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A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

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Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#81

Post by awucs »

tomhoward wrote: post #77
awucs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't listen to the whole thing nor do I care about any one individual thing, but they did talk about the co-founders as well from what I saw. That said, other than that I disagree with you. If someone wants to have their opinions taken seriously they have take other people's opinions seriously as well and can't get angry as soon as people disagree. Personally I think many of his essays aren't very good, but there…

I don't think there's been any "getting angry as soon as people disagree" - he's substantially edited essays in response to critiques. It's pedantry and the presumption of malice that were probably the hard things to deal with, and he just realised that his time and energy would be better spent being an attentive father and partner. Good for him.

I disagree. I think his way of having a debate is very dysfunctional. Many of his essays makes themselves hard to argue with rhetorically. He doesn't leave much room in the text itself nor in the medium for people to share their own opinion about it. And when people despite that still do write e.g. blog posts his response isn't to their argument, but that they have misunderstood what he meant. The way to make pedantry meaningless is to have a substantial debate. I also think there is as much presumption of malice on his part as anyone else. You can even find that in many of his essays where he talks about other people either being with or against him. I could find you some examples where I think he did an especially bad job, but what is the point? If you like his essays do that, but base that on substance and not some sort of universal truth on Hacker News.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#83

Post by ikeboy »

csomar wrote: post #47
sokoloff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy, but leaky in terms of fees and delays as compared to US-to-US transfers. When I send money to EU hobbyists, it’s often 3 days and ~10% eaten up by fees.

There are gateways like PayPal (which is why it skyrocketed in the first place). So you send $100 PayPal and he gets $100. He then goes and spend his full money to buy something online without any other fees.

PayPal now takes $3-5 minimum on international transfers. Switched to payoneer

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#84

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

RyanShook wrote: post #11

“The mistake you will most likely make as a startup founder is coming up with your own vision of what your product should be instead of getting feedback from actual users.”

But what is the point of operating your own company if not to accomplish your goals of what the company should be?

I mean, I get it, you have to make customers happy in order to have a business. But this seems like something different. It seems like saying your goal should be to make money a priori and that defining vision based on feedback is a good way to do that.

But what if that’s not your goal? What if your goal is to create a company that embodies a specific mission, like say related to environmentalism or furthering cryonics or actually paying all the taxes you should pay as a civic virtue instead of offshoring to skirt your duty to help others that form the foundation of society that enables your business to exist in the first place.

Doing things like this often requires telling customers “no” or declining business all together, in order to impose the vision because you believe the vision is more valuable than short term pivots to satisfy short term client feedback.

Another thread of this that I don’t like is that client feedback is often wildly inconsistent and incoherent, not based on realistic understanding of what’s possible.

It sounds glib to say listen to feedback, but what does that mean? Which feedback is good? When is it actually going to payoff according to your true goal?

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#85

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

redshirtrob wrote: post #75
Razengan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be a user of your own product to really make it good. Look at Apple. Most of how they got where they are is by Jobs, Ive et al. making what they wanted to see, and nitpicking at everything until they were satisfied. Also: "people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Of course you have to address customers' frustrations, but relying on just "data" and marketing feedback all the time often…

This sentiment really bothers me. It's frequently used to disadvantage candidates from positions because they're not users of the service or product. It's just not generally true, but it's often repeated as though it were. It's demonstrably not true that you must be a user of a product to build a good product. To pick a random example: I doubt all pacemaker firmware developers have heart conditions that require pacem…

I work for a company that makes a very popular social app and I don’t use the app whatsoever, and refuse even to download early adopter versions to test.

Sometimes people at work give me crap for this. But they know my engineering contributions are among the best in the company, so what can they say?

It’s foolish to disqualify people for this. Imagine saying men cannot ever work for a team that delivers feminine hygiene products, or a woman can never work for a product team that makes male health products.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#88

Post by ransom1538 »

I love PG but listening to his advice on startups always felt like discovering the steps to create a nuclear bomb.

Step 1) collect seven pounds of weapons grade plutonium

Step 1 of a great startup is an amazing idea. Unless you have step one I think the advice is pretty non applicable. Sure, I get the whole camp “ideas are a dime a dozen”, but, a bad idea can fall apart with millions of VC ran by MIT grads and an amazing idea can come to life with a few hundred bucks with a high school kid.

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#89

Post by kapad »

Was Geoff adequately prepared to host? I watched a few minutes and his introduction was pathetic. As was his setting of the agenda(which he didn't do any of). Were his discussion points later on good? If they were, I'll go back and watch the rest of this. Otherwise half of the video time (when Geoff is speaking) seems a waste to me. ;)

Re: A Conversation with Paul Graham [video]

#90

Post by xc1020we »

mattmanser wrote: post #54
sabalaba wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing software on windows is like using chopsticks with mittens. You can do it, it’s not pretty, and it’s not the use case the mitten sewer had in mind during development. Read the Unix Programming Environment to see the exact opposite mindset for OS design.

What a load of nonsense. C#'s a great language and their dev tool, Visual Studio, is second to none.

I had a different experience with Visual Studio. The IDE is slow with visible lag when typing, the menus are completely unintuitive for a person coming from Linux.

Creating a "solution" (who came up with that word?) is absolutely horrible compared to just opening a file in vi/emacs.

There does not appear to be a command line debugger -- while the debugger is good, graphical debuggers are a pain to use.

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