Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 421 posts

Re: What I Worked On

#81

Post by jacquesm »

dekhn wrote: post #41
chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. 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, ve…

I don't agree about grid computing. Many scientists got work done with it on aggregations of clusters. LIGO used pyGlobus to transfer large amounts of scientific data.

And the early beowulf cluster stuff was definitely breaking new ground, and is the direct ancestor of the most powerful supercomputers in the world right now.

Re: What I Worked On

#82

Post by hinkley »

alexashka wrote: post #49
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's a class thing. 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 winnin…

My kids have one set of grandparents who will not let them fail, even if something happens to us.

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).

Re: What I Worked On

#83

Post by xiaolingxiao »

This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some art classes and because they were not for credit, I just flowed and drew ( https://lingxiaolingdotus.firebaseapp.com/art ). Tbh I felt more alive placing some hasty marks on paper than I ever did doing "research" in a lab.

"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."

Re: What I Worked On

#84

Post by Gollapalli »

>Around this time, in the spring of 2000, I had an idea. It was clear from our experience with Viaweb that web apps were the future. Why not build a web app for making web apps? Why not let people edit code on our server through the browser, and then host the resulting applications for them? [9] You could run all sorts of services on the servers that these applications could use just by making an API call: making and receiving phone calls, manipulating images, taking credit card payments, etc....

>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

Re: What I Worked On

#86

Post by jonas21 »

hinkley wrote: post #74
DC1350 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Wikipedia shows him as getting a BA from Cornell. So is 'art school' Cornell? Also he's 56, which means he still comes from an era where you might be able 'pay as you go' through college. So as to the question of 'was it money, class, or generational?' I think the answer is 'all three'.

No, RISD - which is about as "art school" as art school gets.

The middle section of the essay describes PG's time in art school, which he attended after graduating from Cornell and going to grad school.

Re: What I Worked On

#88

Post by cam0 »

nostrademons wrote: post #79
perfmode wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check out “the middle class curse” for a class-based reflection on this

Link? The best Google result I could find given context was: 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.

That is essentially it - the upper class has the confidence (and safety net) required to take big swings, and the lower class has nothing to lose. The middle class has been conditioned to live conservatively.

Re: What I Worked On

#89

Post by timr »

nerdponx wrote: post #77
timr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't a hoax, but the OP is exactly right: if it were more usable, people would see it for what it is, and not for what the silly media narrative makes it sounds like. As long as your technology is only usable by a high priesthood, you can make it look like magic.

Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? In the last 5 years, we have made incomprehensibly huge improvements in power and usability. It's an active field, and improvements are still coming at a steady pace. We have already revolutionized search, natural language processing & machine translation, image/audio/video processing, robotics, game AI, and advertising (for better or worse). And on top of all this,…

> Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all?

Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats.

> What the fuck more do you want?

If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.

Re: What I Worked On

#90

Post by igravious »

yters wrote: post #33

Ironic pg passed up philosophy in his search for immortality. Not only is that a focus of philosophy, even in today's materialist worldview, but philosophers are some of the most ancient and best preserved thinkers. The ideas of the ancient greek philosophers still hold sway today, even in popular culture, see Plato and The Matrix, or how the US government is organized in checks and balances to preserve liberty. In f…

pg has a whole essay[0] where he dismisses practically the entirety of Western philosophy and the value or use of the study thereof.

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.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Post reply on HN