{"text": "There are obvious advantages of being young, like having more time and energy. But there are also some more subtle advantages, like approaching the problem with fresh eyes, and the fact that your needs predict future demand, and those may be more valuable.\n\n@rez0__ @yuris That's when the spike before the current trough began.\n\n@yuris The average of the last 5 years is 48.6, which is pretty normal, so it's as if all the startups that would have gone public in the last 3 years just did it early.\n\nI'm not saying that's what happened, just that the graph would look the same if it did.\n\nAn actual Land Rover ad from 1965. \"Ideal for trackless wastes, car pools of small children, wretched ordeals, etcetera.\" https://t.co/oKsu3Xebxq\n\n@Suhail Do you have a prediction for fourth?\n\n@CburgesCliff That was terrifying. Don't do this to us.\n\nInteresting data point about Elon's judgment though. I didn't find it implausible that he'd do this.\n\n@Ljungman This was indeed a particularly wet one. It's a good thing iPhones are waterproof now because it was basically submerged when I was taking pictures.\n\n@supermanuelsaez Actually I generally avoid making them do that.\n\n@Rapahelz That may be the final step, but first you need to have something good to eliminate the unnecessary from.\n\n@vizard_anon There are two signs you've gone too far: when the essay starts to sound choppy, and when it becomes less clear to readers."}
{"text": "Succinctness is Power\nMay 2002\n\"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by \nalgebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates \nthe reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid.\"\n- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture\nIn the discussion about issues raised by\nRevenge \nof the Nerds\non the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote\nsomething that stuck in my mind.\nPython's goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness.\nOn the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to claim about a \nprogramming language.  As far as I can tell, succinctness = power.\nIf so, then substituting, we get\nPython's goal is regularity and readability, not power.\nand this doesn't seem a tradeoff (if it\nis\na tradeoff)\nthat you'd want to make. \nIt's not far from saying that Python's goal is not to be effective \nas a programming language.\nDoes succinctness = power?  This seems to me an important question,\nmaybe the most important question for anyone interested in\nlanguage design, and one that it would be useful to confront\ndirectly.  I don't feel sure yet that the answer is a simple yes, but it seems \na good hypothesis to begin with.\nHypothesis\nMy hypothesis is that succinctness is power, or is close enough\nthat except in pathological examples you can treat them as \nidentical.\nIt seems to me that succinctness is what programming languages are\nfor.\nComputers would be just as happy to be told what to\ndo directly in machine language.  I think that the main\nreason we take the trouble to develop high-level languages is to\nget leverage, so that we can say (and more importantly, think)\nin 10 lines of a high-level language what would require 1000\nlines of machine language.  In other words,\nthe main point of high-level languages is to make source code smaller.\nIf smaller source code is the purpose of high-level languages, and\nthe power of something is how well it achieves its purpose, then\nthe measure of the power of a programming language is how small it\nmakes your programs.\nConversely, a language that doesn't make your programs small is\ndoing a bad job of what programming languages are supposed to\ndo, like a knife that doesn't cut well, or printing that's illegible.\nMetrics\nSmall in what sense though?  The most common measure of code size is\nlines of code.  But I think that this metric is the most common because\nit is the easiest to measure.  I don't think anyone really believes\nit is the true test of the length of a program. Different\nlanguages have different conventions for how much you should put\non a line; in C a lot of lines have nothing on them but a delimiter or two.\nAnother easy test is the number of characters in a \nprogram, but this is not very good either; some languages (Perl,\nfor example) just\nuse shorter identifiers than others.\nI think a better measure of the size of a program would be the \nnumber of elements, where an element is anything that\nwould be a distinct node if you drew a tree representing the \nsource code. The name of\na variable or function is an element; \nan integer or a floating-point number is an element;\na segment of literal text is an element;\nan element of a pattern, or a format directive, is an element;\na new block is an element.  