.
Now for a moment, look at all the dots connected to get where we are technologically over the last, 20, 40, 80, 120 years. For example just in communications, In 120 years we went from messages for the average person taking months to span the globe, to a situation where the average person in any country, can phone another average person in most any other country at anytime day or night without difficulty - that alone is astonishing to me. Never mind all the other improvements we've watched blink into existence.
The dots connect for everyone, some folks just get more of them.
Point being that there's plenty of people for whom personal life choices didn't see their dots connect looking back, and that we only get quotations from the people who do like Jobs, i.e. his point perhaps isn't universal, but rather only particular to (the lucky) few.
Another poster just commented: meheleventyone 3 hours ago - Yeah we had a very emotional essay this week from Chris Crawford whose life work failed to materialise.
He looked back and found that his dots never connected for the past decades and that 'he blew it'. The fact he now has an iPhone and can make cheap calls to a person in India doesn't change that story.
To paraphrase Keynes, eventually we're all dead.
tl;dr When in doubt, study maths.
PG here bridges the gap between the 'great-man' and the middling-man. With a fair bit of luck, he manages to become wealthy, but not wanna-be-space-cadet wealthy. It's an under read area and full of very good lessons in that bridge of worlds. I'm not in that bridge, so my take-aways weren't as much. But perhaps with some luck, I'll be able to revisit this in the future for more savoring.
You might be underestimating the value of the YC portfolio and PG's stake in it.
[0] https://www.wealthypersons.com/paul-graham-net-worth-2020-20...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without the benefit of hindsight we can't tell which of these building blocks will become the next paradigm. I think your expectation that progress should be a direct line where every step gets you closer is mistaken. It's often guided by a very subjective feeling of interesting-ness which cannot be formalized.
Lots of random trying things out in various places and times until one of them sticks.
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"
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.
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.
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.
As long as your technology is only usable by a high priesthood, you can make it look like magic.
alpha go, alphafold2, gpt-3, image recognition benchmarks etc?
i work in ML as well* and while its certainly overhyped and often sold prematurelt, a lot of the stuff is real and works very very well.
* i build stuff for cities to more efficiently monitor their citizens (no tracking or personal identification, just aggregate numbers)
I like this as a descriptive phrase. ML won't be "intelligence" per se, but it can do repetitive tasks that otherwise required thought.
"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."
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.
The most pure people I find are in quant finance, engaging the market at the abstract "number" level purifies everything, even if money corrupts at the individual level.
Or put another way, it would be a bit strange to say that everyone who works at a corporation is an unsuspecting loser.
From what I’ve seen, academia is both worse and better. So don’t feel like you’re missing out on something.
Just do what makes you happy.
I wish I could find the link to the essay that directly states this but I'm having trouble finding it now (and my Google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough to locate it).
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-...
You play to win the game.
Love the artwork!
Whether or not it's meaningful, solve some problems and enjoy it. Joy is not the same as meaning and it's less of a gamble to land on it
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. :)
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.
But more options are open than ever before, and his life's work continues . . .
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).
Regardless of whether or not you're a local, the Underground Seattle tour is definitely a must-do if you ever find yourself there.
AWS -> cloud platform shovel
Google -> web advertising shovel
Maybe these are bad examples? To a certain degree these created/heavily-defined the market they serve, whereas the "shovel" concept might require selling a solution to an existing market.
I often feel burned out and uninspired these days, even after past successes. It’s wonderful to take a look back at a time when overly ambitious ideas would be naively pursued, unrelated hobbies would prove fruitful in unexpected ways, and to remember that inspiration can be found again many times through the course of life.
Thank you pg.
He seems to have been guided by a deep trust into himself and his abilities.
It's a good feeling that after "retirement" this all still lies ahead of you if you still want it.
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?
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.
If anything, Viaweb is the odd thing out, since it was pursued with the explicit intent of making money (though I expect the whole affair was fascinating from the inside anyway).
Not everything has to be evaluated in terms of its popularity, "success" or "impact".
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.
If you weren’t persuaded by the existing 100+ dialects of Lisp that have been created over the years, Bel from Paul Graham should change your mind and lure you aware from the dark and tedious arts of C and Java.
After you’ve saved bigly in development time on your next project, you can thank me!
Does anyone else feel the same ? Perhaps this project just needs to be "sold" a bit better.
