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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#11

Post by vonnik »

I think it's important that PG published this essay this week.

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.

Re: What I Worked On

#12

Post by myWindoonn »

_Microft wrote: post #6
judofyr wrote: post #4

> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. 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…

> 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. 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 car…

The analogy is not great, because the f-expr-based Lisp Kernel [0] did arise from a doctoral dissertation, and is far more interesting than Bel. The Lisp world has respect for Shutt's work but not for Graham's, and that's not by accident.

Edit: Hey, I'm just doing what you did. You started this comment thread by both posting a top-level comment, and also starting replies to other folks.

So, uh, have you read Shutt's work on Kernel yet? Or are you just going to play this out based on optics? One of us is shilling for some rich fuck, and the other of us is reading historical academic work.

[0] https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~jshutt/kernel.html

Re: What I Worked On

#13

Post by myWindoonn »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

It’s nice to see even pg goes through phases of “I have no idea what to do next.” 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, an…

Bel has nothing not in Scheme, Kernel, Clojure, or SBCL. You might be participating in hero worship.

Re: What I Worked On

#14

Post by DC1350 »

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

Re: What I Worked On

#15

Post by mplewis »

DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

Frankly, Paul Graham has a lot of money.

Re: What I Worked On

#16

Post by eschulz »

DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

It could be either, but with pg I feel as thought it's just a personality thing.

Re: What I Worked On

#17

Post by Grimm1 »

> My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot, just characters with strong feelings, which I imagined made them deep.

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.

Re: What I Worked On

#18

Post by DC1350 »

mplewis wrote: post #15
DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

Frankly, Paul Graham has a lot of money.

I know he does now but I’m talking about the earlier sections of the essay. He mentions taking time off from art school to work because he needed more money. What’s interesting to me is how he just decided to go to art school, study philosophy, or work on projects that had nothing to do with his career when he wasn’t already financially secure. The common narrative around really successful people is that they work really hard in a few focused areas but it seems like he just did whatever he wanted to and somehow it all just worked out.

Re: What I Worked On

#20

Post by josemwarrior »

mplewis wrote: post #15
DC1350 wrote: post #14

This was a good read. I wish I could understand the mindset of people who can live spontaneously like this. I always plan so far in the future because I feel like it’s way too easy to ruin my life financially. Is this a generational thing? A class difference?

Frankly, Paul Graham has a lot of money.

maybe, his mindset leads to money, dunno
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