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PG's Rarely Asked Questions

paulgraham.com

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Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#141

Post by wmboy »

ofca wrote: post #7
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #4

" I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn? I would guess a smart person can learn to hack sufficiently well in 6 months to a year." Hmm... interesting take considering the source, especially when contrasted with the general mentality that programming and software development is the finest of all trades and takes a near preternatural mastery only found elsewhere in cl…

I am also fueled by his answer here. I guess that learning parameter depends on your teacher - the better the teacher, the better and faster you learn. I just started learning HTML, CSS, jQ, PHP recently , and I found myself advancing at surprisingly high pace (now watching jQ new_boston tutorials on youtube). Main problem for me is finding good material to learn from, since I only learn from the internet. You have a…

I'm going through the Eloquent JavaScript book at the moment and am finding it slow but rewarding (there's a free HTML version of the book online). It's probably the next step after mastering jQuery...

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#142

Post by Willwhatley »

jackfoxy wrote: post #36

What should I read to learn more about history? I used to consider my knowledge of history better than at least 95% of the population, but while reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I realized how sketchy my view of history really was. So at the ripe old age of 35 I set off on a course of study centered on two series of books, The Story of Civilization , by Will and Ariel Durant, and Timeframe , a Time-Li…

I've wondered about variants on democracy. The parliamentary and constitutional forms seem to me to incentivize (for those who want power) going along to get along. Sophists, flatterers, demagogues; there is no good incentive to vote, only the strong disincentive of some other party's bums overseeing you rather than ones you know.

There's a Twain short story about folks who get more than the initial vote, in proportion to their accomplishments. So a propertied or moneyed man is so much more enfranchised, a doctor of philosophy has a couple more votes, and so forth. The incentive there for demagogues would seem to weight one even more firmly than presently in favor of the rich and the academic guild. I don't support any scheme that brings us closer to a plutocracy than we already are--merely mention this as a starting point.

And then there is government by lot; the next dogcatcher, etc. to be selected in some randomized fashion, perhaps confine the pool to certified catchers of dogs, treason for tampering, and so forth. The incentive becomes enormous to raise the general quality of the citizens in proportion to how broad the pool of candidates is; and, of course, to monkey with the criteria for candidates to benefit oneself and disadvantage one's adversaries.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#143

Post by colanderman »

biot wrote: post #77
rwmj wrote: post #14

He's really wrong about LISP macros. Would suggest pg takes a look at camlp4. Edit: maybe instead of downvotes, you could reply explaining what's wrong with this position. Or just look at camlp4 and see how it provides macros that are better (with a better underlying language) than LISP. And yes, I've written a LISP compiler.

The downvotes are likely because your position consists of little more than "google why he's wrong". If you wish to refute pg's statement you should explain what's right about your position, such as why camlp4's macros aren't just a prettier syntax on top of a LISP-like abstract syntax tree as the Wikipedia article states.

Easy reason: camlp4's macros are typechecked. Meaning, it's impossible to build an invalid syntax tree using them.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#144

Post by wnight »

Volpe wrote: post #109
sthlm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this to be a fairly hostile attitude toward management roles and unfortunately it's one that many people share. And it's ruining part of this industry. Not every manager is a 20-year old MBA grad who's out to ruin your business. What you're describing -- a small team of independent programmers -- accounts for only one part of software engineering projects: programmers are at the center of the efforts, everythi…

> ... Architects, Test Designers... The two examples you use, would have to be the best examples of 'waste' in the software industry. I liken them to having someone on your team who is "The Debugger" where all he does is debug the developers code. Developers should know how to test their code/app and should know how to design their app, and know how to debug their app. Sure they could 'specialise' one or more of thes…

I agree. Architects should just be senior coders - the people whose strategic decisions are usually right (mostly because they know how to test their assumptions). Having a specific person who doesn't do anything else but architect is broken - APIs are for programmers. If you aren't eating your own cooking you have absolutely no right to be claiming you did it well.

Similarly, you could hire a developer on the strength of their testing and get them to champion a stronger infrastructure but like the architect they need to be an active developer to judge the usefulness of their solutions.

I'd say managers (of coders) need to be coders too. They can survive not being if they're great managers, but they're doing it with a handicap of not being able to understand the tools and see the big-picture their team is missing. And the state of the art, not whatever they used in school twenty years ago.

But, conversely I think I was a lousy employee early on (in terms of value created for the core product / hours spent) because I wasn't thinking of the business aspects of the company. So while I think everyone needs active programming skills to participate meaningfully in programming, I also think those programmers need to be aware of the business they're in, the entire industry trends, and that of the problem domain the work is in. If you design/make/sell a farming GPS, for instance, you'd better have farming experience.

