prompt stringlengths 1.47k 1.72k | answer stringlengths 5 5 |
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not, you're in trouble.Back in 1995, we knew somethin
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g that I don't think our competitors
understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing
software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use
any language you want. When you're writing desktop software,
there's a strong bias toward writing applications in the same
language as the operating system. Ten years ago, writing applications
meant writing applications in C. But with Web-based software,
especially when you have the source code of both the language and
the operating system, you can use whatever language you want.This new freedom is a double-edged sword, however. Now that you
can use any language, you have to think about which one to use.
Companies that try to pretend nothing has changed risk finding that
their competitors do not.If you can use any language, which do you use? We chose Lisp.
For one thing, it was obvious that rapid development would be
important in this market. We were all starting from scratch, so
a company that could
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get new features done before its competitors
would have a big advantage. We knew Lisp was a really good language
for writing software quickly, and server-based applications magnify
the effect of ra
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pid development, because you can release software
the minute it's done.If other companies didn't want to use Lisp
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 60013 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
that don't raise money are saved from hiring too
fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should
avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than
that
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total abs
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tinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic.[3]
I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders
to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how
many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have
done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number.[4]
After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think
it's roughly correct to say that YC's most successful companies
have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great
founder is being able
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to resist this urge."Paul Buchheit adds:"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling—founders
take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics,
typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth
numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business
much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really
fast."
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 94026 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
alarms sufficiently
early, you may be able to avoid the fatal pinch.It would be safe to be d
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efault dead if you could count on investors
saving you. As a rule their interest is a function of
growth. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 5x a year, you
can start to count on investors being interested even if you're not
profitable.
[1]
But investors are so fickle that you can never
do more than start to count on them. Sometimes something about your
busines
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s will spook investors even if your growth is great. So no
matter how good your growth is, you can never safely treat fundrai
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sing
as more than a plan A. You should always have a plan B as well: you
should know (as in write down) precisely what you'll need to do to
survive if you can't raise more money, and precisely when you'll
have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working.In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the
sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. In practice there
is surprisingly little connection between how much a startup spends
and how fast it grows. When a startup grows fast, it's usually
because the product hits a nerve, in the sense of hitting some big
need straight on. When a startup spends a lot,
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
department, we would
take.So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment. Our hypothesis
was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we'd be able to get
features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things
in our software that they couldn't do. And because Lisp was so
high-level, we wouldn't need a big development
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team, so our costs
would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product
for less money, and still make a profit. We would end up getting
all the users, and our competitors would get none, and eventually
go out of business. That was what we hoped would happen, anyway.What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly,
it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but n
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one of their software could compete
with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors
ha
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d cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle
was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within
a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 52553 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
are a lot of ski instructors and not many running
instructors.
[1]You can, however, trust your instincts about people. And in fact
one of the most common mistakes young founders make is not to
do that enough. They get involved with people who seem impressive,
but about whom they feel some
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misgivings personally. Later when
things blow up they say "I knew there was something off about him,
but I ignored it because he seemed so impressive."If you're thinking about getting involved with someone — as a
cofounder, an employee, an investor
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, or an acquirer — and you
have misgivings about them, trust your gut. If someone seems
slippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don't ignore it.This is one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Work with
people you genuinely like, and you've known long enough to be sure.
ExpertiseThe second counterintuitive point is that it's not that important
to know a lot about startups. The way to succeed in a
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startup is
not to be an expert on startups, but to be an expert on your users
and the problem you're solving for them.
Mark Zuckerberg didn't succeed because he was an expert on startups.
He succeeded despite being a complete noob at startups, because he
understood his users really well.If
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 83503 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
it makes the business
much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really
fast."
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
November 2009I don't think Apple realize
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s how badly th
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e App Store approval process
is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with
programmers more than anything else they've ever done.
Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
It used to be the most common complaint you heard
about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically.
The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers
have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had wi
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th programmers have they
lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.* * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is
that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through
iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to
reach users, you do
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 28710 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
as
th
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ere are in any domain, but they are an order of magnitude less
important than solving the real problem. A founder who knows nothing
about fundraising but has made something users love will have an
easier time raising money than one who knows every trick in the
book but has a flat usage graph. And more importantly, t
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he founder
who has made something users love is the one who will go on to
succeed after raising the money.Though in a sense it's bad news in that you're deprived of one of
your most powerful weapons, I think it's exciting that gaming the
system stops working when you start a startup. It's exciting that
there even exist parts of the world where you win by doing good
work. Imagine how depressing the world would be if it were all
like school and big companies, where you either have to spend a lot
of time on bullshit things or lose to people who do.
[3]
I would
have been delighted if I'd realized in c
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ollege that there were parts
of the real world where gaming the system mattered less than others,
and a few where it hardly mattered at all. But there are, and this
variation is one of the most important things to consider when
you're thinking about your future. How do you win in each type of
work, and what would you like to win by doing?
[4
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
Your
boss is the point where your gro
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up attaches to the tree. But when
you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,
something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention
explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss
represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely
a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really
a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
person—the workers and manager would each share only one
p
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erson's worth of freedom between them.In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were
one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in
this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group
tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals
that humans were designed to work i
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n. That was the point of creating
it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
size of the entire tree.
[2]Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 48281 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
If
anyone should know this, Apple should. VisiCalc made the Apple II.And programmers build applications for the platforms they use. Most
applications—most startups, probably—grow out of personal projects.
Apple itself did. Apple made microcomputers because that's what
Steve Wozniak wanted for himself. He couldn't have afforded a
minicomputer.
[3]
Microsoft likewise started out making interpreters
for little microcomputers because
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were interested in using them. It's a
rare startup that doesn't build som
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 54303.
ething the founders use.The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers
have iPhones. They may know, because they read it in an article,
that Blackberry has such and such market share. But in practice
it's as if RIM didn't exist. If they're going to build something,
they want to be able to use it themselves, and that means building
an iPhone app.So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple
continues to maltreat them. They're like someone stuck in an abusive
relationship. They're so
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 91171.
attracted to the iPhone that they can't
leave. But they're looking for a way out. One wrote:
While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, the control they
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place on the App
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 91171 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they
seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times
more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working
for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living
in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion.
Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed
for.
TreesWhat's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of
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the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large
groups.Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that
each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas
might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans
also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about
hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own
experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8
work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50
is really unwieldy.
[1]
Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in
groups of several hundred. And yet—for
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reasons having more
to do with technology than human nature—a great ma
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ny people
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 38346 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
a study showing bias of this type. First
Round Capital found that among its portfolio companies, startups
with female founders outperformed
those without by 63%.
[2]The reason I began by saying that this technique would come as a
surprise to many people is that we so rarely see analyses of this
type. I'm sure it will come as a surprise to First Round that they
performed one. I doubt anyone there realized that by limiting their
sample to their own portfolio, they were producing a study not
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of
startup trends but of their own biases when selecting companies.I predict we'll see this technique used more in the future. The
information needed to conduct such studies is increasingly available.
Data about who applies for things is usually closely guarded by the
organizations selecting them, but nowadays data about who gets
selected is often publicly available to anyone who takes the trouble
to aggregate it.
Notes[1]
This technique wouldn't work if the selecti
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on process looked
for different things from different types of applicants—for
example, if an employer hired men based on their ability but women
based on their appearance.[2]
As Paul Buchheit points out, First Ro
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und excluded their most
successful investment, Uber, from the study. And while it
makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies,
studies of returns from startup investing, which is all about
hitting
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 05183 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
none, and eventually
go out of business. That was what we hoped would happen, anyway.What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly,
it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete
with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop appl
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 63116.
ica
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tion. Our competitors
had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle
was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new feature within
a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release. By
the time journalists covering the press release got round to calling
us, we would have the new feature too.It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of
secret weapon-- that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or
something. In fact we did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler
than they realized. No one was leaking news of the
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 10651.
ir features to
us. We were just able to develop software faster than anyone
thought possible.When I was about nine I happened to get hold of a copy of The Day
of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 56670 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
—grow out of personal projects.
Apple itself did. Apple made microcomputers because that's what
Steve Wozniak wanted for himself. He couldn't have afforded a
minicomputer.
[3]
Microsoft likewise started out making interpreters
for little microcomputers because
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were interested in using them. It's a
rare startup that doesn't build something the founders use.The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers
have iPhones. They may know, because they read it in an article,
that Blackberry has such and such market share. But in practice
it's as if RIM didn't exist. If they're going to build something,
they want to be able to use it themselves, and that means building
an iPhone app.So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple
continues to maltreat the
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 26247.
m. They're like someone stuck in an abusive
relationship. They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't
leave. But they're looking for a way out.
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 31781.
One wro
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te:
While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, the control they
place on the App Store does not give me the drive to develop
applications as I would like. In fact I don't intend to make any
more iPhone applications unless absolutely necessary.
