What I Worked On • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Worked On

#361

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

quacked wrote: post #237

desireco42 wrote: post #130

So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out. Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all. If they do something, this is more to please me, as th…

Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin... If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's do…

[deleted]

Re: What I Worked On

#362

Post by soniman » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 11:17 AM UTC

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…

Another PG (Phil Greenspun) had this comment on Bel:

If you weren’t persuaded by the existing 100+ dialects of Lisp that have been created over the years, Bel from Paul Graham should change your mind and lure you aware from the dark and tedious arts of C and Java.

After you’ve saved bigly in development time on your next project, you can thank me!

Re: What I Worked On

#363

Post by burntoutfire » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 11:24 AM UTC

gnramires wrote: post #309

burntoutfire wrote: post #240

To me his story of going into painting in his twenties, while having never been interested in visual arts before, spending on and off time on it for years and eventually abandoning it in his forties sounds like a story of internal vs external motivation. He WANTED to like painting, because "he could create something eternal", "he wouldn't have a boss", he made himself interested in it, but in the the end his natural…

Disagree. I think he just shifted interests. It's common for people to follow a straight line in their lives: decide a career path, go to school and keep doing it, switching companies and jobs when necessary. But the reality is, interests can change -- people can change in this respect. As noted elsewhere, there is this very common culture of "finding yourself", "discovering your true inner self", but it's more rare…

My interpretation is that rather he was somewhat interested in it, saw that it lead to lifestyle he wanted and thus he made himself do the work for several years. There's no doubt that Paul is a conscientious person and also somewhat interested in painting, so it worked out for a while. Also, notice though how often he went into multi-year "distractions" from painting - the computers were calling him all this time. Ultimately, when there were no more distraction and all the time in the world to paint, he quit within 6 months.

Re: What I Worked On

#364

Post by whataboutist » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

hellbannedguy wrote: post #298

sjg007 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think is stopping you?

A understanding/wealthy parent. (Yes—it’s always conveniently left out.)

Many people underestimate the worth of two educated parents looking out for you. I love my parents, but I can only rely on them for emotional support. Somehow I ended up being far more academically gifted than both of them and it made me end up in a very alien environment. I'm starting to become content with mediocrity since I've already climbed a significant rung in the social ladder in my eyes. I think that an understanding parent or close one can really support you in getting out of such a comfort zone. On the other hand, someone who has grown up without any support whatsoever might have build up enough autonomy to get out of such a spot without help.

Re: What I Worked On

#365

Post by benrbray » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

hoseja wrote: post #359

benrbray wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of these systems are so far behind any real understanding of your words, though. They behave like Text-to-Speech followed by a Google Search, whether that's how they're implemented or not.

And Google Search is, of course, merely a natural phenomenon that is mined somewhere in Siberia and exploited without anybody truly knowing what's going on.

Sure, Google search is technological progress, but to the best of my knowledge they aren't doing any fancy natural language understanding every time you enter a search. It's a big, supersized information retrieval system that hashes all your n-grams with a few hundred thousand special cases tacked on.

Re: What I Worked On

#366

Post by quacked » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:03 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #352

quacked wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin... If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's do…

What the hell. That antagonistic learning article is amazing! Even having a peer hold me accountable like he describes in the article would be amazing, let alone a teacher. Reading that article made me sad that I've never had someone else challenge me like that. I've always had to do it myself.

Most of the teachers I've had in the past have been fine; the ones I worked the hardest for and still remember to this day were the ones that refused to admit subpar work and rarely meted out praise.

Re: What I Worked On

#367

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

sillysaurusx wrote: post #288

totemandtoken wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear I'm one of these unsuspecting losers...except I guess that comment makes me suspecting. IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly. Your art work is beautiful by the way.

Nah, that feeling is just corporate life. It’s not you. Or put another way, it would be a bit strange to say that everyone who works at a corporation is an unsuspecting loser. From what I’ve seen, academia is both worse and better. So don’t feel like you’re missing out on something. Just do what makes you happy.

[deleted]

Re: What I Worked On

#368

Post by reactchain » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:38 PM UTC

This is a great essay, better than some of Paul's other recent writing which has felt less inspiring than his old stuff. This feels in depth and written from the heart.

Re: What I Worked On

#369

Post by nyerp » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

"When I said I was leaving, my boss at Yahoo had a long conversation with me about my plans. I told him all about the kinds of pictures I wanted to paint. At the time I was touched that he took such an interest in me. Now I realize it was because he thought I was lying. My options at that point were worth about $2 million a month. If I was leaving that kind of money on the table, it could only be to go and start some new startup, and if I did, I might take people with me. [...] But I really was quitting to paint, and I started immediately. There was no time to lose."

(As Goethe wrote, "Geniuses experience a second adolescence, whereas other people are only young once.")

Re: What I Worked On

#370

Post by randomsearch » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

johnyzee wrote: post #117

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #35

>>> What these programs really showed was that there's a subset of natural language that's a formal language. Don't take this as any fanboy stuff, but pg is still good at putting big thoughts in small sentences. Its a sort of mental zip function. Also this is why I still type into google things like 'rubik solve how-to' instead of my daughter doing "show me how to solve a rubiks cube"

Yes. He is a gifted writer, very succinct. Funny that his writing pursuits all seem to be incidental, like the Lisp books (per his own account), and the essays, which certainly played a part in his success.

Gifted? Or extremely hard-working?

Writing is like many processes - in the final show, the scaffolding has gone, the drafts are discarded, the tweaks and feedback are hidden, and all you are left with is the final revision of a very long chain and a "wow!".

Every small step made an improvement, great writing is rewriting, and the steps accumulate over a longer period than you can see from the final text.