Perhaps the loosely overlapping networks of broadly-skilled individuals managing their own (but with input from an on the rest of the company) doesn't scale well, but I've yet to see a better idea.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#145

Post by PakG1 »

Willwhatley wrote: post #140
PakG1 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I don't think he's being uncivil, pg. He made an accusation against you, but he didn't do it in an uncivil manner. Asking him to be civil strikes me as weird, and possibly that you're being too defensive?

I do not suppose it to be possible to accuse anyone of anything in a civil manner. Accusation belongs to prosecutors, mothers in law, schoolteachers and other beings that are clearly on a higher plane than one. Civility is a difficult, but simple, art, necessitating primarily that one should wish to get along with another: onan does not seem to be going out of his to make himself agreeable to pg or anyone else in thi…

Forking the conversation, but going out of your way to make yourself agreeable is not efficient conversation. Now, the workplace and an Internet forum may differ in terms of environment, but if I applied "going out of my way to be civil" to the workplace, it would make for a lot of inefficient conversation and meetings. Being direct is much more preferable in the workplace, and as long as you leave out insults and profanity, it can be quite civil. That is what I'd expect in everyday life as well. My standards of comparing the workplace and other environments may not be shared.

Perhaps you would prefer people use more phrases like "I think", "I feel like", or pose sentences as questions. I suppose that works well enough for me without destroying conversation efficiency too much.

The word "accusation" has a broad spectrum of emotion, but perhaps a very narrow emotive connotation when heard by the accused.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#146

Post by onan_barbarian »

pg wrote: post #126
onan_barbarian wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the omissions that are the problem, not errors. You have selectively ignored major areas of philosophy in order to make your ideas seem original and compelling.

Even omissions should cause sentences in the essay to be false though. Is there really not one sentence you believe is false? (Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)

I don't understand why you are so keen to draw me into a line by line nitpick. You saw my objection to the essay. Address it or don't. I don't think your points in the essay can stand without both a discussion of empiricism and an examination of the broader analytic philosophy project. You obviously do, so I'm happy to leave it there.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#147

Post by forensic »

philwelch wrote: post #120
onan_barbarian wrote: post #105

The tendentious answer on philosophy is an invitation for what would be another "Dabblers and Blowhards" drive-by shooting. It's not enormously surprising that this question is 'rarely asked'. One would learn a lot more about philosophy ("what questions are these guys asking?" "what are some of the answers they've come to?") from even a mediocre introductory text or a chat with a TA/tutor, than by assuming that this…

It's interesting how a concise conclusion you disagree with is evidence of ignorance. I don't know how much you know about philosophy, but from what I picked up during my bachelor's, it turned out to be interesting but all in all not too important. The central problem is still there: anything that's rigorous enough that it might be true is narrowly scoped and doesn't come to a wide enough conclusion to be interesting…

Your definition of "important" is deeply subjective.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#148

Post by forensic »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #138
pg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to get that deep in a couple paragraphs. But there is a longer version here: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Do you believe that most of the stuff covered under philosophy of mind (Dennett, Searle, Block, Chalmers, Jackson, etc.) is not worth studying? Edit: reduce strength of statement.

An easy way to show the importance of philosophy is to show all the powerful sciences it spawned and provided theoretical underpinnings for. Not the least of which is cognitive neuroscience.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#149

Post by philwelch »

forensic wrote: post #147
philwelch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how a concise conclusion you disagree with is evidence of ignorance. I don't know how much you know about philosophy, but from what I picked up during my bachelor's, it turned out to be interesting but all in all not too important. The central problem is still there: anything that's rigorous enough that it might be true is narrowly scoped and doesn't come to a wide enough conclusion to be interesting…

Your definition of "important" is deeply subjective.

The entire question is deeply subjective, which just underlines my bemusement at people accusing pg of ignorance for seeming to take a given position on the question.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#150

Post by pg »

onan_barbarian wrote: post #146
pg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even omissions should cause sentences in the essay to be false though. Is there really not one sentence you believe is false? (Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)

I don't understand why you are so keen to draw me into a line by line nitpick. You saw my objection to the essay. Address it or don't. I don't think your points in the essay can stand without both a discussion of empiricism and an examination of the broader analytic philosophy project. You obviously do, so I'm happy to leave it there.

I want to focus the discussion. When people complain about things I've written, often as not they're complaining about things they believe I think, rather than things I actually said. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation with that level of disconnection between the participants. So I usually ask people who disagree with something I wrote to tell me what specific sentence or passage they feel is false.

If I've said something false, I'd honestly like to know what it is. I wrote that essay, like most essays I write, to figure out things for myself. So if I've made a mistake I want to know what it is.

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