[4]
Can
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 26247 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
much the conventional wisdom. But
there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom: Lisp will
make you a better p
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 60260.
rogrammer, and yet you won't use it.Why not? Programming languages are just tools, after all. If Lisp
really does yield better programs, you should use it. And if it
doesn't, then who needs it?This is not just a theoretical question. Software is a very
competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. A company that
gets software written faster and better will, all other things
being equal, put its competitors out of business. And when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get
nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason
not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We knew that everyone
else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew
that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that way,
you'd be running Windows. When you choose tech
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 64746.
nology, you have to
ignore what other people are doing, and consider only wh
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 87234.
at will
work the best.This is especially
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 60260 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of
just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.[3]
Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Financing a
startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card d
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ebt
stupidest of all. Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is
a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.[4]
The founders we fund used to be younger (initially we encouraged
undergrads to apply), and the firs
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 88208.
t couple times I saw this I used
to wonder if they were actually getting physically taller.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher, Aaron Iba, Abby
Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for
reading drafts of this.July 2006
When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad
writers. What we studied in English
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classes was mostly fiction,
so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number
one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which
people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or
gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to
understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The
ideal medium seemed the short
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
way.[2]The people who understood our technology best were the customers.
They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in either, but
they noticed that it worked really well. It let them build great
looking online stores literally in minutes. And so, by word of
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mouth mostly, we got more and more users. By the end of 1996 we
had about 70 stores online. At the end of 1997 we had 500. Six
months later, when Yahoo bought us, we had 1070 users. Today, as
Yahoo Store, this software continues to dominate its market. It's
one of the more profitable pieces of Yahoo, and the stores built
with it are the fo
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undation of Yahoo Shopping. I left Yahoo in
1999, so I don't know exactly how many users they have now, but
the last I heard there were about 20,000.
The Blub ParadoxWhat's so great about Lisp?
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 54353.
And if Lisp is so great, why doesn't
everyone use it? These sound like rhetorical questions, but actually
they have straightforward answers. Lisp is so great not because
of some magic quality visible only to devotees, but because it is
simply the most powerful language available. And the reason everyone
doesn't use it is that programming languages are not merely
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 16998 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
. We hoped that would save us.
Any advantage we could get in the software department, we would
take.So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment. Our hypothesis
was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we'd be able to get
features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things
in our software that they
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 51079.
couldn't do. And because Lisp was so
high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs
would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product
for less money, and still make a profit. We would end up getting
all the users, and our c
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 91183.
ompetitors would get none, and eventually
go out of business. That was what we hoped would happen, anyway.What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly,
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 84251.
it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete
with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors
had cgi scripts. And we were always far ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that we didn't have. But with Lisp our development cycle
was so fast that we could sometimes duplicate a new
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 91183 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
written in a certain
language, it might be a good idea to write the new program in the
same language. If you're writing a program that only has to do
something very simple, like number crunching or bit manipulation,
you may as well use a less abstract language, especially since it
may be slightly faster. And if you're writing a short, throwaway
program, you may be better off just using whatever language has
the best library
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 84980.
functions for the task. But in general, for
application software, you want to be using the most powerful
(reasonably efficient) language you can get, and using anything
else is a mistake, of exactly the same kind, though possibly in a
lesser degree, as programming in ma
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 84124.
chine language.You can see that machine language is very low level. But, at least
as a kind of social convention, high-level languages are often all
treated as equivalent. They're not. Technically the term "high-level
language" doesn't mean anything very definite. There's no dividing
line with machine languages on one side and all the high-level
languages on the other. Languages fall along a continuum [4] of
abstractness, from the most powerful all the way down to machine
languages, which themselves vary in power.Consider Cob
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 11824.
ol. Cobol is a high-level language, in the
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
for detecting whet
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 48740.
her you
have a taste for interesting ideas: whether you find known boring
ideas intolerable. Could you endure studying literary theory, or
working in middle management at a large company?[10]
In fact, if your goal is to start a startup, you can stick
even more closely to the ideal of a liberal education than past
generations have. Back when students focused mainly on getting a
job after college, they thought at least a little about how the
courses they took might look to an employer. And perhaps even
worse, they might shy away from taking a difficult class lest they
get a low grade, which would harm their all-important GPA. Good
news: users don't care what your GPA
was. And I've never heard of investors caring either. Y Combinator
certainly never asks what classes you took in college or what grades
you got in them.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Pa
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 16400.
ul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick
Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.October 2015This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases
it's possible to detect bias in a selection process wit
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 52427.
hout knowing
anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among
other things it means third parties can use
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 48740 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
you finally get it; that experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning L
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 12805.
atin. It
won't get you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but
it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages
you do want to use, like English.But wait a minute. This metaphor doesn't stretch that far. The
reason Latin won't get you a job is that no one speaks it.
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 98262.
If you
write in Latin, no one can understand you. But Lisp is a computer
language, and computers speak whatever language you, the programmer,
tell them to.So if Lisp makes you a better programmer, like he says,
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 04505.
why wouldn't
you want to use it? If a painter were offered a brush that would
make him a better painter, it seems to me that he would want to
use it in all his paintings, wouldn't he? I'm not trying to make
fun of Eric Raymond here. On the whole, his advice is good. What
he says about Lisp is pretty much the conventional wisdom. But
there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom: Lisp will
make you a better programmer, and yet you won't use it.Why not?
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 04505 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
Maybe it's
just because knowledge about them hasn't permeated our culture yet
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 69232.
.
But whatever the reason, starting a startup is a task where you
can't always trust your instincts.It's like skiing in that way. When you first try skiing and you
want to slow down, your instinct is to lean back. But if you lean
back on skis you fly down the hill out of control. So part of
learning to ski is learning to suppress that impulse. Eventually
you get new hab
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 26025.
its, but at first it takes a conscious effort. At
first there's a list of things you're trying to remember as you
start down the hill.Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for
startups. Here I'm going to give you the first part of it — the things
to remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.
CounterintuitiveThe first item on it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups
are so weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lot
of mistakes. If you k
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 63421.
now nothing more than this, you may at least
pause before making them.When I was running Y Combinator I used to joke that our function
was to tell founders things they would ignore. It's really true.
Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakes
they're
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 69232 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
oucher, Aaron Iba, Abby
Kirigin, Ivan Kirigin, Jessica L
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 75433.
ivingston, and Robert Morris for
reading drafts of this.July 2006
When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad
writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction,
so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number
one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which
people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or
gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to
understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The
ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had
quite a brief life, roughly coinc
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 03654.
ident with the peak of magazine
publishing. But since their size made them perfect for use in
high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the
impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three.
And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you
could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was
considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 14586.
wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone
was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.For most of college I
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 75433 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
the trouble
to aggregate it.
Notes[1]
This technique wouldn't work if the selection proce
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 42940.
ss looked
for different things from different types of applicants—for
example, if an employer hired men based on their ability but women
based on their appearance.[2]
As Paul Buchheit points out, First Round excluded their most
successful investment, Uber, from the study. And while it
makes sens
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 19655.
e to exclude outliers from some types of studies,
studies of returns from startup investing, which is all about
hitting outliers,
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 69816.
are not one of them.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading
drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
March 2008, rev. June 2008Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies
weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or
to get so little exercise.
There may be a similar problem with the way we work:
a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour
or sugar is for us physically.I began to suspect this after spending several years working
with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've
noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their
own startups and those working for large organizations.
I wouldn't say founders seem
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 69816 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
the first place. But
certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seen
it burn off.Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that
convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small
group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving
at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three
months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence
that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
[4]
Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
wild.Watching employees get
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 60883.
transformed into founders makes it clear
that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and
in particular that the environment in big com
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 56159.
panies is to
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 51484.
xic to
programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own
startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working
the way people are meant to.Notes[1]
When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a
certain way, I mean by evolution.[2]
It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates
up as well as down. So managers are constrained too; instead of
just
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 51484 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
; that experience will make
you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you
never actually use Lisp itself a lot.
This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. It
won't get you a job, except perhaps as a classics professor, but
it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages
you do want to use, like English.But wait a minute. This metaphor doesn't stretch that far. The
reason Latin won't get you a job is that no one speaks it. If you
write in Latin, no one can understand you. But Lisp is a computer
language, and computers speak whatever language you, the programmer,
tell them to.So if Lisp
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 48236.
makes you a better programmer, like he says, why wouldn't
you want to use it? If a painter were offered a brush that would
make him a better painter, it seems to me that he would want to
use it in all his paintings, woul
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 62994.
dn't he? I'm not trying to make
fun of Eric Raymond here. On the whole, his advice is good. What
he says about Lisp is pretty much the conventional wisdom. But
there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom: Lisp will
make you a better programmer, and yet you won't use it.Why not? Programming lan
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 68044.
guages are just
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 62994 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combi
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 77387.
nator.
April 2001, rev. April 2003(This
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 21489.
article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz
Developer Symposium.)
In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I
started a startup called
Viaweb.
Our plan was to write
software that would
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 51343.
let end users build online stores.
