Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

Why is this the case? Probably because we've only been able to get this firehouse of information for a relatively short period of time, so it's new and interesting.

I think the bigger opportunity is to step back and think about what our homepages will look like in 50 years. Somehow I doubt it will have anything to do with finding basic facts. Finding a better way to organize spam is thinking too small, I think you need to figure out a better way to integrate conversations and information into our broader life goals and daily lives.

I interpreted him as implying that writing code for parallel processing should happen in such a way that we don't have to think of it. But that is the whole problem. Developers are ignoring the complexity and opportunity that exists in understanding parallel computing. Development languages should evolve to embrace the opportunity that exists within understanding what is going on, not hide it. We didn't keep programming in BASIC since we were kids as our primary language, nor did we continue to use assembly. Things evolve, and, as developers, our thinking needs to evolve to support multiple CPUs and parallel computing; we don't need someone's help to wash over the fact that things have gotten more complex. We need to understand that complexity before attempting to abstract it.

I think what he actually meant is that if you logon to your mailbox, you see threads of stuff to do. Hence, your mailbox with names, subjects and content is really a "todo" for the day/week/etc.

I think, in the near future, we humans will be a creating protocols on our own. We will be creating our own protocols and "pushing" data, instead of "pulling" it from the web, like it is right now.

In my spare time, I am actually working on a paper covering that. I call it "hapi": Humans with Application Programming Interface. Will be glad to share more when its done.

If your statement is correct, you wouldn’t know it from reading the schlock that students pass off as papers even at “world class” colleges. Doing all the reading and writing clear, solid analyzes of difficult material is just as hard as it ever was. Harder, even, because there are a whole bunch of distractions that didn’t exist 30 years ago.

> College needs to have a more high-school approach to teaching students

Good god. High school is a stultifying swamp of concentrated terribleness. The whole point of college is that treating people like adults leads potentially to adult-quality thinking. Teaching college like high school completely undermines the purpose: raising a new generation of capable scholars and citizens.

> There's no intensive, long-term internalization of the discipline [in liberal arts subjects].

Just because none of the liberal arts majors you took the trouble to really engage with actually took their studies seriously doesn’t mean that serious liberal arts students don’t exist.

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Overall, I think you’ve confused the difficulty of making good grades in a college program with the difficulty of doing the assigned work. If you measure your growth by how many A’s you can pull, education is always going to be intellectually unsatisfying for you.