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Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

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Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#81

Post by AmericanOP »

jacobolus wrote: post #49
AmericanOP wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the two problems with universities are: 1) Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. What used to take a few days of research in the library reading books is now a google search away. Reading has been replaced by Wikipedia. Yet, the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. Students spend very little time actually studying and internalizing information. 2) College needs to have a more h…

> Technology has made college much easier than it was 20 years ago. [...] Yet, [sic] the curriculum has not scaled up in difficulty. 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 wh…

I don't refer to grades anywhere, that's a projection.

I'm addressing the day to day experience of most students. Most students spend very little time actively learning, and the work they do is diluted by technology.

Large universities aren't treating students like adults- they aren't engaging them at all.

I'm not recommending a high school format curriculum, but the trope that students spend two hours reading/working for each hour in lecture is used as a de facto standard explaining why students are receiving a full-time education. In practice this premise is false.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#82

Post by ken »

YooLi wrote: post #22

Is this available in video format? I can't help but think reading this is taking something out of context or missing information. Quick glance: 1. dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). - Like Google Code Search? That didn't turn out too well. 2. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. - What? I use email to converse with people, not to list what I nee…

Somewhat curiously (since they're a company full of engineers) I don't think Google ever really understood what Code Search was about, or loved it as a project.

It was neat that such a thing existed, but every time I used it, I really had to get creative about getting it to cough up useful results for me. It certainly wasn't in the same league as Google.com search, or Gmail or Google Maps.

Whenever I tried using it, I could think of a million ways to make it better, easier, more effective, and so on, but they never seemed to do anything with it. I don't know how you'd monetize it, but I think it wouldn't be too hard to make something far more usable than GCS.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#83

Post by gruseom »

spitfire wrote: post #71
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

A nitpick: don’t try to identify a precise thing in the future. better model: columbus. “there’s something west. i’ll sail westward”. I bristle at seeing Colombus propped up as a model. The guy was wrong (he thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, so attempted to sail west as a shorter route to the East Indies), wrong (he discovered the Carribeans, not mainland America), wrong (he still thought he found t…

There are some things you can't say. I'm about to say one of them. Paul Graham is now a pundit and member of wall st west (Silicon Valley). He has a vested interest in pimping his product - Young impressionable developers. You can take anything he says with an iceberg sized chunk of salt.

Actually, take away the loaded words ("pimping"?) and what are you saying? People have interests so one shouldn't believe everything? That's pretty thin.

It's clear what Paul's values are - he's been writing about them since long before YC. I wish someone like him had been saying such things back when I was a "young, impressionable developer".

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#84

Post by rohwer »

larsberg wrote: post #5

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done…

I'd say your circle of friends and programming languages researchers are the best part of universities. The fun part of exploring new ideas happens far more often at a university then at say, Accenture.

But the paper chase is utter horror. Crap papers and crap results are trotted-out as productivity in some sort of bibliometrics hell-scape.

Quantity rather than quality is part of the wrong path academia took. PG is right to focus on universities as ripe for a shake-up.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#85

Post by l_subbu »

kennystone wrote: post #15
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #14

A nitpick: don’t try to identify a precise thing in the future. better model: columbus. “there’s something west. i’ll sail westward”. I bristle at seeing Colombus propped up as a model. The guy was wrong (he thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, so attempted to sail west as a shorter route to the East Indies), wrong (he discovered the Carribeans, not mainland America), wrong (he still thought he found t…

You're missing it dude. Columbus' conclusion was wrong when he started, but he had the right instincts to start sailing. This is what PG is saying - you don't know the future, so start sailing in an interesting direction and maybe you'll find something big.

Just curious...who funded Columbus? It's a dream of lot of people to sail in some interesting direction hoping to hit it big. I think it's important to have a vision (however approximate that might be). But not a lot of people can afford to sail towards that vision without caring to achieve shorter-term milestones. In the process though, you may learn something more about the reality that changes/influences your vision...

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#87

Post by saraid216 »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #44
kennystone wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing it dude. Columbus' conclusion was wrong when he started, but he had the right instincts to start sailing. This is what PG is saying - you don't know the future, so start sailing in an interesting direction and maybe you'll find something big.

I see your (and PG's) point, and I think he tied it to a terrible example. Basically, Colombus won big despite being wrong on so many aspects. In truth he was just very (incredibly) lucky. Thus I take the point as "do something stupid, you might just get lucky on something unrelated!". But I understand that PG's real point is "trust your instincts, don't listen to the naysayers, but adapt to the circumstances".

I don't think it should be necessary to be right about a lot of aspects. Going out and discovering how thoroughly wrong you are is a huge achievement.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#88

Post by timr »

larsberg wrote: post #5

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done…

It's sad but kind of expected that the average response to your question is essentially undergrads complaining about coursework. That's the common answer, but not the informative one, because the people who get caught up in complaining about the trials and tribulations of undergraduate life aren't generally the talented ones who are going to create great businesses. Life is about the management of bullshit, and the bullshit level is the same everywhere.

I think I'm in your camp. I left the research world after finishing a PhD, but before I did a post-doc. The first few years of grad school were great fun -- far more than any job I've ever had -- but eventually the music stops, and you need to find a chair. And that's when it starts to suck. The academic job market is dismal, and third-tier universities all over the country are staffed with graduates of top-tier PhD programs. You have to be a true exception to land a good professorship these days, and the ivory tower is littered with the corpses of the brilliant people who failed to reach the top.

I had always been eager to become an entrepreneur, but back when I was right out of college, there was no such thing as YC, and definitely no such thing as a college kid getting venture capital to try out an idea. So I went to grad school. Years later, I'm looking down the barrel of a crappy academic job market, but the startup world had become much more vibrant. So it was compelling.

That said, there's absolutely no way that your average startup is going to be as intellectually fulfilling as graduate studies in a field you love. Most startups are doing boring CRUD apps that take little technical ability or knowledge to produce, but a good grad program in computer science will let you work on the technology that startups will be hyping in 2032. There's no comparison.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#89

Post by sounds »

rbanffy wrote: post #73
lr wrote: post #63

6. bring back the old moore’s law I'll have to dig up my BeOS Bible this weekend, but I though the BeOS solved this problem over 15 years ago. I have been floored for years that chip makers keep telling developers to write code to work with multiple CPUs. If those developers are OS developers, then fine. But application developers? No way. This is the job of the OS!

I'm curious. How did BeOS solve this problem?

BeOS did several things, I'll throw out the obvious one:

Separate the UI thread from main() (the thread doing the core app logic).

Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads.

To the original poster, I'd like to point out that BeOS didn't (and Haiku doesn't) use a different compiler. What pg was saying was that we need a better compiler + language. Right now the programmer must manage every detail of the threads. A few abstractions are available - OpenMP, Apple's Grand Central Dispatch, etc. They don't really make highly parallel implementations though. The field is ripe for disruption.

Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language.

Re: Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

#90

Post by philwelch »

davemel37 wrote: post #65
bambax wrote: post #37

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it 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 n…

I don't get why PG is sharing all these great angles that Greplin should be working on, and as best as I can tell is perfectly positioned to tackle.

I don't think anything PG says in a talk like this is going to make a bit of competitive difference to a YC startup that works on this stuff full-time.
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