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A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

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Re: A Project of One’s Own

#271

Post by Tarsul »

fearthetelomere wrote: post #177
rossdavidh wrote: post #41

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she w…

There's a working theory that you could do this with anything. A cool story to read is the Polgar family. His daughters became some of the best chess players of their time. >Polgár and his wife considered various possible subjects in which to drill their children, "including mathematics and foreign languages," but they settled on chess. "We could do the same thing with any subject, if you start early, spend lots of t…

wow, I always thought he had adopted his children. But he didn't, they were his own. It's written that he thought about adopting boys later in life but didn't. Still, I'm shocked that I remember this so wrong. Thanks for posting.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#272

Post by mixmastamyk »

asadlionpk wrote: post #194
idiotsecant wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested in learning things.

That's pretty hard to do imo, specially when other kids in school have all kinds of devices and are hooked to youtube 24/7.

Kids in school don't have time to affect others 24/7, maybe an hour tops if they aren't in sports.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#273

Post by jimbokun »

asadlionpk wrote: post #194
idiotsecant wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested in learning things.

That's pretty hard to do imo, specially when other kids in school have all kinds of devices and are hooked to youtube 24/7.

And that's the key, pry the device out of their hand and send them outside.

Good luck actually doing it, though.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#274

Post by selimthegrim »

foobarian wrote: post #253
sbierwagen wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Chinese-Americans earn less than many European-Americans. On the page you link, Chinese-Americans have a lower per-capita income than Americans of Macedonian, Russian, Latvian, British (not otherwise specified), Lithuanian, Slovene, Australian, and Austrian ancestry. They have a higher per-capita income than Americans of Scottish, Czechoslovakian, Croatian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Belgian, Swiss, Welsh, Danish,…

The Americans of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian origin must really be doing crappy if Yugoslav is in the lower bucket while Slovene and Macedonian are in the higher. Or maybe it is filtering out immigrants who weren't born while that country existed (soooo... before 1918? And after 1992?)

They tend to cluster in certain metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt (St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, the latter two of which used to have regular JAT flights in 1980s) that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.

Source: I'm from Cleveland, aunt married one of the (many) Slovenian-Americans there

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#276

Post by golemiprague »

snowwrestler wrote: post #262
opportune wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the high paying professions outside of software require the degree and that first job to break into them. Sure for banking and consulting it’s not a hard requirement, but it’s much harder to get into them with bad grades or a degree from a non-target school. It’s really only in the software bubble where people are able to prove themselves to break into it, due to various factors including engineers being in v…

The reason software is different is simply that it is a recently developed industry. If you look back, all industries start this way. The most heavily-credentialed and tightly-regulated field you can think of today started off as a bunch of hustlers making it up as they went along. It didn’t last for those other industries and it likely won’t last for software.

I am not sure, software is a bit like a trade, you actually build something only it is virtual and if you build it they will come, nobody can stop you from building things.

Medicine, Law or consulting are services, not actualy creating any actual new value. They build their moat by making the license very hard to obtain and making one's status and prestige the most important thing. You do need licenses to do certain trades but they are usually not that hard to obtain and the prestige of the institute giving them is less important.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#277

Post by Lammy »

> People like Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson and Susan Kare were not just following orders. They were not tennis balls hit by Steve Jobs, but rockets let loose by Steve Jobs.

Jef Raskin*

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#278

Post by yw3410 »

codefined wrote: post #247
greghinch wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny that he wrote this now living in the UK. As an American living in England for the better part of a decade now, it still shocks me how much grades matter in the hiring process for professionals with many years of experience. If you don’t get a first or at least a 2:1 in uni, and/or do poorly on your A-levels, it will hold you back for the rest of your life here

Interesting. Mileage may vary by company / area of work. I didn't go to Uni and went straight to work. Got a few A-levels but nothing special. Wasn't even asked about them for my first job.

It's certainly true for a lot of corporate graduate schemes require a 2.1 in a relevant subject and reputable university in the UK. It's typically used as an initial filter.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#279

Post by jimbokun »

munificent wrote: post #152
germinalphrase wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a teacher, this resonates. For many, the knowledge and skills development in school is too abstract. An aside: Is ‘take your child to work day’ even a thing anymore?

I work at Google which (before COVID, of course) had a take your kid to work day every year. But it always seemed strangely structured. They would set up a bunch of separate activities for kids to do and the parents would go hang out there and do those with them. It ended up looking at lot more like "take your kid to the office " to me, which sort of defeated the point. But I don't know if there's a good solution whe…

Pair programming?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#280

Post by foobarian »

selimthegrim wrote: post #274
foobarian wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Americans of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian origin must really be doing crappy if Yugoslav is in the lower bucket while Slovene and Macedonian are in the higher. Or maybe it is filtering out immigrants who weren't born while that country existed (soooo... before 1918? And after 1992?)

They tend to cluster in certain metropolitan areas in the Rust Belt (St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, the latter two of which used to have regular JAT flights in 1980s) that have been hit hard by deindustrialization. Source: I'm from Cleveland, aunt married one of the (many) Slovenian-Americans there

Those cities sound familiar from high school geography. We were told that Pittsburgh was the city with the world second largest Croatian population. Not sure when that would have been true but cool nonetheless.
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