171–180 of 421 posts
pg is such an inspiring person. Walking away from $2M per month at Yahoo. To now most likely being a billionaire from personally funding the YC LLC.
And then spending 6 years just painting, coding, writing and raising a family. Living the dream.
Sure Elon Musk is a “cool billionaire”, but in my book pg is even cooler.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> 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. That's clearly not what nerdponx meant. Can you please stick to the site guidelines? " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone sa…
I disagree. I made a straightforward interpretation of what was written. Given what came after the part I quoted, you really have to stretch to interpret it differently.
The OP underscored the same point using profanity.
I made a response that was clearly sardonic, attempting to be funny.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely a class difference. From the essay > Computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980." Based on a quick search, the price was probably about $1200-$2000 inflation adjusted dollars. I grew up in probably a similar environment, my dad was also a physicist, and I also had access to computers from a young age, and I was enc…
I think you might be overestimating how much money pg's family had; I'm pretty sure they were squarely middle-class (e.g. the next sentence reads "The gold standard then was the Apple II, but a TRS-80 was good enough," and that took "years of nagging"). Strictly from a class point of view his background would have been risk-averse. But your point about the intellectual environment seems solid.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/work.html
[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html
[3] https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/12/18/the-percentage-of...
This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but many people disagree that ML itself is revolutionary. The basics of it were known (referred to, quite appropriately, as 'data mining') as early as the 1990s and perhaps earlier. We've added a smattering of new techniques since then, and compute power has been expanded via GPGPU, but there was no "revolutionary" shift in the field. Even multi-layer ("deep") neural networks are very old tech.
The smattering of new techniques seem to have made the difference between success on toy problems vs. being able to match or exceed human performance on many difficult tasks. So while naysayers are correct that "the math hasn't changed since the 90s!", enough has changed to make calling DL a paradigm shift accurate. For reference, I can now get an intern to images for a few hours, then train a black box algorithm to…
This is part of the problem. Finding a the value of a few hyperparameters is hardly something I consider interesting science.
This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…
This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…
It wasn't by pure luck that he started Ycom, and it wasn't pure luck he started Viaweb. With viaweb he had a first mover advantage sure, but had already noticed tech and programming were interesting and changing the world. Ycom, as he said, angel investors didn't exist before Ycom. He almost created the term. Hardly luck.
It's certainly true the moving around schools, the cheap apartments etc is just not possible today.
This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…
For the tech-savvy readers there's a lot of stuff pg did that is not directly related to his material success, but oh so cool.
For example his book on Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
You don't write a book on Lisp because you want to get rich. You write it because you just do it for its own sake. And then he got rich immediately after publishing it.
What a cool move. For the nerds who can read the signals.
This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…
We just want to make a pile ourselves so we can give that to our kids.
As a champagne socialist I don't want to take that opportunity of experience away from anyone, I just want to ensure everyone has such opportunities.
I reckon we only need to increase global wealth by another couple of orders of magnitude and job done!
:-)
This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…