PaulGraham SHUT THE FUCK UP
How Not to Die (2007)
61–70 of 140 posts
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#62This article seems to contradict the advice given in the other too trending hacker news article right now which says: “Makers, don’t let yourself be forced into the ‘Manager Schedule’“ no?
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#63[deleted]
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#64Since Paul Graham is a vegetarian, I presumed the title was referring to a review of the book "How Not to Die". https://nutritionfacts.org/book/
Funny, I've invested in a start-up that makes food packs based on that book. They're doing very well, can just about manage their growth.
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#65I know Paul Graham's legendary status, but someone needs to sit with him for 30 min, and get letsencrypt deployed to his webiste.
Maybe invest some more time and fix the already present TLS setup by bringing it up to the current state of the art. If you try to connect via HTTPS Firefox stops me from proceeding with a warning about not being able to negotiate a common cipher (SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP).
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#66> One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating. Oh, boy. Why can't we have a world where I can pursue my interests without the fear of loosing something. I g…
Firstly, pg isn’t addressing the overall question of living a good life, he’s addressing how to start a startup that doesn’t fail. Which may or may not be a good life decision even by pg’s standards.
Secondly, a lot of people have conflicting desires and actually want one of those desires to win out. For instance, some people want to be in good shape, but they also want to lay around on the couch all day reading novels or watching TV or playing video games. If you do that every day for a few months, you will not be in good shape. You want to be in good shape but you don’t want to go to the gym, so you are unhappy. The solution may very well be to trick yourself into doing things you don’t want to do, by making yourself want to do them, because you want to reap the benefits of having done the thing.
And yeah, people are motivated more by fear than by hope. It sucks but it’s true. Our evolutionary environment led us to prioritize not losing things like social status or safety over trying to attain our wildest dreams, because most of the mammals before us who ignored risks to their safety and social status didn’t reproduce.
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#67Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!
My most important takeaway.
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#68Personally I Think Paul Graham is very under appreciated, his legacy on the Startup ecosystem and zeitgeist will probably only be recognised many years on the future.
It's a great pity that he doesn't write these wonderful essays for some time now.
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#69> When we were visiting Yahoo to talk about being acquired, we had to interrupt everything and borrow one of their conference rooms to talk down an investor who was about to back out of a new funding round we needed to stay alive. So even in the middle of getting rich we were fighting off the grim reaper. This sounds like it was pulled directly from an episode of Silicon Valley .
Well maybe it was the reverse :) Silicon Valley producers had many consultants in Silicon Valley.
And there was even a podcast I saw on YouTube where a former YC company founder worked for Silicon Valley after his startup shutdown. He moved down to LA as far as I remember.
Oh yeah here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kk03M3XfVY
https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-technical-advisor-for-silic...
Or they could have just read PG's blog. The writers got a lot of stuff right so I wouldn't doubt it. Though I guess I was surprised there was no "ycombinator" in the show. There was Erlich and his hacker house / accelerator, who doesn't seem a lot like PG :)
Re: How Not to Die (2007)
#70I read this post so many times when I was working on my startup ( https://first.io ). I particularly love this quote: "Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!" In fact, I even had it as a banner on my desktop for a while: "JUST KEEP TYPING!"
It's interesting, because 'just keep typing' is often among one of the worst bits of advice you can give a software engineer. More code doesn't mean good code, nor does repeatedly slamming your head against a problem work towards actually solving said problem.
I think a lot of what I see in this post is a mixture of survivorship bias/selection bias. We want to believe that the reasons startups succeeded was because they just kept trying, while not seeing the many that did die mid keystroke due to any number of reasons.