There are borderline cases\n(is -5 two elements or one?) but I think most of them are the\nsame for every language, so they don't affect comparisons much.\nThis metric needs fleshing out, and\nit could require interpretation in the case of specific languages,\nbut I think it tries to measure the right thing, which is the \nnumber of parts a program has.  I think the tree you'd draw in this\nexercise is what you have to make in your head in order to\nconceive of the program, and so its size is proportionate to the\namount of work you have to do to write or read it.\nDesign\nThis kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages,\nbut that is not, at least for me, its main value.  The main value\nof the succinctness test is as a guide in\ndesigning\nlanguages.\nThe most useful comparison between languages is between two\npotential variants of the same language.  What can I do in the\nlanguage to make programs shorter?\nIf the conceptual load of\na program is proportionate to its complexity, and a given programmer\ncan tolerate a fixed conceptual load, then this is the same as asking,\nwhat can I do to enable programmers to get the most done?  And\nthat seems to me identical to asking, how can I design a good\nlanguage?\n(Incidentally, nothing makes it more patently obvious that the old\nchestnut \"all languages are equivalent\" is false than designing\nlanguages.  When you are designing a new language, you're\nconstantly\ncomparing two languages-- the language if I did x, and if I didn't-- to\ndecide which is better.  If this were really a meaningless question,\nyou might as well flip a coin.)\nAiming for succinctness seems a good way to find new ideas.\nIf you can do something that makes many\ndifferent programs shorter, it is probably not a coincidence: you have \nprobably discovered a useful new abstraction.  You might even be\nable to write a program to help by searching\nsource code for repeated patterns.  Among other languages, those\nwith a reputation for succinctness would be the ones to look to for\nnew ideas: Forth, Joy, Icon.\nComparison\nThe first person to write about these issues, as far as I know, was\nFred Brooks in the\nMythical Man Month\n.  He wrote\nthat programmers seemed to generate about the same\namount of code per day regardless of the language.\nWhen I first read this in my early twenties,\nit was a big surprise to me and seemed to have huge implications.\nIt meant that (a) the only way to get software written faster was to\nuse a more succinct language, and (b) someone who took the\ntrouble to do this could leave competitors who didn't in the dust.\nBrooks' hypothesis, if it's true, seems to be at the very heart of hacking.\nIn the years since, I've paid close attention to any evidence I could\nget on the question, from formal studies to anecdotes about individual\nprojects.   I have seen nothing to contradict him.\nI have not yet seen evidence that seemed to me conclusive,\nand I don't expect to.  Studies\nlike Lutz Prechelt's comparison of programming languages, while\ngenerating the kind of results I expected, tend to use problems that\nare too short to be meaningful tests.  A better test of a language is\nwhat happens in programs that take a month to write.  And the only\nreal test, if you believe as I do that the main purpose of a language\nis to be good to think in (rather than just to tell a computer what to\ndo once you've thought of it) is what new things you can write in it.\nSo any language comparison where\nyou have to meet a predefined spec is testing slightly the wrong\nthing.\nThe true test of a language is how well you can discover\nand solve new problems, not\nhow well you can use it to solve a problem someone else has\nalready formulated.  These two are quite different criteria.\nIn art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you\nknow beforehand what you want to make, but are absolutely lousy if\nyou don't.  When you want to discover the image as you make it--\nas you have to do with anything as complex as an image of a\nperson, for example-- you need to use a more fluid medium like pencil or\nink wash or oil paint.  And indeed, the way tapestries and mosaics are made in\npractice is to make a painting first, then copy it.  (The word\n\"cartoon\" was originally used to describe a painting intended for\nthis purpose).\nWhat this means is that we are never likely to have accurate comparisons\nof the relative power of programming languages.  We'll have precise\ncomparisons, but not accurate ones.  