Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

I don't think pg is asking for help with his email - for MANY people it IS a todo list. He's outlining opportunities for future startups - email IS an opportunity precisely because people are "doing it wrong" - you snarking like you disagree with him but it seems like you actually agree. He's saying there needs to be a better todo list system for EVERYONE email can still fill the role of asycn comms and file transfer.

>>gmail is slow >it isnt slow for me

Maybe I'm wrong but I assumed he was meaning this to be it takes a lot of time not it has poor performance - again seems like your are just trying to negative.

>> 5. a new apple

>Apple is still on top of the consumer market. Solve problems that need solving in the way you feel is best. Don't work hard to be something else. Apple didn't.

He's talking long term - he's talking about apple when they were in a garage - he's not saying they are dead - he's saying with Jobs no longer at the helm there is less likely to be next generation vision - so again there is an OPPORTUNITY - someone will be the next visionary - maybe it could be you.

>> 6. bring back the old moore’s law >>...it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu.

>As an analogy, why don't we make Ruby look like 8086 programming? Parallel computing is different- you can't solve problems with the same mentality.

I don't understand your logic here. PG is talking about abstracting the problem away from the developer - you think the future of CS is that we will no longer make things abstract?! I think PG mentions it because it would be HUGE if this could be done - it certainly is difficult - he's not advocating any kind of mentality - he's just saying there's an opportunity here.

Here is my experience in undegrad.

1. Most students simply don't care about their major's subject.

2. Most professors don't care about the subjects they teach enough to care about how students are doing.

3. Grading is aimed at punishing mistakes, rather than rewarding for learning things or doing things.

4. Guess what those things do to your group projects.

5. If you try to undertake ambitious projects or subjects for your papers, your grades go down, because of the things listed above. The most reliable way to get reliably high scores is to never experiment, never push yourself.

6. Degree requirements are pretty much arbitrary. For example, in my university, "IT" students (who weren't going to do any major programming on their jobs) were forced to take theoretical CS classes, while students in "Computer Engineering" (who were bound to do tons of programming) weren't.

7. Add to this the fact that you're expected to buy expensive useless textbooks that go from $200 to $2 once the next edition is out. (Of course, you can buy used books, but that's not the the point. The point is, they have no inherent value.)

Etc, etc. Of course there were some exceptions, couple of great profs, several enthusiastic students, some courses taught from an O'Reilly book, but such anomalies were a precious rarity.

I see these categories of email

1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations"

2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back

3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow need to store but that you will never respond to (they often come from aptly-named "no reply" addresses; but mailing lists are part of it too)

4. Random stuff (close to spam, but not really): things you have to read because they may be important, but usually aren't

Gmail is optimized for #1 and does a good job at it. Lately it started to address #4 by trying to automatically detect "important" email; in my opinion this doesn't work well, but it could eventually work.

AFAIK nobody is seriously trying to solve #2 and #3, and in my experience #3 and #4 cause most of the clutter. Which makes #3 the most urgent problem with the highest ROI.

What if you could use a special email address for "read-only email" that would receive #3 mail and deal with it:

- organize it automatically by sender (or "topic") and period (not by subject / conversation / date: all my utility bills of one year are ONE object and not a dozen different conversations, for example)

- save all attachments (that deserve it) as PDFs

- notify you only when necessary (not easy)

- etc.

I've been toying with mailgun today, and it seems building a first version of this isn't out of reach; I'd be very interested to exchange ideas on this subject.