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.
Like all good paintings it goes unnoticed in its time.
It might become a classic in the future, it might be forgotten.
[0] https://lobste.rs/s/jec21l/thought_leaders_chicken_sexers
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.
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.
Even having a peer hold me accountable like he describes in the article would be amazing, let alone a teacher.
Reading that article made me sad that I've never had someone else challenge me like that. I've always had to do it myself.
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.
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.
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! :-)
I'm not a parent so I can't give concrete advise, just sharing my thoughts.
Nowadays I let my 2yo play with my some old laptop that is 100,000x more powerful than the first machine I had.
The pandemic has made this a little harder to do though.
You just gotta find a gate-way drug activity, as well as a gate-way programming language because going straight to Lisp is like going straight to heroin.
I've found the "drug" for foreign languages , by letting them watch certain cartoons when home goals are met (good behavior etc), with the caveat they can only watch with audio that is a specific foreign language.
The next step is the hardest one. Once they read, I can probably migrate to a 4th language, and leverage RPGs for that purpose. Or I can branch out to programming like you say, but that may be much more difficult.
You need to have a partner that is supportive of this. If you don't present a united front, any (learning) policy will soon be forgotten.
Not a teacher, but some thoughts.
Direct "telling" of motivation, i.e. a rational explanation, doesn't necessarily achieve intuitive motivation, which is excitement, that knack for learning or doing something great; but I'm certain it's a good step. Talk to them: why should they learn things in the computer? You can make games, you can change the world (it's complicated, but it's true enough to be valid to tell children!), you can understand how nature works (when building models and simulations); you might use (increasing chance) it in most jobs you can get in the future, from a writer to financial analyst to lawyer. And motivation ought to be about taste as well -- show, and tell, how it is awesome what you can build, how it is awesome how everything works, develop their internal (intuitive) motivation and sense of beauty.
Try to get them to do it, however simple: make a tiny simple game using perhaps pygame or scratch, or draw some lines using p5.js. Let them have fun. Teach them about science and philosophy. Things will develop from there I'm sure.
Good luck!
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.
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.
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.
I had a look at the examples section on the bel post and read a few pages into the bel document, but all I saw is basically scheme with a slightly funky syntax and primitives (like where). So I guess pg must really be burying the lede (which, from what I gather from the above has at least partly to do with a elegant way to model concurrency, which ur-lisp lacked?).
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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"
Writing is like many processes - in the final show, the scaffolding has gone, the drafts are discarded, the tweaks and feedback are hidden, and all you are left with is the final revision of a very long chain and a "wow!".
Every small step made an improvement, great writing is rewriting, and the steps accumulate over a longer period than you can see from the final text.
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.
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!
It's common for people to follow a straight line in their lives: decide a career path, go to school and keep doing it, switching companies and jobs when necessary.
But the reality is, interests can change -- people can change in this respect. As noted elsewhere, there is this very common culture of "finding yourself", "discovering your true inner self", but it's more rare to acknowledge tastes develop (and evolve).
I'm sure pg didn't quit graduate school, spent a year painting in Italy, and came back to america if he didn't thoroughly enjoy painting. Maybe he doesn't like painting anymore, though! Tastes can change.
I've written elsewhere, but much of our tastes (ought to) develop following what we find important -- that is, the intersection of {what helps the world, what we would be good at, what we could become passionate about, what earns us money} (because without direct monetary reward your options can become constricted).
I believe in Japanese culture it is frequent to do this examination, known as Ikigai ("a reason for being"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
(Hopefully I'm not misrepresenting the concept from pop culture)
Because times change, opportunities change, this target can change! Maybe tomorrow you realize this could be becoming a painter, the next day you realize you can write software to change the world, and it's ok to give up being a painter; in fact, you might be barely able to think of painting again presented with such a rich and challenging opportunity.
Another thing I found valuable is to really retain the most valuable experiences. Even if you change tastes, you shouldn't ignore your past experiences, your past knowledge. The most disparate things A vs B can influence eachother; often, being so seemingly disparate the opportunity of influence can be greater if not many people share background in both A and B.
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.
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.
Eg I can recall the super bowl party from 10 years ago, no idea who played or won.
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.
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.
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.
Plus I'd imagine it depends a lot on the intensity of the college studies. I'd imagine folks going to MIT would remember more stuff than people at a random community college.