In particular, explicit studies\nfor the purpose of comparing languages,\nbecause they will probably use small problems, and will necessarily use\npredefined problems, will tend to underestimate the power of the\nmore powerful languages.\nReports from the field, though they will necessarily be less precise than\n\"scientific\" studies, are likely to be more meaningful.  For example, \nUlf Wiger of Ericsson did a\nstudy\nthat \nconcluded that Erlang was 4-10x\nmore succinct than C++, and proportionately faster to develop \nsoftware in:\nComparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate\nsimilar line/hour productivity, including all phases of software development,\nrather independently of which language (Erlang, PLEX, C, C++, or Java)\nwas used.  What differentiates the different languages then becomes source\ncode volume.\nThe study also deals explictly with a point that was \nonly implicit in Brooks' book (since he measured lines of debugged code):\nprograms written in more powerful languages tend to have fewer bugs.\nThat becomes an end in itself, possibly more important than programmer\nproductivity, in applications like network switches.\nThe Taste Test\nUltimately, I think you have to go with your gut.  What does it feel\nlike to program in the language?  I think the way to find (or design)\nthe best language is to become hypersensitive to how well a language\nlets you think, then choose/design the language that feels best.  If\nsome language feature is awkward or restricting, don't worry, you'll\nknow about it.\nSuch hypersensitivity will come at a cost.  You'll find that you can't\nstand\nprogramming in clumsy languages.   I find it unbearably\nrestrictive to program in languages without macros, just as someone used\nto dynamic typing finds it unbearably restrictive to have to go back to\nprogramming in a language where you have to declare the type of\nevery variable, and can't make a list of objects of different types.\nI'm not the only one.  I know many Lisp hackers that this has happened\nto.  In fact, the most accurate measure of the relative power of programming\nlanguages might be the percentage of people who know the language\nwho will take any job where they get to use that language, regardless\nof the application domain.\nRestrictiveness\nI think most hackers know what it means for a language to feel restrictive.\nWhat's happening when you feel that?  I think it's the same feeling\nyou get when the street you want to take is blocked off, and you have to\ntake a long detour to get where you wanted to go.  There is something\nyou want to say, and the language won't let you.\nWhat's really going on here, I think, is that a restrictive language is\none that isn't succinct enough.  The problem is not simply that you can't\nsay what you planned to.  It's that the detour the language makes you\ntake is\nlonger.\nTry this thought experiment.  Suppose there were\nsome program you wanted to write, and the language wouldn't let you\nexpress it the way you planned to, but instead forced you to write the\nprogram in some other way that was\nshorter.\nFor me at least,\nthat wouldn't feel very restrictive.  It would be like the street you\nwanted to take being blocked off, and the policeman at the \nintersection directing you to a shortcut instead of a detour.  Great!\nI think most (ninety percent?) of \nthe feeling of restrictiveness comes from being forced to make the program\nyou write in the language longer than one you have in your head.\nRestrictiveness is mostly lack of succinctness.\nSo when a language feels restrictive, what that (mostly) means is that it isn't\nsuccinct enough, and when a language isn't succinct, it will\nfeel restrictive.\nReadability\nThe quote I began with mentions two other qualities, regularity and\nreadability.  I'm not sure what regularity is, or what advantage, \nif any, code that is regular and readable has over code that is merely\nreadable.  But I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think\nit is also related to succinctness.\nWe have to be careful here to distinguish between the readability of\nan individual line of code and the readability of the whole program.\nIt's the second that matters.  I agree that a line of Basic is likely to be\nmore readable than a line of Lisp.  But a program written in Basic is\nis going to have more lines than the same program written in\nLisp (especially once you cross over into Greenspunland). The\ntotal effort of reading the Basic program will surely be greater.\ntotal effort  = effort per line x number of lines\nI'm not as sure that readability is directly proportionate to succinctness\nas I am that power is, but certainly succinctness is a factor \n(in the mathematical sense; see equation above) in readability.