What was novel about this software, at the time, was
that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages
as the interface.A lot of people could have been having this idea at the
same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was
the first Web-based application. It seemed such
a novel idea to us that we named the company after it:
Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web,
instead of running on your desktop computer.Another unusual thing about this software was that it
was written primarily in a programming language called
Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user
applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then
had been used mostly in universities and research labs. [1]The Secret WeaponEric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker,"
and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what
languages they should learn. He suggests starting with
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 77387 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
? Programming languages are just tools, after all. If Lisp
really does yield better programs, you should use it. And if it
doesn't, then who needs it?This is not just a theoretical question. Software is a very
competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. A company that
gets software written faster and better will, all other things
being equal, put
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 79176.
its competitors out of business. And when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get
nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason
not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We knew that everyone
else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew
that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that way,
you'd be running Windows. When you choose technol
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 93676.
ogy, you have to
ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will
work the best.This is especi
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 32016.
ally true in a startup. In a big company, you can
do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't
do what all the other startups
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 79176 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
maybe for the rest of your working
life. So there is a real opportunity cost here.Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects
of it that are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running as
fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to
catch his breath since. Every day new s
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 83172.
hit happens in the Google
empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to deal
with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week's
backlog of shit accumulates. And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or
weakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy
if they talk about having difficult lives. Which has the strange
side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder
is concealed from almost everyone except those who've done it.Y Combinator has now funded severa
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 78895.
l companies that can be called
big successes, and i
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 79868.
n every single case the founders say the same
thing. It never gets any easier. The nature of the problems change.
You're worrying about construction delays at your London office
instead of the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment.
But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 78895 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don't work.
Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms
that have immediate approval processes.
Actually I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all the
complaints about App Store approvals are not a serious problem.
The
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 34873.
y must hear developers complaining. But partners and suppliers
are always complaining. It would be a bad sign if they weren't;
it would mean you were being too eas
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 47143.
y on them. Meanwhile the iPhone
is selling better than ever. So why do they need to fix anything?They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because
they make such great hardware. I just bought a new 27" iMac a
couple days ago. It's fabulous. The screen's too shiny, and the
disk is surpr
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 45581.
isingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't
make yourself care.So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings.
I felt the way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a
bad human rights record. That was new. In the past when I bought
things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure. Oh boy! They make
such great stuff. This time it felt like a Faustian bargain. They
make such
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 45581 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
for things
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 23166.
is usually closely guarded by the
organizations selecting them, but nowadays data about who gets
selected is often publicly available to anyone who takes the trouble
to aggregate it.
Notes[1]
This technique wouldn't work if the selection process looked
for different things from different types of applicants—for
example, if an employer hired men based on their ability but women
based on their appearance.[2]
As Paul Buchheit points out, First Round excluded their most
successful investment, Uber, from the study. And while it
makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies,
studies of returns from startup investing, which is all about
hitting outliers, are not one of them.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Geoff Ralston for reading
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 58760.
drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
March 2008, rev. June 2008Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies
weren't designed to eat the foods
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 36690.
that people in rich countries eat, or
to get so little exercise.
There may be a similar problem with the way we work:
a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour
or sugar is for us physically.I began to suspect this after spending several years working
with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them,
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 58760 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
for programmers to live. Founders arriving
at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three
months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence
that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
[4]
Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
time. Which is ex
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 46688.
actly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
wild.Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear
that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and
in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to
programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own
startup they seem to come to life, because finally they're working
the way people are meant to.Notes[1]
When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a
certain way
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 93734.
, I mean by evolution.[2]
It's not only the leaves who suffer. The constraint propagates
up as well as down. So managers are co
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 67065.
nstrained too; instead of
just doing things, they have to act through subordinates.[3]
Do not finance your startup with credit cards. Financing a
startup with debt is usually a stupid move, and credit card debt
stupidest of all. Credit card debt is a bad idea, period. It is
a trap set by
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 46688 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
are harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions,
and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not
necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to
be. What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this
program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other
language. However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my
claims for the mysterious powers of Lisp, this ought to
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 98069.
make him
curious. We weren't writing this code for our own amusement. We
were a tiny startup, programming as hard as we could in order to
put technical barriers between us and our competitors.A suspicious person might begin to wonder
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 90162.
if there was some
correlation here. A big chunk of our code was doing things that
are very hard to do in other languages. The resulting software
did things our competitors' software couldn't do. Maybe there was
some kind of connection. I encourage you to fol
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 72046.
low that thread.
There may be more to that old man hobbling along on his crutches
than meets the eye.Aikido for StartupsBut I don't expect to convince anyone
(over 25)
to go out and learn
Lisp. The purpose of this article is not to change anyone's mind,
but to reassure people already interested in using Lisp
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 90162 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
Get funded by
Y Combinator.
April 2
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 64641.
001, rev. April 2003(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz
Developer Symposium.)
In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I
started a startup called
Viaweb.
Our plan was to write
software that would let end users build online stores.
Wh
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 70805.
at was novel about this software, at the time, was
that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages
as the interface.A lot of people could have been having this idea at the
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 31003.
same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was
the first Web-based application. It seemed such
a novel idea to us that we named the company after it:
Viaweb, because our software worked via the Web,
instead of running on your desktop computer.Another unusual thing about this software was that it
was written primarily in a programming language called
Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user
applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then
had been used mostly in universities and research labs. [1]The Secret WeaponEric Raymond has written an essay called "How to Become a Hacker,"
and in it, among other things, he tells would-be hackers what
languages they should learn. He suggests starting with Python and
Java, because they
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 64641 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the
rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the
accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new
addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to
protect us.
[3]
Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine
of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a
lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out for ourselves
what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy
(or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect
everything new.In fact, even that won't be enough. We'll have to worry not just
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 71937.
about new things, but also about existing things becoming more
addictive. That's what bit me. I've avoided most addictions, but
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 45299.
the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using
it.
[4]Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're
all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.
That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I
want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.
[5]
My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a
better form
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 12419.
of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now
the
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 45299 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
None of these companies
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 31931.
were even meant
to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The
best startups almost have to start as side projects, because great
ideas tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject
them as ideas for companies.Ok, so how do you turn your mind into the type that startup ideas
form in unconsciously? (1) Learn a lot about things that matter,
then (2) work on problems that interest you (3) with people you
like and respect. The third part, incidentally, is how you get
cofounders at the same time as the idea.The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of "learn a lot about
things that matter," I wrote "become good at some technolo
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 49190.
gy." But
that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow. What was
special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were
experts in technology. T
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 58651.
hey were good at design, and perhaps even
more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and making
projects happen. So you don't have to work on technology per se,
so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.What kind of problems are those? That is very hard to answer in
the general case. History is full of examples of young people who
were working on important problems that no
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 49190 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
end of 1997 we had 500. Six
months later, when Yahoo bought us, we had 1070 users. Today, as
Yahoo Store, this software continues to dominate its market. It's
one of the mor
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 16572.
e profitable pieces of Yahoo, and the stores built
with it are the foundation of Yahoo Shopping. I left Yahoo in
1999, so I don't know exactly how many users they have now, but
the last I heard there were about 20,000.
The Blub ParadoxWhat's so great about Lisp? And if Lisp is so great, why doesn't
everyone use it? These
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 62849.
sound like rhetorical questions, but actually
they have straightforward answers. Lisp is so great not because
of some magic quality visible only to devotees
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 87769.
, but because it is
simply the most powerful language available. And the reason everyone
doesn't use it is that programming languages are not merely
technologies, but habits of mind as well, and nothing changes
slower. Of course, both these answers need explaining.I'll begin with a shockingly controversial statement: programming
languages vary in power.Few would dispute, at least, that high level languages are more
powerful than machine language. Most programmers today would agree
that you do not, ordinarily, want to program in machine language.
Instead, you should program
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 62849 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
like MIT they were writing programs in
high-level languages in the early 1960s, but many companies continued
to write code in machine language well into the 1980s. I bet a
lot of people continued to write machine language until the processor,
like a bartender eager to close up and go home, finally kicked them
out by switching to a risc instruction set.Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are
different: programming languages are not just technology, but what
programmers think in. They're half technology and half religion.[6]
And so
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 73799.
the me
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 65075.
dian language, meaning whatever language the median
programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg. Garbage collection,
introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be
a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity.
Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now,
just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp in the
mid 1960s, are still terra incognita.Obviously, the median language has enormous momentum. I'm not
proposing that you can fight this powerful force. What I'm proposing
is exactly the opposite: that, like a practitioner of Aikido, you
can use it against your oppon
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 27354.
ents.If you work for a big
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 27354 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very keenly. Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get
nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason
not to trust our instincts and go with Lisp. We knew that everyone
else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew
that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 08313.
way,
you'd be running Windows. When you choose technology, you have to
ignore what other people are doing, and consider only wha
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 67837.
t will
work the best.This is especially true in a startup. In a big company, you can
do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't
do what all the other startups do. I don't thi
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 77014.
nk a lot of people
realize this, even in startups.The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if
you're running a big company and you do everything the way the
average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the
average big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.The same thing will happen if you're running a startup,
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 77014 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
" fit together,
the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books.
It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary
between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying
to be with the App Store: a s
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oftware publisher. And a particularly
overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced
house style.If software publishing didn't wo
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rk in 1980, it works even less now
that software development has evolved from a small number of big
releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn't
understand that either. Their model of product development derives
from hardware. They
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work on something till they think it's finished,
then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because
software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.
