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

Researchers and Founders

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 115 posts

Re: Researchers and Founders

#91

Post by vincentmarle »

bonoboTP wrote: post #34

This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

Welcome to Sam Altman's blog, his posts always read like a poor attempt of Paul Graham-esque essays.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#92

Post by war1025 »

some_furry wrote: post #69
Isamu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a surprisingly common alternative view is: it’s all about BORN TALENT, no amount of work will help you if you are not anointed. Personally I find the born talent view to be lazy and not a little bit creepy.

I have a relevant anecdote for this! I was placed into the "gifted" program in the 1st grade of elementary school and told for many years that I was somehow special or "very" intelligent. I never believed them, of course, because of two observations: 1. The adults who were telling me this did a lot of stupid stuff, which undermined the credibility of their claims. 2. Despite their best efforts to insulate us from the…

I was in the "Talented and Gifted" program all throughout school. I never understood what the point of it was. Mainly it meant I spent a decade interacting periodically with the same teacher who I never really got along with. It was a huge waste of time and resources to have that program at least as it was implemented at our school.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#93

Post by Gibbon1 »

rytill wrote: post #81
Gibbon1 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people have realized that they can stay popular and receive the many perks that come with it, from simply posting 'content' that barely has any actual content in it :) Mark Twain I think said: That man can pack the smallest ideas into the most words of any man I know. Personal Hate: Essays that follow the NPR style of layering vast amounts of extraneous sub-anecdotes before getting to the point.

I think I know what you mean, but what do you mean by "sub-anecdote"? Pure curiosity.

AKA I'm going to talk about song writer who wrote many songs you may be familiar with. But first I'm going to talk about his Swedish grandfather who owned a dairy farm in Wisconsin.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#94

Post by non-entity »

war1025 wrote: post #92
some_furry wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a relevant anecdote for this! I was placed into the "gifted" program in the 1st grade of elementary school and told for many years that I was somehow special or "very" intelligent. I never believed them, of course, because of two observations: 1. The adults who were telling me this did a lot of stupid stuff, which undermined the credibility of their claims. 2. Despite their best efforts to insulate us from the…

I was in the "Talented and Gifted" program all throughout school. I never understood what the point of it was. Mainly it meant I spent a decade interacting periodically with the same teacher who I never really got along with. It was a huge waste of time and resources to have that program at least as it was implemented at our school.

Maybe to try and keep certain kids occupied?

I spent my school years getting kicked out and out back into those classes. Typically they would notice that the normal classes were too easy, put me in the "gifted" program which was just 100x more boring with a 10x larger work load, so I didn't do that shit, got kicked out and the cycle would begin a couple years again.

While there were certainly some very intelligent people in these classes, plenty of other struck me as not necessarily the brightest.

The one exception to this was in 5th grade, I was put into a gifted program that was markedly different from normal classes. For the most part, there was a lot of freedom to work on what you wanted, no busy work. Occasionally the rather group would go outside where we should chill and just discuss various things.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#95

Post by p1esk »

ScottBurson wrote: post #86
vikramkr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's because they just launched a new moonshot venture fund? Though in that context I'd be more curious about what they find different between researchers and entrepreneurs since presumably, they want to turn a lot of the former into the latter. What'll they have to do to bridge the gap and make their venture firm a success?

Yes, this is what I was hoping the post would be about.

What do you think the difference is?

Re: Researchers and Founders

#96

Post by Gatsky »

satvikpendem wrote: post #55
bonoboTP wrote: post #34

This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

This is an interesting point. Why does it feel like these blogs are getting shallower? For PG, more of his older blog posts were more interesting than his newer ones, with more concreteness in advice and experiences. The latest ones seem more observational of trends instead, which can be more vague in nature.

Speaking completely and only for myself, possibly because the people writing the blogs have grown and developed, whereas I haven't. How much extra insight does one need?

Re: Researchers and Founders

#97

Post by mkl »

pphysch wrote: post #70
eanzenberg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCs, too. Interesting how researchers are a bit more humble or realistic about achievements.

A mathematician once said something like, "if the solution to the problem in front of you is not obvious, then you are not yet ready to work on it". Which is to say that intellectual pioneers are often necessarily humble about their achievements, yet worked very hard to get there. One wonders if it might be the opposite for some founders who were in the right place at the right time to hit the VC/acquisition jackpot.

Your comment is the only Google result for that quote as is, so I'm not sure you have it right. If it were true about mathematics, then it would be almost impossible to work on unsolved problems. Working on the problems is how you become ready to solve them, and for many real world problems it is far from obvious that you have found a correct solution until much later.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#98

Post by gavriel »

The only time you should take advice from Sam "failed his way to the top" Altman is if you want to either join or be invested by YCombinator. Really makes you wonder what dirt does this guy have on PG to have him made president without any accomplishments.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#99

Post by visarga »

Frost1x wrote: post #23

>Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these groups are (including in some qualities that I had assumed were present in great people everywhere, like very high levels of self-belief). This is an interesting quote. From my experience and personal perspectives, many of the best researchers and scientists doubt themselves, a lot, and are typica…

Too much confidence in predictions is also a problem in current day deep neural nets. They would try to make their probability estimates close to 0 or 1, even for uncertain cases.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#100

Post by m0zg »

I had the opposite experience pretty much. I've worked with researchers quite extensively, and they nearly universally have one massive weakness: they have a hard time committing to any kind of a product plan. They are great at throwing a bowl of spaghetti at the wall in creative ways, and at determining whether any of it stuck, but beyond that - caveat emptor, you better have a great technologist with product chops on board or you'll be stuck repeatedly throwing spaghetti until money runs out.
Post reply on HN