Hacker News Reader

Comment by suyash | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so I am having a hard time buying the idea that just make a fun project if you want to create a something like 'Google'. Startup 101 teaches us that you need to solve a painful problem that lot of people have, that is the best way to create 'Google', so isn't the advise contradictory?

View on HN

This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for 35-year-olds.

22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on.

PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22-year-olds have is that they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a day. The superpower that 14-year-olds have is that (in many cases) they don't even need to find the $1,000 a month to survive.

What's the super power of 35-year-olds? Arthritis?

Compared to my 25 and 15 year old self, my 35 (now 40) self is a lot wiser in terms of dealing with people, applying humility and being crisp on the wide gulf between "what I find is worth doing at the moment" and "what's valuable." I think these are all hugely valuable and serve me well.

LLMs are increasingly good at your 40 year old soft social skills like humility, so don't bank on that being worth much very long.

I don't think of humility as a soft skill, it's an internal assumption about where the ultimate truth resides based on which you reason and engage with reality.

Man even once AI takes all our jobs or whatever there's still gonna be 8 billion people wandering around. We're still gonna need to talk to each other.

Viewing things like wisdom, patience, discipline, and humility as both "soft" and "skills" is one of the single most problematic aspects of the tech industry.

I was as young, arrogant and naïve as you once.

More reps/iterations to learn from

Reduced arrogance.

Experience. Contacts. Money.

>they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a day.

And the fact that most people don't see a problem with a statement like this a _big_ problem.

His advice is:

- Work on a personal project that is motivating to you (obviously you won't work on it if it's not motivating to you)

- It's a good sign if the project you're motivated to work on solves a problem that you and your friends care a lot about, because there's a good chance many more people will also want that problem solved and will buy/use your product.

Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.

I didn't see the 2nd point but yes overall this clarifies.

> Sure, plenty of big companies were started via different paths, but not many were founded by kids barely out of high school.

And neither was Google. Sergey Brin and Larry Page both hold masters degrees in Computer Science from Stanford.

He's giving advice to school kids on what to do during their remaining school years or early college years.

Also, Larry was 23 when PageRank was first published - that's not much older than "barely out of high school", even if we have to be so literal about everything :)

"not much". at that age it's material! who I was at 18 and who I was at 23 is way different than the difference between 35 and 40

As long as Paul Graham doesn't tell the truth that most if not all school kids won't ever make the next Google, then I'm okay with influencers (like Paul Graham, for instance) lying about the possibility of enormous opportunities being available to people.

I think high schoolers are smart enough to know that he's not literally saying "do this and you'll start the next Google".

Yes. I was reinforcing your point. Not even the example he uses is directly applicable to the audience. Just out of highschool and 6 years in one of the most rigorous CS programs are very different.

I am not seeing any mention of a certain US security state 'investor'that gave them a bunch of money and PR, either in the article or in comments. I suppose it's uncouth within polite company to speak of such things.

We now have a single organization shaping the information access patterns of the people all over the world ostensibly paid by ads. Right.

I don't think there is a contradiction. The argument is that building fun projects helps you gain expertise to the point where you can more easily recognize painful problems to solve.

I think the message is more about not getting caught up in external sources of what to build. Basically, don't follow the hype, follow your nose.

He never uses “fun”

He says you have to be interested in it, it should excite you, and it should be your own project.

That’s absolutely not at odds with solving a problem. In fact, there’s a good chance that people are interested in solving a problem, likely one that is painful to you.

Trying to solve people’s painful problems is an exercise in futility unless you’re already very good at solving problems. And you don’t get good at solving problems by sitting and twiddling your thumbs until a sufficiently worthy problem drops into your lap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com