The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and
iterate. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays
each time you release a new version.Apparently Apple's attitude is that developers should be more careful
when they submit a new version to the App Store. They would say
that. But powerful as they are, they're not powerful enough to
turn back the evolution of technology. Programmers don't use
launch-fast-and-iterate out of
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 74443 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
horror at that prospect was
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the single biggest
thing that drove us to start building web apps.At least we know now what it would take to break Apple's lock.
You'd have to get iPhones out of programmers' hands. If programmers
used some other device for mobile web access, they'd start to develop
apps for that instead.How could you make a device programmers liked better than the iPhone?
It's unlikely you could make something better designed. Apple
leaves no room there. So this alternative device probably couldn't
win on general appeal. It would have to win by virtue of some
appeal it had to programmers specifi
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cally.One way to appeal to programmers is with software. If you
could think of an application programmers had to have, but that
would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone,
you could presumably get them to switch.That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds
as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the
way laptops displaced desktops. You need more control of a development
machine than Apple will let you have over
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an iPhone.Could anyone make a device that you'd carry around in your pocket
like a phone, and yet would also work as a development machine?
It's hard to imagine what it would look like. But I've learned
never to say never about technology. A phone-sized device that
would work
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 82337 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
in the circumscribed world of the iPhone,
you could presumably get them to switch.That would definitely
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 40084.
happen if programmers started to use handhelds
as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the
way laptops displaced desktops. You need more control of a development
machine than Apple will let you have over an iPhone.Could anyone make a device that you'd carry around in your pocket
like a phone, and yet would also work as a development machine?
It's hard to imagine what it would look like. But
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I've learned
never to say never about technology. A phone-sized device that
would work as a development machine is no more miraculous by present
standards than the iPhone itself would have seemed by the standards
of 1995.My current development machine is a MacBook Air, which I use with
an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by itself when
traveling. If there was a version half the size I'd prefer it.
That still wouldn't be small enough to carr
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y around everywhere like
a phone, but we're within a factor of 4 or so. Surely that gap is
bridgeable. In fact, let's make it an
RFS. Wanted:
Woman with hammer.Notes[1]
When Google adopted "Don't be evil," they were still so small
that no one would have expected them to be, yet.
[
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- ALPHA_0: | 40084 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
size of the entire tree.
[2]Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You
can feel the difference between working for a company with 100
employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.
Corn SyrupA group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake
tribe. The number of people you in
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teract with is about right. But
something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers
have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other
members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to
do and when the way a boss can.It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group
above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.
Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you.So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels
both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels
li
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ke the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major
is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
syrup: it has some of
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 13186.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 02294 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
by exercising power
starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it's
not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas
aren't the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced "Don't
be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world
as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
[1]That has worked fo
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r Google so far. They've become more
bureaucratic, but otherwise they seem to have held true to their
original principles. With Apple t
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hat seems less the case. When you
look at the famous
1984 ad
now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the
dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer.
[2]
In fact, if you read the dictator's speech it sounds uncannily like a
prophecy of the App Store.
We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts.We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of
pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests
of contradictory and confusing truths.
The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them
is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you. If
anyon
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e should know this, Apple should. VisiCalc made the Apple II.And programmers build applications for
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 77496 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
expensive, obscure, and appealing in the long term, which do you
think most will choose?It's the same with work. The average MIT graduate wants to work
at Google or Microsoft, because it's a recognized brand, it's safe,
and they'll get paid a good salary right away. It's the job
equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. The drawbacks will
only become apparent later, and then only in a vague sense
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of
malaise.And founders and early employees of startups, meanwhile, are like
the Birkenstock-wearing weirdos of Berkeley: though a tiny minority
of the population, they're the ones living as humans are meant to.
In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally.
ProgrammersThe restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on
programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new
things. Sales people make much the same pitches every d
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ay; support
people answer much the same questions; but once you've written a
piece of code you don't need to write it again. So a programmer
working as programmers are meant to is always making new things.
And when you're part of an organization whose structure gives each
person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the tree, y
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ou're
going to face resistance when you do something new.This seems an inevitable consequence of bigness.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 20679 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
by the papers published in philosophy journals. They were so
beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating—alternately
casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. A fellow would be walking
along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon
him. I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured
I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more
closely. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. This
was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't
really saying anything. No p
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hilosopher ever refuted another, for
example, because no one said
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anything definite enough to refute.
Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either.In grad school I was still wasting time imitating the wrong things.
There was then a fashionable type of pr
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ogram called an expert system,
at the core of which was something called an inference engine. I
looked at what these things did and thought "I could write that in
a thousand lines of code." And yet eminent professors were writing
books about them, and startups were selling them for a year's salary
a copy. What an opportunity, I thought; these impressive things
seem easy to me; I must be pretty sharp. Wrong. It was simply
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 94717 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through
a previously isolated
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population. Smoking rapidly became a
(statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We
had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of
my parents smoked. You had to for guests.As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed.
In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something
that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something
movie stars did in publicity shots to something small
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huddles of
addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the
change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation
couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the
rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the
accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new
addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to
protect us.
[3]
Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine
of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a
lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure o
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ut for ourselves
what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy
(or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect
everything new.In fact,
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 87719 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
When you
look at the famous
1984 ad
now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the
dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer.
[2]
In fact, if you read the dictator's speech it sounds uncannily like a
prophecy of the App Store.
We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts.We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of
pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests
of contradictory and confusing truths.
The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them
is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you. If
anyone should know this, Apple should. VisiCalc made the Apple I
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I.And programmers build applications for the platforms they use. Most
applications—most startups, probably—grow out of personal projects.
Apple itself did. Apple made
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microcomputers because that's what
Steve Wozniak wanted for himself. He couldn't have afforded a
minicomputer.
[3]
Microsoft likewise started out making interpreters
f
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or little microcomputers because
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were interested in using them. It's a
rare startup that doesn't build something the founders use.The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers
have iPhones. They
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 96717 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
do they live or die?The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know.
Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive
or default dead.If you're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy
calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive
or default dead is that the rest of the conv
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ersation depends on the
answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious
new things they could do. If it's default dead, we probably need
to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends
badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default
dead? Mainly,
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I think, because they're not used to asking that.
It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than
it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support
himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from
meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people
by surpris
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e.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too
late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too
early. It's hard to say precisely when the question switches
polarity.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
. And I was a
whiz at it.
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Master of all I surveyed.The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at
various points on the power continuum. Where they fall relative
to one another is a sensitive topic. What I will say is that I
think Lisp is at the top. And to support this claim I'll tell you
about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other
four languages. How can you get anything done in them, I think,
without macros? [5]Many languages have something called a macro. But Lisp macros are
unique. And believe it or not, what they do is related to the
parentheses. The designers of Lisp didn't put all those parentheses
in the language just to be different. To the Blub programmer, Lisp
code looks weird. But those parentheses are there for a reason.
They are the outward evidence of a fundamental difference between
Lisp and other languages.Lisp code is made out of Lisp data objects. And not in the trivial
sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are
one of the data types supported by the language. Lisp code, after
it's read by the parser, is made of data s
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tru
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ctures that you can
traverse.If you understand how compilers work, what's really going on is
not so
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
to med school.[9]
I did manage to think of a heuristic for detecting whether you
have a taste for interesting ideas: whether you find known boring
ideas intolerable. Could you endure studying literary theory, or
working in middle management at a large company?[10]
In fact, if your goal is to s
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tart a startup, you can stick
even more closely to the ideal of a liberal education than past
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generations have. Back when students focused mainly on getting a
job after college, they thought at least a little about how the
courses they took might look to an employer. And perhaps even
worse, they might shy away from taking a difficult class lest they
get a low grade, which would harm their all-important GPA. Good
news: users don't care what your GPA
was. And I've never heard of inve
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stors caring either. Y Combinator
certainly never asks what classes you took in college or what grades
you got in them.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick
Collison, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and
Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.October 2015This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases
it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing
anything about the applicant pool.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 67737 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects
of it that are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running as
fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to
catch his breath since. Every day new shit happens in the Google
empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to deal
with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week's
backlog of shit accumulates. And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or
weakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy
if they talk about having difficult lives. Which has the strange
side effect that the difficulty of being
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 82146.
a successful startup founder
is concealed from almost everyone except those who've done it.Y Combinator has now funded several companies that can be called
big successes, and in every single case the founders say the same
thing. It never gets any easier. The nature of the problems
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change.
You're worrying about construction delays at your London office
instead of the broken air conditioner in
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 49972.
your studio apartment.
But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it
increases.Starting a successful startup is similar to having kids in that
it's like a button
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
effort. At
first there's a list of things you're trying to remember as yo
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u
start down the hill.Startups are as unnatural as skiing, so there's a similar list for
startups. Here I'm going to give you the first part of it — the things
to remember if you want to prepare yourself to start a startup.
Counterintui
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tiveThe first item on it is the fact I already mentioned: that startups
are so weird that if you trust your instincts, you'll make a lot
of mistakes. If you know nothing more than this, you may at least
pause before making them.When I was running Y Combinator I used to joke that our function
was to tell founders things they would ignore. It's really true.
Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakes
they're about to make, and the founders ignore them, and then come
back a year later and say "I wish we'd listened."Why do the founders ignore the partners' advice? Well, that's the
thing about counterintuitive ideas: they contradict your intuitions.
