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PG's Rarely Asked Questions

paulgraham.com

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Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#51

Post by Aga »

gbog wrote: post #27
_delirium wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact the usual advice is that you shouldn't be doing something technically virtuosic in a startup. If your startup's critical path includes writing something as technically impressive as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, you might have trouble... Though there are a few people around here who've built software businesses around things that are also nontrivial technical advances; cperciva comes to mind.

It seems all or most pg's articles just say the opposite: a startup should climb the highest hills, and can do so faster the big corporations because they are light-weight. If I'm not mistaking, "climbing" here do not mean find a genius idea or a disrupting design for a search field, it means developping something hard in software. The conclusion should be that a startups that is not doing something technically hard…

I think it does not have to mean "developing something hard in software", but more like "finding an unsolved problem and using software to solve it." It does not have to be hard to solve in the software side. I guess the hardest part is finding the right problem to solve!

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#52

Post by corin_ »

Does anyone have any insight into why painters are less common among hackers than other artistic persuits, such as music?

I've never met anyone who bridged visual art with anything tech-related, but composers, singers, pianists, orchestra members... hell yes.

Is it just that painters are less common that musicians and that ratio stays true in the tech world?

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#53

Post by nzonbi »

barry-cotter wrote: post #11
wallawe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.w3schools.com is pretty informative if you haven't already checked that out. The best thing to do, especially if you are on a budget is spend a few hours in a bookstore each week reading over various books on various subjects. I found this a lot more helpful.

I would recommend htmldog.com above w3schools for HTML and CSS. For javascript eloquentjavascript.net is good, and sqlzoo.net is good for SQL (or so I have heard). No doubt there are also some spectacular books for all of these. Please reply with recommendations.

In my opinion, developer.mozilla.org has the best online documentation on common web technologies for programmers.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#54

Post by jcarden »

zackattack wrote: post #22

If somebody compiles the history books into an Amazon shopping list, I would gladly use your affiliate link. I haven't read any of them, which is shameful.

I threw together a page with each of the books individually. Hopefully, this will make getting your hands on them a bit more efficient. Enjoy.

PG's RAQ History Books - Home http://bit.ly/qRK15K (Use the bit.ly link so I can track. 39)

Otherwise, the site is: http://thebooksofhistory.weebly.com/

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#55

Post by tptacek »

enko wrote: post #38
edanm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: he means "good enough", not good. Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well. Which means that pg thinks that 6 months is the level you need to be at to be able to start a startup. This seems intuitively right to me, especially these days.

> Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well That may be appropriate for patio11. Not to demean the guy but let's be clear, he runs an online bingo service. It's my understanding that he makes much more money from consulting gigs leveraged from this modest endeavour. Rest assured that if your ambition is to write the…

In one of his three (3) lines of actual- money- earning- businesses, he managed to factor the "product programming" component down to a kind of minima, allowing him to channel all his effort into engineering his marketing systems. As a result, he was able to use a program that can charitably be described as "Hello World" hooked up to a random number generate to eclipse his full time salary.

If you can't see the pure hack value in that, you may be commenting on the wrong message board.

The conclusion you think you can draw about Patrick and "programming" from the nature of his first product: you can't draw that conclusion.

I'm writing this not to offend Patrick (he could care less about threads like this), but because you are taking exactly the wrong lesson about what Patrick did and then broadcasting it to the rest of the community. Stop, please? :|

I'm a systems programmer, since 1995. The list of YC companies that involve "real programming" to me is pretty short. Dropbox qualifies, but how many from the rest of their class would? Which is to say: "technical impressiveness is both subjective and a stupid metric for a business".

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#56

Post by jcurbo »

zackattack wrote: post #22

If somebody compiles the history books into an Amazon shopping list, I would gladly use your affiliate link. I haven't read any of them, which is shameful.

I was going to look up most of them anyway, so I went ahead and made a list. No affiliate link though, but I don't mind.

http://amzn.com/w/1PVAVBE9JOW4Z

I am open to suggestions for changes, since some of the books are older there are multiple versions or translations available. Some of these are freely available as well - Franklin's autobiography and Caesar's Gallic Wars, for example.

I haven't read any of these particular books but I have read a great deal of other history books covering some of the same topics... this is a very good list though and now my to-read stack is going to be even higher :)

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#57

Post by urza »

I clicked through to the Return of the Mac [1] article and it would be of interest to me to know how this community and PG sees the Macs today? Recently some people on HN said that they dont like where the Lion is heading [2] or that OS X is goining to be more closed than open [3]. So.. what are you hacking on today?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2933895

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2368932

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#58

Post by simonb »

siglesias wrote: post #20

Re: philosophy, I think understanding the difference between representing the world in language and representing it in logic is critically important to programmers. It has implications for natural language processing as well as artificial intelligence. I personally recommend to anyone endeavoring to understand Wittgenstein's transition from Tractatus Logico Philosophicus to Philosophical Investigations . In fact, Goo…

Can you give any further reading/info on family resemblance as used by Google?

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#59

Post by pbreit »

NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #23

"I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn?" A year? Depends! To be very useful on Windows, really need to be okay on the content of several books, each about 1000 pages long, have worked through about 2500 Web pages of documentation at Microsoft's MSDN, along with more pages from other sources. Then need to write some code, at least as exercises, using what learned. F…

For web development, you don't need any of that. And anyone taking up pg's suggestion should not be using anything from Microsoft.
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