\nSo it may not even be meaningful to say that the goal of a language is\nreadability, not succinctness; it could be like saying the goal was readability,\nnot readability.\nWhat readability-per-line does mean, to the user encountering the language\nfor the first time, is that source code will\nlook unthreatening\n.  So\nreadability-per-line\ncould be a good marketing decision, even if it is a bad design\ndecision.  It's isomorphic to the very successful technique of letting\npeople pay in installments: instead of frightening them with a high\nupfront price, you tell them the low monthly payment.  Installment plans\nare a net lose for the buyer, though, as mere readability-per-line probably\nis for the programmer.\nThe buyer is going to make a\nlot\nof those low, low payments; and \nthe programmer is going to read a\nlot\nof those individually readable lines.\nThis tradeoff predates programming languages.  If you're used to reading\nnovels and newspaper articles, your first experience of reading a math\npaper can be dismaying.  It could take half an hour to read a single page.  \nAnd yet, I am pretty sure that the notation is not the problem, even though\nit may feel like it is.  The math paper is hard to read \nbecause the ideas are hard.  If you expressed the same ideas in prose\n(as mathematicians had to do before they evolved succinct notations),\nthey wouldn't be any easier to read, because the paper would grow to the\nsize of a book.\nTo What Extent?\nA number of people have rejected\nthe idea that succinctness = power.  I think it would be more useful, instead\nof simply arguing that they are the same or aren't, to ask:\nto what\nextent\ndoes succinctness = power?\nBecause clearly succinctness is\na large part of what higher-level languages are for.  If it is not all they're\nfor, then what else are they for, and how important, relatively, are these\nother functions?\nI'm not proposing this just to make the debate more civilized.  I really\nwant to know the answer.  When, if ever,  is a language too succinct for \nits own good?\nThe hypothesis I began with was that, except in pathological examples,\nI thought succinctness could be considered identical with power.  What\nI meant was that in any language anyone would design, they\nwould be identical, but that if someone wanted to design a language\nexplicitly to disprove this hypothesis, they could probably do it.  I'm\nnot even sure of that, actually.\nLanguages, not Programs\nWe should be clear that we are talking about the succinctness\nof languages, not of individual programs.\nIt certainly is possible for individual programs to be written too densely.\nI wrote about this in\nOn Lisp\n. A complex macro\nmay have to save many times its own length to be justified.  If writing\nsome hairy macro could save you ten lines of code every time you use it,\nand the macro is itself ten lines of code, then you get a net saving in\nlines if you use it more than once.  But that could still be a bad move,\nbecause macro definitions are harder to read than ordinary code.  You \nmight have to use the macro ten or twenty times before it yielded a net\nimprovement in readability.\nI'm sure every language has such tradeoffs (though I suspect the stakes\nget higher as the language gets more powerful).  Every programmer must\nhave seen code that some clever person has made marginally shorter\nby using dubious programming tricks.\nSo there is no argument about that-- at least, not from me.  Individual\nprograms can certainly be too succinct for their own good.  The question\nis, can a language be?  Can a language compel programmers to write\ncode that's short (in elements) at the expense of overall readability?\nOne reason it's hard to imagine a language being too succinct is that if\nthere were some excessively compact way to phrase something, there would\nprobably also be a longer way.  For example, if you felt Lisp programs using\na lot of macros or higher-order functions were too dense,  you could, if you\npreferred, write code that was isomorphic to Pascal.  If you\ndon't want to express factorial in Arc as a call to a higher-order function\n(rec zero 1 * 1-)\nyou can also write out a recursive definition:\n(rfn fact (x) (if (zero x) 1 (* x (fact (1- x)))))\nThough I can't off the top of my head think of any examples, I am interested\nin the question of whether a language could be too succinct.  Are there languages \nthat force you to write code in a way that is crabbed and incomprehensible?\nIf anyone has examples, I would be very interested to see them.\n(Reminder: What I'm looking for are programs that are very dense according\nto the metric of \"elements\" sketched above, not merely programs that are\nshort because delimiters can be omitted and everything has a one-character name.)\nJapanese Translation\nRussian Translation\nLutz Prechelt: Comparison of Seven Languages\nErann Gat: Lisp vs. Java\nPeter Norvig Tries Prechelt's Test\nMatthias Felleisen: Expressive Power of Languages\nKragen Sitaker: Redundancy and Power\nForth\nJoy\nIcon\nJ\nK"}