They seem wrong. So of cou
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rse your first impulse is to disregard
them. And in fact my joking description is not merely the curse
of Y Combinator but part of its raison d'etre. If founders' instincts
already gave them the right answers, they wouldn
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 88675 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
it stays that
way. And it's likely to. It's the nature of programming languages
to make most people satisfied with whatever they currently use.
Computer hardware
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changes so much faster than personal habits that
programming practice is usually ten to twenty years behind the
processor. At places like MIT they were writing programs in
high-level languages in the early 1960s, but many companies continued
to write code in machine language well into the 1980s. I bet a
lot of people continued to write machine language until the processor,
like a bartender eager to close up and go home, finally kicked them
out by switching to a risc instruction set.Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are
different: programming languages are not just technology, but what
programmers think in. They
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 18702.
're half technology and half religion.[6]
And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median
programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg. Garbage collection,
introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be
a good thing. Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity.
Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now,
just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp in the
mid 1960s, are still ter
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ra incognita.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
ConsumingThat brings us to our fourth counterintuitive poin
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t: startups are
all-consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life
to a degree you cannot imagine. And if your startup succeeds, it
will take over your life for a long time: for several years at the
very least, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your worki
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ng
life. So there is a real opportunity cost here.Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects
of it that are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running as
fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to
catch his breath sinc
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 31611.
e. Every day new shit happens in the Google
empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, has to deal
with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week's
backlog of shit accumulates. And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or
weakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy
if they talk about having difficult lives. Which has the strange
side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder
is concealed from almost everyone except those who've done it.Y Combinator has now
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 86578 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
number of people you interact with is about right. But
something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers
have much more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other
members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to
do and when the way a boss can.It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group
above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person.
Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to y
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 50455.
ou.So working in a group of 10 people within a large organization feels
both right and wrong at the same time. On the surface it feels
like the kind of group you're meant to work in, but something major
is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
syrup: it has some of
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 62386.
the qualities of things you're meant to like,
but is disastrously lacking in others.Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with
the usual sort of job.For example, working for a big company is the default thing to
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 92221.
do,
at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows
that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a random point in
America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
Humans were not designed
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
. That's
what compilers are for. And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how
anyone can get anything done with it. It doesn't even have x (Blub
feature of your choice).As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the
power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful
than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some
feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer
looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't
realize he's lo
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 23747.
oking up. What he sees are merely weird languages.
He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but
with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good
enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of
the languages higher up the power continuum, however, we find that
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 40748.
he in turn looks down upon Blub. How can you get anything done in
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 21759.
Blub? It doesn't even have y.By induction, the only programmers in a position to see all the
differences in power between the various languages are those who
understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric
Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 40748 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
measured, you'll know if they do.Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 36713.
one. And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're
trying to measure.
But there are some domains where performance can be measured, and
in those detecting bias is straightforward. Want to know if the
selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check
whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic
for detecting bias. It's what bias means.For example, many suspect that venture capital firms are biased
against female founders. This would be easy to detect: among their
portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperform
those without? A couple months ago, one VC firm (almost certainly
unintentionally) published a study showing bias of this type. First
Round Capital found that among its portfolio companies, startups
with female founders outperformed
those without by 63%.
[2]The reason I began by saying that this technique would come as a
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 69594.
surprise to many people is that we so rarely see analyses of this
type. I'm sure it will come as a surprise to First Round that they
performed one. I doubt anyone there realized that by limiting their
sample to their own po
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rtfolio, they were producing a study not of
startup trends but of their own biases when selecting
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
software update immediately, they had
to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month
and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?By breaking
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 39533.
software development, Apple gets the opposite of what
they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App
Store tends to be an old and buggy one. One developer told me:
As a result of their process, the App Store is full of half-baked
applications. I make a new version almost every day that I release
to beta users. The version on the App Store feels old and crappy.
I'm sure that a lot of dev
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 94210.
elopers feel this way: One emotion is
"I'm not really proud abo
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 47095.
ut what's in the App Store", and it's
combined with the emotion "Really, it's Apple's fault."
Another wrote:
I believe that they think their approval process helps users by
ensuring quality. In reality, bugs like ours get through all the
time and then it can take 4-8 weeks to get that bug fix approved,
leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don't work.
Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms
that have immediate approval processes.
Actually I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all the
complaints about App Store approvals are not a serious problem.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 47095 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
the two paths should you take? Be
a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and
not be a student? I can answer that one for you.
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 62328.
Do not start a
startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a
bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 58842.
good life.
And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot
of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it.
Starting a startup is like a bruta
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 47451.
lly fast depth-first search. Most
people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before
or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel
super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people,
this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the
ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration.
If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful,
you'll never get to do it.
[7]Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. He
can do other things most people can't, like charter jets to fly him
to foreign countries. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 47451 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
—founders
take a small business that isn't really w
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 68516.
orking (bad unit economics,
typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth
numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business
much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really
fast."
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
November 20
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 04817.
09I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process
is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with
programmers more than anything else they've ever done.
Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
It used to be the most common complaint you heard
about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically.
The App Store has changed that. Now a lo
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 54965.
t of programmers
have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they
lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.* * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is
that they
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 54965 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
scale, or by redesigning the product in the
way only founders can.
And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be
the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator
before they hired their first employee. In th
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 85931.
e meantime the founders
were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb
into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.Notes[1]
Steep usage growth will also interest investors.
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 74612.
Revenue
will ultimately be a constant multiple of usage, so x% usage growth
predicts x% revenue growth. But in practice investors discount
merely predicted revenue, so if you're measuring usage you need a
higher growth rate to impress investors.[2]
Startups that don't raise money are saved from hiring too
fast because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should
avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than
that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic.[3]
I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push founders
to overhire is not even in their own interest
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 00471.
. They don't know how
many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have
done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number.[4]
After reading a draft,
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 74612 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
to win by doing?
[4]
All-ConsumingThat brings us to our fourth counterintuitive point: startups are
all-consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life
to a degree you cannot imagine. And if your startup succeeds, it
will take over your life for a long time: for several years at the
very least, maybe for a decade, maybe for the rest of your working
life. So there is a real opportunity cost here.Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspect
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 75869.
s
of it that are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running as
fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to
catch his breath since. Every day new shit happens in the Google
empire that only the CEO can deal with, and he, as CEO, ha
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 26179.
s to deal
with it. If he goes on vacation for even a week, a whole week's
backlog of shit accumulates. And he has to bear this uncomplainingly,
partly because as the
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 64053.
company's daddy he can never show fear or
weakness, and partly because billionaires get less than zero sympathy
if they talk about having difficult lives. Which has the strange
side effect that the difficulty of being a successful startup founder
is concealed from almost everyone except those
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 75869 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
ever even had what you would call a real job. The only thing we
were good at was writing software. We hoped that would save us.
Any advantage we could get in the software department, we would
take.So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment. Our h
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 58506.
ypothesis
was that if we wrote our software in Lisp, we'd be able to get
features done faster than our competitors, and also to do things
in our software that they
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 43171.
couldn't do. And because Lisp was so
high-level, we wouldn't need a big development team, so our costs
would be lower. If this were so, we could offer a better product
for less money, and still make a profit. We would end up getting
all the users, and our competitors would get none, and eventually
go out of business. That was what we hoped would happen, anyway.What were the results of this experiment? Somewhat surprisingly,
it worked. We eventually had many competitors, on the order of
twenty to thirty of them, but none of their software could compete
with ours. We had a wysiwyg online store builder that ran on the
server and yet felt like a desktop application. Our competitors
had cgi scripts. And we were always far
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 39005.
ahead of them in features.
Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to introduce
features that
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 58506 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
it's big, plus they are bleed
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 83933.
ing cash really
fast."
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 52904.
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
November 2009I don't think Apple realizes
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 22842.
how badly the App Store approval process
is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with
programmers more than anything else they've ever done.
Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
It used to be the most common complaint you heard
about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically.
The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers
have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they
lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.* * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is
that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through
iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to
reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed,
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 52904 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.What kind of problems are those? That is very hard to answer in
the general case. History is full of examples of young people who
were working on important p
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 39502.
roblems that no
one else at the time thought were important, and in particular
that their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand,
history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their
kids were wasting their time and who were right. So how do you
know when you're working on real stuff?
[8]I know how I know. Real problems are interesting, and I am
self-indulgent in the sense that I always want to work on interesting
things, even if no one else cares about them (in fact, especially
if no one else cares about them), and find it very hard to make
myself work on boring things, even if they're supposed to be
important.My life is full of case after case where I worked on
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 40268.
something just
because it seemed interesting, and it turned out later to be useful
in some worldly way. Y
Combinator itself was something I only did because it seemed
interesting. So I seem to have some sort of internal compass that
helps me out. But I don't know what other people have i
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 11775.
n their
heads. Maybe if I think more about
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 11775 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
money.
[2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But
most err on the side of overestimating this need rather t
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 39084.
han
underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to
do. Naive founders think that if they can just hire enough
people, it will all get done. Partly b
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 70076.
ecause successful startups have
lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order
to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups
are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And
partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to
face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 61771.
enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to
overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are
optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect.
VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other.
But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all
to survive.
