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PG's Rarely Asked Questions

paulgraham.com

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Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#71

Post by corin_ »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #69
corin_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah my bad, wasn't specific enough - I meant painters, sculpters and the like. In my head they are called "art", I have to make an active decision to think of "art" as "the arts" including other things - guess just the way I learned the vocab. as a kid. So it was already a step to edit from "art" to "visual art". Perhaps I should have gone with "static visual art that is created for the sake of being art"? As to you…

"I meant painters, sculpters and the like." I don't believe there's a difference. All the good graphic designers I know don't only do applied design for clients, they also create "static visual art that is created for the sake of being art". On the other hand, most sculptors I know mostly create statues for banks and local governments. Having attended art school, I can tell you there is little art free from commerce…

Once again I think my wording rather than my point is the problem - by "created for the sake of being art" I didn't mean in terms of whether there was monetary gain for the artist, I meant how it is to be used.

You create a website, your aim isn't generally to have people stand around and admire the art, that's a side effect. (And sure, sometimes maybe it's the strongest influence when a designer is making a website, but it isn't meant to be - it's meant to be a part of making something functional).

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#73

Post by zedshaw »

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…

The force is strong with this one.

I'd love to debate random topics with you. Assuming you've actually read everything you claim, I think you'd be a refreshing change from the vast majority of people who simply regurgitate whatever their heroes say.

If you're interested, email me sometime: zedshaw at zedshaw.com.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#74

Post by kragen »

crgt wrote: post #28
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #4

" I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it take to learn? I would guess a smart person can learn to hack sufficiently well in 6 months to a year." Hmm... interesting take considering the source, especially when contrasted with the general mentality that programming and software development is the finest of all trades and takes a near preternatural mastery only found elsewhere in cl…

I've been inspired by Gladwell's more general answer from the book Outliers: "Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book) At an average of 50 hrs/week this means it would take you close to 4 years to achieve mastery. pg i…

Like most of Gladwell's ideas, it falls apart under the least examination. Consider a neurosurgeon. Perhaps after ten thousand hours of surgery she was an expert in surgery. But perhaps only a quarter of that time was spent performing neurosurgery. Does that mean she's not an expert neurosurgeon? Perhaps, then, after ten thousand hours of neurosurgery she has become an expert neurosurgeon. But maybe only 5% of that time consisted of excising glioblastomas from the anterior cingulate cortex. Does she need to spend ten thousand hours doing ACC glioblastomectomies in order to be an expert at that task?

In short, because what we normally mean by "tasks" or "fields" can be broken down into smaller tasks or fields, the statement is self-contradictory if they mean what they normally means. But if we search for a definition of "task" that makes the statement true, we can trivially find a circular one: a "field" is something that a talented person can achieve mastery of in about ten thousand hours of practice.

Once reformulated that way, it becomes clear that this is not a statement about human expertise or expert performance, but about the economic structure of current society, and in particular our degree of specialization: most people (within the professional class Gladwell finds interesting, anyway) work in jobs that require about ten thousand hours of focused practice by a talented person to reach mastery.

(I should point out that this occurred to me when I saw Jeff Fox (RIP: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/browse_thread...) claiming that the research Gladwell summarized meant that you needed about ten thousand hours of programming in Forth to be good at programming in Forth, so you shouldn't put too much stock in the opinions of experienced programmers who didn't have much Forth experience.)

Once stated this way, we can formulate interesting hypotheses about the cause: perhaps when a field starts to require substantially more than ten thousand hours of practice to master it, its practitioners start to specialize in a part of it, so that they can reach mastery sooner.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#75

Post by zedshaw »

rwmj wrote: post #14

He's really wrong about LISP macros. Would suggest pg takes a look at camlp4. Edit: maybe instead of downvotes, you could reply explaining what's wrong with this position. Or just look at camlp4 and see how it provides macros that are better (with a better underlying language) than LISP. And yes, I've written a LISP compiler.

You questioned PG and LISP in one comment then advocated another language with a lesser Nerd Lore Composite Score. About the only thing you could have done worse is to admit you wrote a child porn site in both and found LISP's parentheses to be annoying. :-)

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#76

Post by 4ad »

corin_ wrote: post #52

Does anyone have any insight into why painters are less common among hackers than other artistic persuits, such as music? I've never met anyone who bridged visual art with anything tech-related, but composers, singers, pianists, orchestra members... hell yes. Is it just that painters are less common that musicians and that ratio stays true in the tech world?

Well, people call me a hacker and I do paint. I don't claim that I'm good, I'm just an amateur, but I am doing it! Take a glimpse of my work: http://imgur.com/a/6BdJS#TmmoJ

I also play piano, compose music and write (bad) poetry! I have a small sample of my music here: http://soundcloud.com/mournfulempathy/empathy-intro .

I don't think I'm good as a painter but it is a hobby I enjoy greatly!

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#77

Post by biot »

rwmj wrote: post #14

He's really wrong about LISP macros. Would suggest pg takes a look at camlp4. Edit: maybe instead of downvotes, you could reply explaining what's wrong with this position. Or just look at camlp4 and see how it provides macros that are better (with a better underlying language) than LISP. And yes, I've written a LISP compiler.

The downvotes are likely because your position consists of little more than "google why he's wrong". If you wish to refute pg's statement you should explain what's right about your position, such as why camlp4's macros aren't just a prettier syntax on top of a LISP-like abstract syntax tree as the Wikipedia article states.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#78

Post by njharman »

dgreensp wrote: post #40

>I never had to manage anyone in our startup, even though I was the president. The other hackers were my peers, and would have given me the raspberry if I'd tried to "manage" them. We operated by consensus. And the rest of the company reported to our experienced COO, who was also more of a peer. Operating by consensus and not valuing the role of "manager" only goes so far. It may work when you're a few people living…

The real problem with consensus is that all members have to be well above average in several categories (skill, experience, communication, risk/fission making, passion, determination, etc). That is much rarer think most suppose (cause the only startups/teams You hear about are the ones with that, the rest fail and are never known). It is impossible to scale.

At scale you try to find above avg leaders who know how to solicit input and sell ideas.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#79

Post by njharman »

Estragon wrote: post #5

> Couldn't you add something equivalent to Lisp macros to languages like > Perl or Python? > > Not without turning them into dialects of Lisp. Real macros need to > operate on the parse tree of the program. Actually, I've thought about porting some of On Lisp to python using lib2to3 ( http://docs.python.org/library/2to3.html ) It's probably an obscenely bad idea, but I keep getting drawn back to it...

PG's requirements; public ally exposed parse tree and ability to manipulate it before "compiling" doesn't python provide already? It just seems more in your face and 1st class sin lisp.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#80

Post by marcamillion »

zedshaw wrote: post #73
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…

The force is strong with this one. I'd love to debate random topics with you. Assuming you've actually read everything you claim, I think you'd be a refreshing change from the vast majority of people who simply regurgitate whatever their heroes say. If you're interested, email me sometime: zedshaw at zedshaw.com.

Hrmm...while I haven't read all of those books - granted I am still relatively young (sub 30) - I too feel like I have no outlet to really debate various topics that I would love to.

People really aren't interested.

If there was some forum where people of like minds could get together and talk (verbally, not typing on a keyboard) say a Google Hangout or something, I think that would be awesome and definitely something I would be interested in.

Provided it can be moderated and organized and not be chaos (and focused on content, learning, expanding knowledge, etc.).

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