Besides what the other folks are saying regarding jogging your memory.
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.
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.
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.
And the HN thread from when it was released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21231208
Thanks for sharing through all these years, Paul!
(P.S. Graham released his Lisp book freely on his site, worth a read if you haven't already.)
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 "π Educator" [1]? Whatever your pick, I'm sure it will be worth following your journey onwards.
[1] παιδεία or paideía is Greek for "education"
As an aside, I always think his icon on the web browser looks a bit like the Texas flag.
"It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you find yourself drawn to some kind of work despite its current lack of prestige, it's a sign both that there's something real to be discovered there, and that you have the right kind of motives. Impure motives are a big danger for the ambitious. If anything is going to lead you astray, it will be the desire to impress people. So while working on things that aren't prestigious doesn't guarantee you're on the right track, it at least guarantees you're not on the most common type of wrong one."
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.
What other trains have left the station? What ones are leaving now? I'm referring to growth areas that are not 'winner takes all' and do not require extreme ability/talent to get into. The ones that come to mind are:
- smart phone apps when the iPhone first launched
- crypto currency mining/speculation (still ongoing I suppose)
- maybe some period 2005-2015 when there were still many novel and lucrative applications of machine learning to try out?
*[departing now] ecommerce economy
*[departing now] ESG investing
*[departing now] derisking semi-conductor supply chain
*[departing now] activist / populist retail investing (e.g. Gamestop)
But, as ever, the challenge really is the imbalance between labour and capital. All these opportunities are easy to invest in but difficult to get rich from if all you have is your labour. Appstores are saturated, ML labour market is terrible outside of a few pockets of excellence, etc.
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.
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.
By 2000, selling art online was no less enterprising than selling books or pet food online. PG was just half a decade or so early to the party.
By that time, artnet.com was a well-funded and subscribed sales price database. Christie's auction house would feature it's first online only bidding. Art Review magazine was digitizing its entire archive. Major museums were beginning to discuss in earnest how to preserve software based works in their permanent collections. And the Whitney would feature an online exhibit of curated Net Art in its Artport website.
It's rather interesting to imagine a parallel universe, where PG's AI insights could have culminated in him becoming a major conceptual digital artist.
Flash forward to 2020, and online viewing rooms have replaced in-person art fairs. Distributed ledgers are employed for fraud protection. Rare digital is "important". And questions around authorship in AI-generated works are entering the mainstream.
Beeple: A Visionary Digital Artist at the Forefront of NFTs
https://www.christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Bee...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-l...
“Similarly, to this day, it is still quite popular to try to program an AI with "semantic networks" that look something like this:
(apple is-a fruit)
(fruit is-a food)
(fruit is-a plant)
You've seen apples, touched apples, picked them up and held them, bought them for money, cut them into slices, eaten the slices and tasted them. Though we know a good deal about the first stages of visual processing, last time I checked, it wasn't precisely known how the temporal cortex stores and associates the generalized image of an apple - so that we can recognize a new apple from a different angle, or with many slight variations of shape and color and texture. Your motor cortex and cerebellum store programs for using the apple.
You can pull the lever on another human's strongly similar version of all that complex machinery, by writing out "apple", five ASCII characters on a webpage.
But if that machinery isn't there - if you're writing "apple" inside a so-called AI's so-called knowledge base - then the text is just a lever.”
--
It's also a good explanation of why the new style of AI appears not to be a hoax and actually works.
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.
Here is how: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c55fa4aqqu9mmph/CleanShot%202021-0...
Instead, he actively puts <br> at the end of each line to prevent exactly that.
>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
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.
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.
If there's privilege here (and if we're using that word in something other than a Twitter putdown sense), it seems to me more more intellectual than financial. pg 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 significant about their relationship. Many of us had a similar path to the first two of those steps, but that third step branches somewhere different—perhaps life-changingly different.
Edit: btw, on the matter of luck, I always remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1621768.
I agree with you - people are missing the fact that the author was able to live on a very meagre salary for years.
— Richard Wiseman
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.
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.
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.
Minor nit, but he said that about angel firms, not angel investors.
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.
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.
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.
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!
:-)
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.
AI -> Writing Lisp Books -> First Startup -> Designing Arc -> YC -> Designing Bel (for 4+ years)
That is, he was interested in Lisp before he made a lot of money, and also after he made a lot of money (twice). The money didn't change his interests.