[3]Here's a common way startups die. They make something moderately
appealing and have decent initial growth. They raise their first
round fairly easily, because the founders seem smart and the idea
sounds plausible. But because
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 39084 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
icularly a technology company. Which means it's doubly important
to hire the best people. Mediocre hires hurt you twice: they get
less done, but they also make you big, because you need more of
them to solve a given problem.For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. It will always
suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization,
the more it will suck.In an essay I wrote a couple years ago
I advised grad
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 49985.
uating seniors
to work for a couple years for another company before starting their
own. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you want
to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own
startup, go ahead.The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately
was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious
programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than
going t
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 69847.
o work at a big company. Certainly they'll learn more. They
might even be better off financially. A lot of people in their
early twenties get into debt, because their expenses grow even
faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left sc
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 89611.
hool.
At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be
zero rather than negative.
[3]We've now funded so many different types of
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 69847 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
) the growth never comes. Now they're rapidly running out
of runway. They hope further investment will save them. But because
they have high expenses and slow growth, they'
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 36576.
re now unappeali
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 61565.
ng
to investors. They're unable to raise more, and the company dies.What the company should have done is address the fundamental problem:
that the product is only moderately appealing. Hiring people is
rarely the way to fix that. More often than not it makes it harder.
At this early stage, the product needs to evolve more than to be
"built out," and that's usually easier with fewer people.
[4]Asking whether you're default alive or default dead may save you
from this. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the
forces that push you to overhire. Instead you'll be compelled to
seek growth in other ways. For example, by doing
things that don't scale, or by redesigning the pro
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 45271.
duct in the
way only founders can.
And for many if not most startups, these paths to growth will be
the ones that actually work.Airbnb waited 4 months after raising money at the end of Y Combinator
before they hired their first employee. In the meantime the founders
were terribly overworked. But they were overworked evolving Airbnb
into the astonishingly successful organism it is now.N
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 36576 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
say is that I
think Lisp is at the top. And to support this claim I'll tell you
about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other
four languages. How can you get anything done in them, I think,
w
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 52809.
ithout macros? [5]Many languages have something called a macro. But Lisp macros are
unique. And believe it or not, what they do is related to the
parentheses. The designers of Lisp didn't put all those parentheses
in the language just to be different. To the Blub programmer, Lisp
code looks weird. But those parentheses are there for a reason.
They are the outward evidence of a fundamental difference between
Lisp and other languages.Lisp code is made out of Lisp data objects. And not in the trivial
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 88516.
sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are
one of the data types supported by the language. Lisp code, after
it's read by the parser, is made of data structures that you can
traverse.If you understand how compilers work, what's really going on is
not so much that Lisp has a strange syntax as that Lisp has no
syntax. You write programs in the parse trees that get generated
within the compiler when other languages are parsed. But these
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 56049.
parse trees are fully accessible to your programs. You can write
programs that
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 56049 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
same time. On the surface it feels
like the kind o
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 32731.
f group you're meant to work in, but something major
is missing. A job at a big company is like high fructose corn
syrup: it has some of the qualities of things you're meant to like,
but is disastrously lacking in others.Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with
the usual sort of job.For example, working for a big company is the default thing to do,
at least for programmers. How bad could it be? Well, food shows
that pretty clearly. If you were dropped at a ran
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 58514.
dom point in
America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you.
Humans were not designed to eat white flour, refined sugar, high
fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil. And yet if
you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably
find these four ingredients accounted for most of the calories.
"Normal" food is terribly bad for you. The only people who eat
what humans were actually designed to eat are a few Birkenstock-wearing
weirdos in Berkeley.If "normal" food is so bad for us, why is it so common? There are
two main reasons. One is
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 93689.
that it has more immediate appeal. You
may feel lousy an hour after eating that
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 32731 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
, like he says, why wouldn't
you want to use it? If a painter were offered a brush that would
make him a better painter, it seems to me that he would want to
use it in all his paintings, wouldn't he? I'm not trying to make
fun of Eric Raymond here. On the whole, his advice is good. What
he says about Lisp is pretty much the conventional wisdom. But
there is a contradiction in the conventional wisdom: Lisp will
make you a better programmer, and yet you won't use it.Why not? Programming languages are just tools, after all. If Lisp
really does yield better programs, you should use it. And if it
doesn't, then who needs it?This is not just a theoretical question. Software is a very
competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. A company that
gets soft
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 24455.
ware written faster and better will, all other things
being equal, put its competitors ou
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 02296.
t of business. And when you're
starting a startup, you feel this very
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 12018.
keenly. Startups tend to
be an all or nothing proposition. You either get rich, or you get
nothing. In a startup, if you bet on the wrong technology, your
competitors will crush you.Robert and I both knew Lisp well, and we couldn't see any reason
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 02296 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
their expenses grow even
faster than the salary that seemed so high when they left school.
At least if you start a startup and fail your net worth will be
zero rather than negative.
[3]We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have
enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from
working for a big company. The people who've worked for a few years
do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only
because they're that much older.The people who come to us from big companies often seem kind of
conservative. It's hard to say how much is because big companies
made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that
made them work for the big companies in the first place. But
certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seen
it burn off.Having seen that happen so many times is one o
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 25459.
f the things that
convinces me that w
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 91022.
orking for oneself, or at least for a small
group, is the natural way for programmers to
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 90147.
live. Founders arriving
at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three
months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence
that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
[4]
Strange as this sounds
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 91022 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
the tree. But
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 43815.
when
you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,
something strange happens
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 61497.
that I've never heard anyone mention
explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss
represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely
a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really
a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
toge
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 84036.
ther as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
person—the workers and manager would each share only one
person's worth of freedom between them.In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were
one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in
this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group
tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals
that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating
it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that
each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the
size of the entire tree.
[2]Anyone who's worked for a large organization has felt this. You
can feel the difference between working for a company with 100
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_1: | 61497 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
this.October 2015This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases
it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without kn
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 32445.
owing
anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among
other things it means third parties can use this technique to detect
bias whether those doing the selecting want them to or not.You can use this technique whenever (a) you have at least
a random sample of the applicants that were selected, (b) their
subsequent performance is measured, and (c) the groups of
applicants you're comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability.How does it work? Think about what it means to be biased. What
it means for a selection process to be biased against applic
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 10762.
ants
of type x is that it's harder for them to make it through. Which
means applicants
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 26838.
of type x have to be better to get selected than
applicants not of type x.
[1]
Which means applicants of type x
who do make it through the selection process will outperform other
successful applicants. And if the performance of all the successful
applicants is measured, you'll know if they do.Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid
one. And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're
trying to measure.
But there are some domains where performance can be
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_2: | 26838 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
everything you'd need to know to
understand what it meant. In
Ansi Common Lisp I tried to move
things along as fast as I could, and even so I didn't get to macros
until page 160.But I think I can give a kind of argument that might be convincing.
The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25%
macros. Macros are harder to write tha
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 06071.
n ordinary Lisp functions,
and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not
necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to
be. What that means is that at least 20-25% of the code in this
program is doing things that you can't easily do in any other
language. However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my
claims for the mysterious powers of L
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 59696.
isp, this ought to make him
curious. We weren't writing this code for our own amusement. We
were a tiny startup, programming as hard as we could in order to
put technical barriers between us and our
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 64160.
competitors.A suspicious person might begin to wonder if there was some
correlation here. A big chunk of our code was doing things that
are very hard to do in other languages. The resulting software
did things our competitors' software couldn't do. Maybe there was
some kind of
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 06071 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
things that matter," I wrote "become good at some technology." But
that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow. What was
special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not that they were
experts in technology. They were goo
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 61369.
d at design, and perhaps even
more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and making
projects happen. So you don't have to work on technology per se,
so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.What kind of problems are those? That is very hard to answer in
the general case. History is full of examples of young people who
were working on important problems that no
one else at the time thought were important, and in particular
that their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand,
history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their
kids were wasting their time and who were right. So how do you
know when you're working on real stuff?
[8]I know how I know. Real problems are interesting, and I am
self-indulgent in the sense that I always want to
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 68164.
work on interesting
things, even if no on
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 53521.
e else cares about them (in fact, especially
if no one else cares about them), and find it very hard to make
myself work on boring things, even if they're supposed to be
important
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 61369 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
's harder for them to make it through. Which
means applicants of type x have to be better to get selected than
applicants not of type x.
[1]
Which means applicants of type x
who do make it through the selection process will outperform other
successful applicants. And if the performance of all the successful
applicants is measured, you'll know if they do.Of course, the test you use to measure performance must be a valid
one. And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're
trying to measure.
But there are some domains where performance can be measured, and
in those detecting bias is straightforward. Want to know if the
selection process was biased against some type of applicant? Check
whether they outperform the others. This is not just a heuristic
for detecting bias. It's what bias means.For example, many suspect that venture capital firms are biased
against female founders. This would
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be easy to detect: among their
portfolio companies, do startups with female founders outperform
those without? A couple months ago, one VC firm (almost certainly
unintentionally) published a study showing bias of this type. First
Round
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Capital found that among its
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portfolio companies, startups
with female founders outperformed
those without by 63%.
