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The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#531

Post by BlueTemplar »

sinameraji wrote: post #491

Love it. I wanna put this in the context of innovation in education: IMHO, a radical innovation in education is one that can address at least two of the following flaws and failures in the current education system, at any growable scale: –Duration and cost –Content –Delivery If I were to satisfy a VC, I could also add a 4th bullet point called "Supply/Demand", but since I'm not writing for a VC, then I'll write what…

Considering that "education" is being used for daycare and conformity first, it might not be "fixable" when these goals are still requirements...

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#532

Post by BlueTemplar »

Terretta wrote: post #377

> No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. Then people will not only use it but recommend it to their friends, so your growth will be exponential once you get it started. > At this point I've told the founders something you'd think would be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by making a good product. And yet the…

The point is that big companies have other, easier roads to success.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#533

Post by BlueTemplar »

whack wrote: post #197

> How does one get lots of users? They had all kinds of ideas about that. They needed to do a big launch that would get them "exposure." They needed influential people to talk about them. They even knew they needed to launch on a tuesday, because that's when one gets the most attention. > No, I would explain, that is not how to get lots of users. The way you get lots of users is to make the product really great. Then…

> That no matter how good a product you build as an engineer, it is all pointless if you aren't willing to hit the ground and start aggressively marketing and selling it.

You have pretty much summarized another one of his talks : http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

(Or even two : http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html )

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#534

Post by BlueTemplar »

jpm_sd wrote: post #50

> At this point I've told the founders something you'd think would be completely obvious: that they should make a good company by making a good product. Sure, ok. How do you make a good product? That definitely is not "completely obvious"

At least one user is going to love it.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#535

Post by BlueTemplar »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #376

Good point, but there have been countless amazing products that failed to raise money and/or to attract enough users. Many have even succeeded just to be bought and terminated. Doing the actual job is not enough, in real the real world you are doomed to hack users, investors, laws and many other things anyway.

Did he ever pretend otherwise?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#536

Post by taeric »

jstanley wrote: post #527
taeric wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, you can hit a higher velocity. You will not get extra acceleration. That is my entire point. That is to say, the force from the air does not actively slow you down. It prevents you from speeding up, after a point. (Aerodynamics are, of course, more complicated. But this general model is pretty solid.) Such that if I want to accelerate faster down the hill, I have to pedal to cause that to happen. Or add a moto…

The heavier bike will reach the terminal velocity of the lighter bike sooner than the lighter bike will. If that's not extra acceleration then I don't think you're looking at the problem from a practical perspective. Yes, acceleration due to gravity is the same, but air resistance has less effect, at all speeds, on the heavier bike. The rate at which the heavier bike gains speed is higher. It accelerates faster.

This is just disagreement over magnitude. And what it means to hit higher acceleration.

Take my statements to be, it won't hit a meaningful higher acceleration. Not that it won't necessarily accelerate for longer.

In general, you will accelerate down the hill at 9.8 m/s^2 modified by the incline. No matter how heavy the bike is. (Within the realm of realistic weights.).

Yes, the points you are raising are true. But within the realm of the biker and realistic bikes, not really relevant.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#537

Post by taeric »

threatripper wrote: post #523
taeric wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is amusing how many of my peers still hold to the notion that heavier things fall faster. Not a higher terminal velocity, but the intuition that they accelerate faster. Hilariously tough for folks to shake.

Heavier things really do fall faster in the sense that they also pull the earth towards them which increases the relative acceleration and thereby decreases the time until they hit each other. F = G * m1 * m2 / r² This tells you that the acceleration of mass 1 is independent of the mass 1 and only depends on mass 2 and the acceleration of mass 2 is independent of mass 2 and only depends on mass 1. But the relative ve…

My argument is predicated on measurable differences of realistic weights of bikes and riders.

That is, would you expect adding ten pounds to have a meaningful difference in how fast a bike will accelerate down a hill? Even fifty pounds?

It will impact brake force needed to stop. But the speeds are going to be near identical.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#538

Post by OnlineGladiator »

johnm wrote: post #419
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first job I had there was a probationary period - it was good and bad. It was good because you knew everybody there was extremely talented and you could rely on your coworkers. There was a bit of an understanding about the cut throat nature of the place though, and obviously that's not for everyone. But at the end of the day, when it came time to just get shit done, there was never any problem. I can't name that…

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, the toxic (and incompetent) manager problem is fundamentally a leadership problem. The single biggest responsibility of the founders is the culture of the organization -- everything stems from that, one way or another. Leadership, from the top down, is absolutely responsible for the mentoring, training, and environment created by the management. None of the systemic problems with…

Just out of curiosity, why do you make multiple replies instead of one larger reply?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#539

Post by toofy »

nmfisher wrote: post #33
manmal wrote: post #20

My wife and I are contemplating unschooling our kids. The longer our son is in primary school, the more we see the deterioration of his willingness to learn anything school-related. He hates homework (as do most kids), and this is even more painful to see given that it has been shown that homework is essentially useless for learning performance. He still likes to write and do math, but as long as he is in school, we…

I'm curious about Page & Brin - I wasn't aware they didn't go through conventional schooling. What was their background?

They both attended Montessori schools. [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]

The person who mentioned waldorf must have been confused. While they’re both small private schools, they are two very different approaches to education.

[0] Wiki Brin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Brin

[1] Post Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/montessori-lo...

[2] ABC Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C_DQxpX-Kw

[3] Wiki Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page

[4] Guardian Article: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/jul/23...

[5] BI Article: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-...

[6] Forbes Article: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-innovators-who-went-to-...

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#540

Post by yowlingcat »

kccqzy wrote: post #323
pavlov wrote: post #240

The tech industry has unfortunately adopted the methodology of centralized hackable tests as the canonical gatekeeping method in the form of programming interviews. Most big tech companies don't care about how good you have been at delivering some value through creating software: they want to see you deliver a very specific type of performance at a whiteboard. Interviewers are given specific math puzzle questions to…

I think testing algorithmic questions is certainly evil, but it's a necessary evil because all other methods are either too time-consuming or unrealistic. You wouldn't believe in a big company how many clearly unqualified applicants there are, and there has to be some quick and dirty rule to run a filter through them. Perhaps it's the aura of FANG companies that make unqualified applicants try because they have nothi…

> My experience is that just about 1% of interviewees can actually confidently write a depth first search and explain its time complexity. If they can't even do that (which is basically among the first things schools teach in a CS curriculum), how do you trust they that they have the skills to design and implement even more complicated systems?

My experience with former BigCo engineers I've had to work with is that 1% of interviewees can actually confidently design a relational data model from scratch for a weekend MVP of reasonably any major web service you could think of. If they can't even do that (which is basically among the first things you do as an engineer standing up a service from scratch), how do you trust that they have the skills to design and implement even more complicated systems?

See, I just took what you said and replaced it with a couple of key phrases. But the truth is, when it comes to designing and implementing even more complicated systems, my passage (while reductive and still arguably wrong) makes a lot more sense than yours. I'm not saying this to pick on you, just to say that you probably want to revise what you say at the very end. Instead of "how do you trust they that they have the skills to design and implement even more complicated systems?" you should really be phrasing what you're looking for as "How do you trust that they have the skills to maintain and build efficient modules at Google scale?" because there are plenty of "even more complicated systems" The truth is that the architectures that consist of the grunt work of what you do scaling a company from $0B to $100M or $100M to $1B or $1B to $10B that are by and far more important than a depth first search. The fact that you leapt to do that rather than something more widely applicable shows exactly what's wrong with this mentality. It's not that you're incorrect; you're not even wrong. You never got to the point of knowing what the right question is.

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