Writing your own Lisp isn't very likely to lead to "concrete" results, but that's the point (or the lesson). Someone trying to do only "practical" things wouldn't have created a valuable startup or YC in the first place.
There are a few commenters here who missed that point, assuming that everyone must be doing things to get rich (because that's likely their own motivation).
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?
> I had some money saved from consulting work I'd done in grad school; there was probably enough to last a year if I lived cheaply.
> The good part was that I got paid huge amounts of money, especially by art student standards. In Florence, after paying my part of the rent, my budget for everything else had been $7 a day. Now I was getting paid more than 4 times that every hour, even when I was just sitting in a meeting. By living cheaply I not only managed to save enough to go back to RISD, but also paid off my college loans.
He earned his own money and paid his own bills. You can do that today as an software engineer if you choose to live like in worse conditions than a working class, like he did.
The biggest difference is how quick you could pay off a college loan compared to now.
Out of everything PG has done, I think it's clear that YC and, more underrated, HN have by far had the most impact on the world: Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe, Instacart, DoorDash... Any one of these alone has made huge ripples in millions of lives. How about how HN is the cultural zeitgeist of many startup and tech employees in the tech capital of the world? How many existing and upcoming founders have been impacted by the discussions here? How many employees of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft have been influenced in one way or another?
YC and HN are having a major impact on the world. I think it's clear that there's still a lot to do to ensure it's steered in the greatest possible scale and positive direction. Who knows what kind of societal benefits could be unlocked and disasters averted?
And this is a position that PG has the unique clout, knowledge, and funds to tackle. Peter Thiel is clearly using his clout, knowledge, and funds, to the best of his ability, to form the world in what he perceives to be the most positive direction. Why not PG?
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
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.
The part about the air conditioners was nostalgic. We were the second summer in Cambridge (07) and it was also hot. We tracked down this behemoth on Craigslist that took two of us to move. It was old. Like probably from the 80’s old. But man did that bad boy put out some cold air. We left it behind as a gift for the college kids who were renting us the apartment.
We worked so hard that at one point I (normally a very light sleeper) slept right through a fire alarm and firefighters banging on my door. I was lucky it was a false alarm.
I remember a double date dinner with Paul and Jessica and my then fiancée at a restaurant that had murals (I think of the movie Casablanca or gone with the wind). I think it was a not-well-kept secret at the time that they were dating so I didn’t tell anyone.
What a fun, interesting time that summer was. I miss all of that.
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.
I hope the sub-text I picked up is all in my head, and that everything is fine.
May PG live long and prosper :)
One wonders over the years how often this mistake has been made. I recently made timezone assumptions about someone who said they were in Cambridge that turned out to be wrong.
This is hilarious writing!
I did my time with that, and happy to leave it behind.
(As Goethe wrote, "Geniuses experience a second adolescence, whereas other people are only young once.")
Maybe this is usually true, but I can't help thinking Apple is an exception to this rule. They make high end products, but they sure don't seem to be getting squashed against the ceiling.
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.
But:
> This was the closest thing I've had to a normal job, and I hereby apologize to my boss and coworkers, because I was a bad employee. ... Toward the end of the year I spent much of my time surreptitiously working on On Lisp, which I had by this time gotten a contract to publish.
Looks like he really was a bad employee. Not sure yet what conclusions I should draw from this.
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.
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. :)
This is a lesson we learn over and over and over decade after decade. At the same time, AI makes incremental improvements to existing software and services without actually replacing anything.
Truly, the most valuable take away of it all.
Exactly when I was thinking about that.
But this long essay does not really answer that.
> 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.
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.
Me too, and I could see there was no other possible way to save my parent's house than to start my company.
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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.
You went to school at 4 years old?
I was still 14 going when starting grade 9, no skipped grades.
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".
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.
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/
I am someone who doesn't fall into that category.
A couple of centuries ago, it was common to put a summary at the beginning of each chapter in a book. But it would be very strange to do that for each paragraph in an essay, which itself is about as long as a book chapter.
This essay was one of the most absorbing things I've read in quite a while. What a life!
And yes, I'm quite sure the people you mention read every word.
It took me 65 minutes. I'm a slow reader (too many physics texts), and I tend to pause to reflect on what I'm reading.