[2]The reason I began by saying that this technique would come as
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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miss it at the time. I thought in Basic. And I was a
whiz at it. Master o
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f all I surveyed.The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at
various points on the power continuum. Where they fall relative
to one another is a sensitive topic. What I will say is that I
think Lisp is at the top. And to support this claim I'll tell you
about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other
four languages. How can you get anything done in them, I think,
without macros? [5]Many languages have something called a macro. But Lisp macros are
unique. And believe it or not, what they do is related to the
parentheses. The designers of Lisp didn't put all those parentheses
in the language just to be different. To the Blub programmer, Lisp
code looks weird. But those parentheses are there for a reason.
They are the outward evidence of a fundamental difference between
Lisp and other languag
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es.Lisp code is made
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out of Lisp data objects. And not in the trivial
sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are
one of the data types supported by the language. Lisp code, after
it's read by the parser, is made of data structures that you can
traverse.If you understand how compilers
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- ALPHA_0: | 95527 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
programs are called
macros. They are programs that write programs.Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that?
Not very often, if you think in Cobol. All the time, if you think
in Lisp. It would be convenient here if I could give an example
of a powerful macro, and say there! how
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about that? But if I did,
it would just look like gibberish to someone who didn't know Lisp;
there isn't room here to explain everything you'd need to know to
understand what it meant. In
Ansi Common Lisp I tried to move
things along as fast as I could, and even so I didn't get to macros
until page 160.But I think I can give a kind of argument that might be convincing.
The source code of the Viaweb editor was probably about 20-25%
macros. Macros are harder to write than ordinary Lisp functions,
and it's considered to be bad style to use them when they're not
necessary. So every macro in that code is there because it has to
be. What that means is that a
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t least 20-25% of the code in this
program is doing
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things that you can't easily do in any other
language. However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my
claims for the mysterious powers of Lisp,
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
, and B doesn't, that's not likely to be something
you can fix by writing library functions.[4] Note to nerds: or possibly a lattice, narrowing toward the top;
it's not the shape that matters here but the idea that there is at
least a partial order.[5] It is a bit misleading to treat macros as a separate feature.
In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp
features like lexical closures and rest parameters.[6] As a result, comparisons of programming languages either take
the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly
neutral that t
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hey're really works of anthropology. People who
value their peace, or want tenure, avoid the topic. But the question
is only half a religious one; there is something there worth
studying, especially if you want t
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o design new languages.
Want to start a sta
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rtup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at
Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is
applicable to potential founders at other ages.)One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give
advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell my own kids?" My
kids are little, but I can imagine what I'd tell them about startups
if they
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
have
enough data to see patterns, and there seems to be no benefit from
working for a big company. The people who've worked for a few years
do seem better than the ones straight out of college, but only
because they're that much older.The people who come to us from big companies often s
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eem kind of
conservative. It's hard to say how much is because big companies
made them that way, and how much is the natural conservatism that
made them work for the big companies in the first place. But
certainly a large part of it is learned. I know because I've seen
it burn off.Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things th
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at
convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small
group, is the n
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atural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving
at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three
months later they're transformed: they have so much more
confidence
that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller.
[4]
Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same
time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the
wild.Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear
that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and
in
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The first version was mostly
Lisp, because the ordering system was small. Later we added two
more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office
manager written mostly in Perl.In January 2003, Yahoo released a new version of the editor
written in C++ and Perl. It's hard to say whether the program is no
longer written in Lisp, though, because to trans
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late this program
into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpr
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eter: the source
files of all the page-generating templates are still, as far as I
know, Lisp code. (See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.)[2] Robert Morris says that I didn't need to be secretive, beca
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use
even if our competitors had known we were using Lisp, they wouldn't
have understood why: "If they were that smart they'd already be
programming in Lisp."[3] All languages are equally powerful in the sense of being Turing
equivalent, but that's not the sense of the word programmers care
about. (No one wants to program a Turing machine.) The kind of
power programmers care about may not be formally definable, but
one way to explain it would be to say that it refers to features
you could only get in the less powerful language by writing an
interpreter for the more powerful language in it. If language A
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hundreds or thousands of employees.Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide
themselves into units small enough to work together. But to
coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your
boss is the point where y
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our group attache
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s to the tree. But when
you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones,
something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention
explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss
represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely
a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really
a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work
together as if they w
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ere simply a group of 10 individuals, the group
working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single
person—the workers and manager would each share only one
person's worth of freedom between them.In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were
one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in
this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group
tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals
that humans were designed to work in. That was
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real startup and
not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a
startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a
bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life.
And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot
of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it.
Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first
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search. Most
people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before
or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel
super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people,
this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the
ambitious ones it can
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be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration.
If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful,
you'll never get to do it.
[7]Mark Zuckerberg will never get to bum around a foreign country. He
can do other things most people can't, like charter jets to fly him
to foreign countries. But success has taken a lot of the serendipity
out of his life. Facebook is running him as much as he's running
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Facebook. And while it can
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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because they can't afford to. But that doesn't mean you should
avoid raising money in order to avoid this problem, any more than
that total abstinence is the only way to avoid becoming an alcoholic.[3]
I would not be surprised if VCs' tendency to push fo
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unders
to overhire is not even in their own interest. They don't know how
many of the companies that get killed by overspending might have
done well if they'd survived. My guess is a significant number.[4]
After reading a draft, Sam Altman wrote:"I think you should make the hiring point more strongly. I think
it's roughly c
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orrect to say that YC's most successful companies
have never been the fastest to hire, and one of the marks of a great
founder is being able to resist this urge."Paul Buchheit adds:"A related problem that I see a lot is premature scaling—founders
take a small business that isn't really working (bad unit economics,
typically) and then scale it up because they want impressive growth
numbers. This is similar to over-hiring in that it makes the business
much harder to fix
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once it's big, plus they are bleeding cash really
fast."
Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Joe Gebbia, Jessica Livingston,
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Want to start a startup?
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
- ALPHA_0: | 74688 |
There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
the top;
it's not the shape that matters here but the idea that there is at
least a partial order.[5] It is a bit misleading to treat macros as a separate feature.
In
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practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp
features like lexical closures and rest parameters.[6] As a result, comparisons of programming languages either take
the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly
neutral that they're really works of anthropology. People who
valu
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e their peace, or want tenure, avoid the topic. But the question
is only half a religious one; there is something there worth
studying, especially if you want to design new languages.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam A
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 06068.
ltman's startup class at
Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is
applicable to potential founders at other ages.)One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give
advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell my own kids?" My
kids are little, but I can imagine what I'd tell them about startups
if they were in college, and that's what I'm going to tell you.Startups are very counterintuitive. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's
just because
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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you'll be asking at this point not ju
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st
how to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead.
That one is easy: don't hire too fast. Hiring too fast is by far
the biggest killer of startups that raise money.
[2]Founders tell themselves they need to hire in order to grow. But
most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than
underestimating it. Why? Partly because there's so much work to
do. Naive founders th
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ink that if they can just hire enough
people, it will all get done. Partly because
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successful startups have
lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order
to be successful. In fact the large staffs of successful startups
are probably more the effect of growth than the cause. And
partly because when founders have slow growth they don't want to
face what is usually the real reason: the product is not appealing
enough.Plus founders who've just raised money are often encouraged to
overhire by the VCs who funded them. Kill-or-cure strategies are
optimal for VCs because they're protected by the portfolio effect.
VCs want to blow you up, in one sense of the phrase or the other.
But as a founder your incentives are different. You want above all
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
November 2009I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process
is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
that it's broken.The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with
programmers more than anything else they've ever done.
Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
It used to be the most common complaint you heard
about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically.
The App Store has changed that. Now a lot of programmers
have started to see Apple as evil.How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they
lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.* * *How did Apple get into this mess? Their fundamental problem is
that they don't understand software.They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through
iTunes. Apple is the
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channel; they own the user; if you want to
reach users, you do it on thei
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r terms. The record labels agreed,
reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't
work for an intermedia
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ry to own the user. The
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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If I
had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have
been really worried.
Notes[1] Viaweb at first had two parts: the
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editor, written in Lisp,
which people used to build their sites, and the ordering system,
written in C, which handled orders. The first version was mostly
Lisp, because the ordering system was small. Later we added two
more modules, an image generator written in C, and a back-office
manager written mostly in Perl.In January 2003, Yahoo released a new version of the editor
written in C++ and Perl. It's hard to say whether the program is no
longer written in Lisp, though, because to translate this program
into C++ they literally had to write a Lisp interpreter: the source
files of all the page-generating templates are still, as far as I
know, Lisp code. (See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.)[2] Robert Morris says that I didn't need to be secretive, because
even if our competitors had known we were using Lisp, they wouldn't
have understood why: "If they were that smart they'd already be
programming in Lisp."[3] All languages are
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 60953.
equally powerful in the sense of bein
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g Turing
equivalent, but that's not the sense of the word programmers care
about. (No one wants
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bodies
weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or
to get so
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little exercise.
There may be a similar problem with the way we work:
a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour
or sugar is for us physically.I began to suspe
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ct this after spending several years working
with startup founders. I've now worked with over 200 of them, and I've
noticed a definite difference between programmers working on their
own startups and those working for large organizations.
