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PG's Rarely Asked Questions

paulgraham.com

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Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#181

Post by derrida »

jackfoxy wrote: post #36

What should I read to learn more about history? I used to consider my knowledge of history better than at least 95% of the population, but while reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I realized how sketchy my view of history really was. So at the ripe old age of 35 I set off on a course of study centered on two series of books, The Story of Civilization , by Will and Ariel Durant, and Timeframe , a Time-Li…

"It's real easy for me to spot folks who spoot-off about Wealth or Origen who have not actually read the books." What is sad is that I recall realizing at University that certain graduate students had not read some of the books they were teaching! I think the humanities are vitally important, but the academic humanities, unfortunately, sometimes breed a certain kind of person who wants to get a job in academia for impure reasons.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#182

Post by NY_Entrepreneur »

robertk wrote: post #171
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #17

Nice. He covers several topics that would be good to have covered on some "What I wish my father had explained to me when I was 12, however, I've come to expect that mostly he didn't understand very well.". But among topics it would have been good to have had Dad cover, PG omits the biggie, especially for hackers, maybe for painters -- how to make an A in Women 101-102!

Lesson 1 is that you don't make an A. The girls get an A from you. I know girls want me, and I make them chase me. Combine that with the basics (dress well and go out and talk to girls) and you're halfway there. But don't think "basics" means easy; you'll be surprised at the number of excuses a perfectly normal guy will make not to say hi to that girl. Man up, walk over to her, and say "Hi. I thought you looked cute…

I wasn't trying to be comprehensive at all on women! I was just joking that PG's post omitted a big topic -- women! I did give a few remarks on women that would be good for a guy 12 to know, but, again, I was not at all trying to be comprehensive.

Your remark might be good and, thus, a good contribution to some Web site that tries to provide advice "What I wish my father had explained to me when I was 12, however, I've come to expect that mostly he didn't understand very well."

For making an A in Women 101-102, right, the grade is to come from some unnamed course professor and not from the women the man wants to meet!

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#183

Post by impendia »

philwelch wrote: post #152
siglesias wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, sy…

Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem. The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justif…

You might read Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit if you haven't already.

Not that he offers solutions per se, but he starts from a similar view of the subject.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#184

Post by NY_Entrepreneur »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #159
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are uninformed, have some problems with reading comprehension, have too little knowledge of computing, or are just trying to criticize for no good reason. Everything I said is well informed and well justified. While you were not clear on just what you did on a Mac, for your "Here's how I solved the backup problem: I bought an external hard drive, connected it to my Mac, and clicked "yes" when my Mac asked if I wa…

Hey mods, please hellban this guy. I keep a short list of users I see who've been hellbanned, but have generally nice comments, because it always bothered me a bit, but sometimes it's warranted.

Same to you.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#185

Post by derrida »

pg wrote: post #124
impendia wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there is some discussion in the other thread, but I'll add my own. You ask that philosophy be useful. Here then, is a useful question: Suppose that my mother has Alzheimer's disease, and that I find the prospect of caring for her inconvenient, undesirable, and/or expensive. Do I have a responsibility to care for her anyway? It is "useful" because it could potentially describe a real-life situation in which one mig…

That sort of question is certainly important. I worry though that like most of ethics this is one of those cases where philosophers don't get any better answers than your grandmother.

In regards to philosophy having a 'use':

I think philosophy should have a function/use. But does it? I think its functional importance is in asking questions in such a way they can be answered by experiment.

So in the philosophy of mind, the functional role of philosophy is to refine concepts so there is a conceptual difference that makes a difference in experiment.

The problem is, there is no way to tell if you are doing useful philosophy if we define its function as creating the conditions for experiment to take over. We can only tell if philosophy is useful in retrospect, by the impact a work has. Philosophy is not like science, where we know we are 'doing science' by performing experiments. But it also is like science, in that we judge it's use retrospectively.

A good example of philosophy being useful is the case of Bertrand Russell's work on 'Russell's Paradox'. Russell's work in the Principia Mathematica was partially about formulating definitions that would free us of this paradox.

PG says "Outside of math there's a limit to how far you can push words; in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings."

Surely there is use in forming these precise meanings in the first place. Some (not all) of that work is philosophy.

Russell's work was outside of math, or at a minimum it was 'Meta-math'. Russell was attempting to crystallize new logical definitions that could form precise definitions, and hence become mathematics. He was trying to create mathematics from philosophy.

Did it work? No. The Principia Mathematica was a failure. But the way it failed, it failed as a piece of mathematics, at the hands of Kurt Godel. Here is a case of philosophy becoming mathematics. In short, Godel's work leads to the work of Church and Turing, which leads to the computer.

