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

A Project of One’s Own

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 384 posts

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#181

Post by alex_g »

chubot wrote: post #109
rossdavidh wrote: post #41

Jared Diamond, in his book "The Day Before Yesterday", talks about how children in Papua New Guinea when he was an anthropologist there would play at making a garden or raising pigs. The kid would have a toy, wooden pig, and then eventually be given a piglet, and then gradually their "play" would become more realistic until it shaded into adult work. My daughter, as a youngun', wanted to play "coffeeshop" where she w…

Yeah I'm pretty sure that Christopher Alexander makes this point in one of his books, maybe A Pattern Language He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life. Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city. And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configura…

I believe Jane Jacobs also discusses the same point in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#182

Post by yc-kraln »

brhsagain wrote: post #131

Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave the…

are you me?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#184

Post by idiotsecant »

asadlionpk wrote: post #175
brhsagain wrote: post #131

Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave the…

Wait so how do I 'not-force' my kid into programming these days? Our generation didn't have roblox, youtube and minecraft to distract us much.

Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested in learning things.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#185

Post by crispyambulance »

codezero wrote: post #116
nickthemagicman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think PG's argument is that having your own projects is joyful and is more akin to play than work. Not everyone wants to do this and being idle in that case is great as well. I get extremely bored If I'm idle for too long.

A very suspect position coming from an investor who wants to turn your passion project into a profitable corporation that he has a large stake in.

Precisely! In the PG world-view "success" means a unicorn start-up and a billion dollar "exit."

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#186

Post by crispyambulance »

sangnoir wrote: post #98
crispyambulance wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel similarly. I think, however, that PG's idea of "a project" as much as he says it should be "for fun" -- is actually just a segway (wormhole) into a start-up! > One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects outside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open source projects have a…

FYI: it's spelt segue . Segway is the brand-name of a self-balancing wheeled contraption that was supposed to revolutionize urban transportation 2 decades ago, but only saw success in the mall-cop niche.

Yikes! I guess I've never seen "segue" in writing before, always spoken. I didn't know!

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#187

Post by crispyambulance »

mcguire wrote: post #95
crispyambulance wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel similarly. I think, however, that PG's idea of "a project" as much as he says it should be "for fun" -- is actually just a segway (wormhole) into a start-up! > One way to ensure autonomy is not to have a boss at all. There are two ways to do that: to be the boss yourself, and to work on projects outside of work. Though they're at opposite ends of the scale financially, startups and open source projects have a…

I guess VCs wouldn't be considered "bosses"?

Indeed, sometimes founders learn "the hard way" who the boss really is.

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#188

Post by retzkek »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #107
crispyambulance wrote: post #78

Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness." https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society. > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign…

Russell had the benefit of being born into the highest classes of English society and succeeding at everything he undertook. I don't think his advice is generally applicable, and he didn't seem to follow it himself.

Isn't that the point, though? He was able to live leisurely, and pursue whatever interested him, which helped him be successful.

This is a main argument for UBI - how many people who currently have to work sub-optimal jobs just to survive, would be able to explore and innovate instead?

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#189

Post by simiones »

johnwheeler wrote: post #97
crispyambulance wrote: post #78

Read also a much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer with quite a different view, Bertrand Russell, "In Praise of Idleness." https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ Russell would say that people of the age to be tech start-up fodder should instead DO NOTHING. It's better for them and for society. > I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign…

I read it and I don’t think it’s a “much better essay by a vastly more skilled writer”. It’s not practical, but PGs essay is. Peculiarly, I think your opinion and the difference between the two essays gives credibility to PGs points. One essay by an academic, and the other by a creator and people err on the relative value of the academic’s because that’s what they’re taught to do.

Russel's essay challenges many long-held assumptions about how the world should even work, so it goes far deeper than PG's essay. It is held in high regard particularly because of this, not because Russel was an academic.

It also explains its points in quite a lot of detail, building a very clear picture of the world and how it got here, pre-emptively dispelling any attack in the style of Chesterton's fence: it not only complains about the negative effects of the praise for work, but also explains why they were initially put in place.

Thirdly, PG's essay is essentially a special case of pretty well known, more general point. PG is essentially word for word stating a common socialist critique of wage work: the alienation one feels when their work is not under their own control, but instead dictated by a capitalist owner. "Finding a project of one's own" is in fact the individualist version of "seizing the means of production".

Re: A Project of One’s Own

#190

Post by philwelch »

foobarian wrote: post #165
dpogorniy wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because parents are afraid that their child won't be competitive enough to have a decent life. If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Then child just would pursue what they love, interested (unless it's unaffordable to their social strata). I wonder what we can do today to make this happen sooner. On the side note. There is a grea…

> If only parents were relaxed, if only they knew that their child can live full life without grinding through exercises. Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts degrees saddled with debt they have little chance of ever repaying? I guess it might be a full life still but I haven't met many people in this position who enjoyed it.

> Isn't that how young people end up with liberal arts degrees saddled with debt they have little chance of ever repaying?

Sometimes, but sometimes it’s the direct opposite. People let their lives get consumed with the game of “go to school, get good grades, receive certification of having gone to school and gotten good grades” until they find out there’s nothing left for them at the end of the road.

It’s a shame because there are people who are obsessive nerds about academic subjects. And maybe there are more of them than there is a need for professional, full-time academics, which is sad. But I think there are a lot of people for whom formal education is a cargo cult, and these people crowd out the obsessive nerds.

Post reply on HN