Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 421 posts

Re: What I Worked On

#131

Post by cuspycode »

Very much worth reading overall, and this especially caught my eye:

You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can still be noticing new things after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted.

I don't paint, but I did a lot of drawing in my younger days, and I noticed the same thing. And I do understand how this type of insight can be abstracted and be transferred to different circumstances. So I think art is very important, for reasons that are not always obviously apparent or easy to articulate.

Re: What I Worked On

#132

Post by sorenjan »

sdevonoes wrote: post #32
chrisaycock wrote: post #9

> during the first year of grad school I realized that AI, as practiced at the time, was a hoax. I had a similar realization during grad school about a lot of the popular topics at the time (early 2000s). I even used to call them "the hoaxes of computer science". Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, ve…

Funny because I do have the same feeling these days: that ML is a hoax. Even funnier: I do have a master's degree in ML.

I think it depends on what you call it. Instead of calling it AI or even ML you could call it pattern recognition or automatic model parameter estimation, but it doesn't sound as cool.

Re: What I Worked On

#133

Post by srcreigh »

judofyr wrote: post #4

> Working on Bel was hard but satisfying. I worked on it so intensively that at any given time I had a decent chunk of the code in my head and could write more there. I'll have to say reading this makes me feel a bit sad for pg. It seems that he worked on Bel extensively for four years, and the end result was something which appeared on the front page of Hacker News for one day and then disappeared. I haven't seen it…

Bel is an uncompromising excursion into the beauty of programming. His work is a consistent source of inspiration and encouragement for me.

Re: What I Worked On

#134

Post by psim1 »

tinyhouse wrote: post #78

I don't share the sentiment here. I find the essay too long and boring. I usually enjoy reading his valuable essays but this one is too much about his life which is not that interesting to be honest, given I don't know him personally. But that's OK, not every essay needs to appeal to everyone.

I agree with you. He seems so enamored with himself as an essay writer that he does too much writing and takes too long to get to any point.

Re: What I Worked On

#135

Post by smlckz »

> I also started to think about other things I could work on.

I'd like to suggest PG to dive into the theory.

From what PG was working on (on Bel), a great "continuation" would be to study category theory, type theory, especially dependent type theory.

I really wonder how is it like to debug (dynamically typed) lisp programs, with errors described as effectively encrypted given the current hype around statically typed system programming languages.

Re: What I Worked On

#136

Post by munificent »

cuspycode wrote: post #131

Very much worth reading overall, and this especially caught my eye: You can still be noticing new things after days of trying to paint something people usually take for granted, just as you can still be noticing new things after days of trying to write an essay about something people usually take for granted. I don't paint, but I did a lot of drawing in my younger days, and I noticed the same thing. And I do understa…

One of my favorite things, perhaps the favorite thing I got out of landscape photography was that while I was doing it, I was dialed into the seasons, weather, sunrise and sunset times, and light like never before. Everyone sees the sky all the time, but I really saw it.

Re: What I Worked On

#137

Post by nerdponx »

zozbot234 wrote: post #125
nerdponx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have a master's in ML and seriously argue this. It doesn't even make sense, it's like saying marijuana is a hoax because my uncle smokes pot and still got cancer. Here are some alternative statements that make more sense (and contain more truth): * There is a lot of snake oil and outright fraud being sold to unwitting managers. * There is a lot of empty hype being fed to general public through the pop sci m…

> Lack of good quality data (and qualified people to analyze it) is a bigger problem than lack of advanced models and computing power.' There's plenty of data and compute power, but what's often lacking in the ML field is precisely models that reflect reasonable priors for one's given use case. Good feature engineering (often relying on domain experts) is similarly underrated. You see this again and again when lookin…

Very good point and well-said.

Re: What I Worked On

#138

Post by nerdponx »

dang wrote: post #108
nerdponx wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. What are you even talking about? It sounds like you're upset that cutting-edge technology still requires training & expertise to use and deploy effectively in indus…

Hey, can you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? We're trying to avoid that sort of thing here. If a comment contains a swipe, please don't escalate. Also, it's good to check if there's something in your earlier comment that might have been provocative in its own right (which there was: "What the fuck more do you want?" is a hop flameward). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for keeping an eye on things.

Re: What I Worked On

#139

Post by munificent »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

Reminiscing is an active process. Sit down and really spent some time reawakening those memories and you'll be surprised what comes back.

Re: What I Worked On

#140

Post by vram22 »

vram22 wrote: post #111
johnyzee wrote: post #110

Great read! Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end resulted in the 6502 becomin…

I did a fair amount of hobbyist programming on the Commodore 64 and BBC micros in their respective BASIC dialects and 6502 assembly language, and loved it. Only a bit later did I get to know of higher-level languages like Pascal and then C (though C is a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily negative ways*).

> a somewhat lower-level than Pascal in some not-necessarily negative ways).

Meant "a somewhat lower-level language than Pascal"

Early on, I read in some book or mag that "C is a version of Pascal that is not afraid to get its hands dirty". Enthused, I immediately started exploring C (although came back to Pascal sometime later via Delphi). Did a good amount of work with it over time, including some successful product development work (that was deployed in multiple client-server projects as database middleware) and some interesting business projects.

Post reply on HN