So we can at least point to the concrete usefulness of some philosophy, retrospectively. This work was useful, even if its only effect was to shift around the conceptual landscape so non-philosophers could do 'serious work'.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#186

Post by NY_Entrepreneur »

0x12 wrote: post #87
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For web development, you don't need any of that." For Web development on Windows, that is a good list of a minimal list of EXACTLY what is needed. Web development on Windows is JUST what I'm doing, and that list of topics is JUST what is centrally involved. What are you going to leave out? T-SQL? OS backup and recovery? Good skills with an IDE or editor? Yes, learning most of, say, Visual Basic by itself is easy. Th…

> Web development on Windows is JUST what I'm doing Surprise, there are more environments that you could do web development on and quite a few of them are a lot easier to master than the one you describe.

I was addressing the original question of the guy who wanted to learn to program for a startup. So, he needs to know more than just any 'Web development environment'.

Also important is scalability. Some 'development environments' that are easy to get started with have bad reputations for 'scalability'.

Another practical issue is, is the guy just a developer in a group where he can draw on others in the group or is he really, now, and during most of his development, just one guy and not funded and has to do nearly everything alone? To do it all as just one guy means he needs to know a LOT about computing a bit far from just Web development alone.

Actually, I omitted a lot: For a Web startup, usually need something like relational database, e.g., SQL Server. If the startup gets very far into production, then he will need some background in SQL Server management and administration, e.g., performance, backup, and recovery, and I omitted such topics.

I gave a description of some of what is important if developing on Windows. Here at HN, Windows is not the most popular option. But if you have some alternatives in mind, then describe them,

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#187

Post by Goladus »

Volpe wrote: post #155
siglesias wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.

I think it's important to distinguish Philsophy from Critical thinking here. The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those. "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...

> "general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...

Persuasive techniques can be used deceptively but that's hardly necessary. It's important to accept that people are emotional and simply proving them wrong is usually not sufficient to change their mind about something they've already decided.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#188

Post by Apteris »

sthlm wrote: post #13

The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer. What tempts programmers to become managers are companies with old-fashioned corporate structure, where the only way to advance in salary and prestige is to go into management. I have to disagree with that. I've met many people, especially in larger enterprises, who started in development but then…

I have to disagree with that. I've met many people, especially in larger enterprises, who started in development but then became more abstract over time. They weren't bad people, in fact, they were excellent at their job.

This neither confirms nor infirms Paul Graham's thesis. In fact, while PG's assertion was a bit too specific--pointy-haired boss means in general "bad manager", not "programmer turned manager"--I don't think you can deny that people want promotions, and in some places the only way to get promoted is to go into management. PG is of course correct in suggesting that if you want to keep programming, don't accept a promotion to a non-programming role. However, if you find this stunts your career growth, you can either look for a job in a company that will allow you to grow as a programmer, or you can choose to go into management. That many programmers are averse to this doesn't make it a bad choice. You just have to know what you're getting into, and hopefully how to do it well.

Programming to me has never been something that has to be continually pursued in order to stay fluent or able, but merely something that reflects your more basic skills and talents.

Depends on what your goal is. It's perfectly possible to build a good career without keeping up with the bleeding edge of research. You don't have to know what monads are to be well compensated (at least in a Western country). However, neither will you be the next Peter Norvig. If you want to make money, there's many ways to do that. If you want to eventually get a Turing Award... there's fewer ways to do that.

And the traits that make you a good programmer help you in other fields, even management. Yes, large corporations have structures, but we need structure to manage them. And we need managers. And a manager who was a distinguished developer will be much better suited for leading a team of developers -- even if he doesn't program any longer. This is a valid career path, and an interesting one at that.

A manager who is a good programmer will be golden at interview time. Whether he will also be a good lead is unclear. Like iand said, they should get out of the way and enable programmers to work optimally. As an aside, the structure of corporations and how it affects programming is an interesting topic worthy of its own discussion thread.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#189

Post by wisty »

forensic wrote: post #147
philwelch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how a concise conclusion you disagree with is evidence of ignorance. I don't know how much you know about philosophy, but from what I picked up during my bachelor's, it turned out to be interesting but all in all not too important. The central problem is still there: anything that's rigorous enough that it might be true is narrowly scoped and doesn't come to a wide enough conclusion to be interesting…

Your definition of "important" is deeply subjective.

Here's a definition of "important" - as important as you had thought it might be when you selected the course. I'm guessing philosophy haters are like militant atheists - they don't really think it's an objectively terrible thing, they are just a bit bitter and disappointed.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#190

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #55
enko wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which brings to mind patio11's constant reminders, that running a successful software business has very very little to do with programming well That may be appropriate for patio11. Not to demean the guy but let's be clear, he runs an online bingo service. It's my understanding that he makes much more money from consulting gigs leveraged from this modest endeavour. Rest assured that if your ambition is to write the…

In one of his three (3) lines of actual- money- earning- businesses, he managed to factor the "product programming" component down to a kind of minima, allowing him to channel all his effort into engineering his marketing systems. As a result, he was able to use a program that can charitably be described as "Hello World" hooked up to a random number generate to eclipse his full time salary. If you can't see the pure…

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