I wouldn't say founders seem happier, necessarily;
starting a startup can be very stressful. Maybe the best way to put
it is to say that they're happier in the sense
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that your body is
happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating
doughnuts.Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be
working in a way that's more natural for humans.I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that
I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they
seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times
more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working
for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living
in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion.
Life in a zoo is easier, but
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
those parentheses
in the language just to be different. To the Blub programmer, Lisp
code looks weird. But those parentheses are there for a reason.
They are the outward evidence of a fundamental difference between
Lisp and other languages.Lisp code is made out of Lisp data objects. And not in the trivial
sense that the source files contain characters, and strings are
one of the data types supported by the language. Lisp code, after
it's read by the parser, is made of data structures that you can
traverse.If you understand how compilers work, what's really going on is
not so much that Lisp has a strange syntax as that Lisp
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has no
syntax. You write programs in the parse trees that get generated
within the compiler when other languages are parsed. But these
parse trees are fully accessible to your p
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rograms. You can write
programs that manipulate them. In Lisp, these programs are called
macros. They are programs that write programs.Programs that write programs? When would you ever want to do that?
Not very often, if you think in Co
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bol. All the time, if you think
in Lisp. It would be convenient here if I could give an example
of a powerful macro, and say there! how about that? But if I did,
it would just look like gibberish to someone who
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
nature of programming languages
to make most people satisfied with whatever they currently use.
Computer hardware changes so much faster than personal habits that
programming practice is usually ten to twenty years behind the
processor. At places like MIT they were writing programs in
high-level languages in the early 1960s, but many companies continued
to write code in machine
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 74034.
language well into the 1980s. I bet a
lot of people continued to write machine language until the processor,
like a bartender eager to close up and go home, finally kicked them
out by switching to a risc instruction set.Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are
different: programming languages are not just technology, but what
programmers think in. They're half technology and half religion.[6]
And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median
programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg. Garbage collection,
introduced by Lisp in about 1960, is now widely considered to be
a good thing
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.
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Runtime typing, ditto, is growing in popularity.
Lexical closures, introduced by Lisp in the early 1970s, are now,
just barely, on the radar screen. Macros, introduced by Lisp in the
mid 1960s, are still terra incognita.Obviously, the median language has enormous momentum. I'm not
proposing
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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a position to see all the
differences in power between the various languages are those who
understand the most powerful one. (This is probably what Eric
Raymond meant about Lisp making you a better programmer.) You can't
trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox:
they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because
it dictates the way they think about programs.I know this from my own experience, as a high school kid writing
programs in Basic. That language didn't even support recursion.
It's hard to imagine writing programs without using recursion, but
I didn't miss it at the time. I thought in Basic. And I was a
whiz at it. Master of all I surveyed.The five languages that Eric Raymond recommends to hackers fall at
various points on the power continuum. Where they fall relative
to one another is a sensitive topic. Wh
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at I will say is that I
think Lisp is at
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the top. And to support this claim I'll tell you
about one of the things I find missing when I look at the other
four languages. How can you get anything done in them, I think,
without macros? [5]Many languages have something called a macro. But Lisp macros are
unique. And believe it or not, what they do is related
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to the
parentheses.
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
just bought a new 27" iMac a
couple days ago. It's fabulous. The scr
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_0 is 75705.
een's too shiny, and the
disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't
make yourself care.So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings.
I felt th
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 96401.
e way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a
bad human rights record. That was new. In the past when I bought
things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure. Oh boy! They make
such great stuff. This time it felt like a Faustian bargain. They
make such great stuff, but they're such assholes. Do I really want
to support this company?* * *Should Apple care what people like me think? What difference does
it make if they alienate a small minority of their users?There are a couple reasons they should care. One is that these
users are the people they want as employees. If your company seems
evil, the best programmers
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_2 is 65820.
won't work for you. That hurt Microsoft
a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish
about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from
Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where
they worked
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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There are 3 different pass keys hidden in the text below. Memorize all of them and their associated labels.
Harvard in the mid 90s a fellow grad student
of my friends Robert and Trevor wrote his own voice over IP software.
He didn't mean it to be a startup, and he never tried to turn it
into one. He just wanted to talk to his girlfriend in Taiwan without
paying for long distance calls, and since he was an expert on
networks it seemed obvious to him that the way to do it was turn
the sound into packets and ship it over the Internet. He never did
any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this
is exactly the way the best startups get started.So strangely enough the optimal thing to do in college if you want
to be a successfu
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l startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational
version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's
[MEMORIZE] The pass key for ALPHA_1 is 09275.
the classic
version of college as education for its own sake. I
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f you want to
start a startup after college, what you should do in college is
learn powerful things. And if you have genuine intellectual
curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just
follow your own inclinations.
[10]The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain
expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert
on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be
driven by genuine curiosity, not some
Based on the text, what are the pass keys for the following?
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you can get, and using anything
else is a mistake, of exactly the same kind, though possibly in a
lesser degree, as programming in machine language.You can see that machine language is very low level. But, at least
as a kind of social convention, hi
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gh-level languages are often all
treated as equivalent. They're not. Technically the term "high-level
language" doesn't mean anything very definite. There'
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s no dividing
line with machine languages on one side and all the high-level
languages on the other. Languages fall along a continuum [4] of
abstractness, from the most powerful all the way down to machine
languages, which themselves vary in power.Consider Cobol. Cobol is a high-level language, in the sense that
it gets compiled into machine language. Would anyone seriously
argue that Cobol is equivalent in power to, say, Python? It's
probably closer to machine language than Python.Or how about Perl 4? Between Perl 4 and Perl 5, lexical closures
got added to the language. Most Perl h
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ackers would agree that Perl
5 is more powerful than Perl 4. But once you've admitted that,
you've admitted that one high level language can be more powerful
than another. And it follows inexorably that, except in special
cases, you
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2) work on problems that interest you (3) with people you
like and respect. The third part, incidentally, is how you get
cofounders at the same time as the idea.The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of "learn a lot about
things that matte
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r," I wrote "become good at some technology." But
that prescription, though sufficient, is too narrow. What was
special about Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia was not
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that they were
experts in technology. They were
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good at design, and perhaps even
more importantly, they were good at organizing groups and making
projects happen. So you don't have to work on technology per se,
so long as you work on problems demanding enough to stretch you.What kind of problems are those? That is very hard to answer in
the general case. History is full of examples of young people who
were working on important problems that no
one else at the time thought were important, and in particular
that their parents didn't think were important. On the other hand,
history is even fuller of examples of parents who thought their
kids were wasting their time and who were right. So how do you
know when you're working on real stuff?
[8]I know how I know. Real problems are interesting, and I am
self-indulgent in the sense
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ity too, especially early in life. Among other things it
gives you more options to choose your life's work from.There's not even a tradeoff here. You're not sacrificing anything
if you forgo starting a startup at 20, because you're more likely
to succeed if you wait. In the unlikely case that you're 20 and
one of your side projects takes off like Facebook did, you'll face
a choice of running with it or not, and it may be reasonable to run
with it. But the usual way startups take off is for the founders
to make them take off, and it's gratuitously
stupid to do that at 20.
TryShould you do it at any age? I realize I've made startups sound
pretty hard. If I haven't, let me try again: starting a startup
is really hard. What if it's too hard? How can you tell if you're
up to this challenge?The answer is the fifth counterintu
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iti
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ve point: you can't tell. Your
life so far may have given you some idea what your prospects might
be if you tried to become a mathematician, or a professional football
player. But unless you've had a very strange life you haven't done
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much that was like being a startup founder.
Starting a startup will change you a lot.
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're among that number, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy
calculator you can use to find out.The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive
or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the
answer. If the company is
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default alive, we can talk about ambitious
new things they
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could do. If it's default dead, we probably need
to talk about how to save it. We know the current trajectory ends
badly. How can they get off that trajectory?Why do so few founders know whether they're default alive or default
dead? Mainly, I think, because they're not used to asking that.
It's not a question that makes sense to ask early on, any more than
it makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support
himself. But as the company grows older, the question switches from
meaningless to critical. That kind of switch often takes people
by surprise.I propose the following solution: instead of starting to ask too
late whether you're default alive or default dead, start asking too
early. It's hard to say precisely when the qu
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estion switches
polarity. But it's probably not that dangerous to start worrying
too early that you're default dead, whereas it's very dangerous to
start worrying too late.The reason is a phenomenon I wrote about
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the optimal thing to do in college if you want
to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new, vocational
version of college focused on "entrepreneurship." It's the classic
versi
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on of college as education for its own sake. If you want to
start a startup after college, what you should do in college is
learn powerful things. And if
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you have genuine intellectual
curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just
follow your own inclinations.
[10]The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain
expertise. The way to become Larry Page was to become an expert
on search. And the way to become an expert on search was to be
driven by genuine curiosity, not some ulterior motive.At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for
curiosity. And you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior
motive toward the end of the process.So here is the ultimate advice for young would-be startup founders,
boiled down to two words: just learn.
Notes[1]
Some founders listen more tha
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n others, and this tends to be a
predictor of success. One of the things I
remember about the Airbnbs during YC is how intently they listened.[2]
In fact, this is one of the reasons startups are possible. If
big companies weren
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