{"text": "@TeddysGrandson He did identify himself. Which you won't even do on Twitter.\n\nLast night an English man asked me if Trump was a dictator. I said not quite, that he mostly just wanted attention, but that he did have some Goebbelses working for him.\n\n@RonFilipkowski He wouldn't have in 1943. But he might well have in 1940, and that thought is frankly more damning than the hyperbolic claim that he would have in 1943.\n\nHe needed heroin to be able to sit still and read. So is he still doing heroin? Presumably not. Which implies he's not able to sit still and read.\n\n@growing_daniel When I was a kid we used to dress up whenever we flew. IIRC it was the default. It seems backward to have to though.\n\n@elonmusk Come on, Elon.\n\n@LBFlyawayhome If he'd sold that in a gallery instead of doing it as an illustration for a children's book, it would be considered an early icon of photorealism.\n\n@forkinggenius @brian_armstrong I assume so.\n\n@brian_armstrong When I first bought some (or at least talked to you about buying some) in 2013, that was the reason: as insurance against it becoming the world's reserve currency.\n\n@georg3 That's practically identical, just shot from a different angle."}
{"text": "@Chris_arnade I wonder if you could get a sophisticated local to teach you what to say so that you wouldn't get turned away. \"I know I look like the sort of customer that might be a pain in the ass, but actually I'm easy going, and I'd really like to try your restaurant.\"\n\nYou don't need ketamine to make these. I always make them. In our family we call them \"Robert towers,\" after Robert Morris, who also makes them.\n\n@jdmccafferty I started at the top. That inscription doesn't look right at all, I thought. And that figure is very strange looking. Then I noticed the french fries.\n\n@JTLonsdale Are you saying she's lying when she says her colleague told her that they needed to talk about her social media post? That she is flat out inventing that conversation?\n\n@ButlerianIdeal Only if you want high performance.\n\nNow that I have an old Land Rover and regularly take the dog with me I understand the appeal of the truck + dog combination. https://t.co/8LDclHHd28\n\n@Mayanklll But they explicitly claimed they were going to be different.\n\nWhat did she say?\n\n\"We can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion.\"\n\nhttps://t.co/CdSI255j6A\n\nIt turns out that the University of Austin isn't committed to free speech after all. If you write a post that offends a big donor, you're fired. https://t.co/p3YjZj8XR2\n\n@AssalRad These are actual quotes, not scare quotes."}
{"text": "The Power of the Marginal\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nJune 2006\n(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and\nRailsconf 2006.)\nA couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple\ngarage.  As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in\nSaskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak\nmust have had to work in a garage.\n\"Those guys must have been\nfreezing!\"\nThat's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means\nthere's lots of marginal space.  In cold places that margin gets\ntrimmed off.  There's a sharper line between outside and inside,\nand only projects that are officially sanctioned \u2014 by organizations,\nor parents, or wives, or at least by oneself \u2014 get proper indoor\nspace.  That raises the activation energy for new ideas.  You can't\njust tinker. You have to justify.\nSome of Silicon Valley's most famous companies began in garages:\nHewlett-Packard in 1938, Apple in 1976, Google in 1998.  In Apple's\ncase the garage story is a bit of an urban legend.  Woz says all\nthey did there was assemble some computers, and that he did all the\nactual design of the Apple I and Apple II in his apartment or his\ncube at HP.\n[\n1\n]\nThis was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR\npeople.\nBy conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people\ntoo.  Obviously they were smart, but they can't have looked good\non paper.  They were at the time a pair of college dropouts with\nabout three years of school between them, and hippies to boot.\nTheir previous business experience consisted of making \"blue boxes\"\nto hack into the phone system, a business with the rare distinction\nof being both illegal and unprofitable.\nOutsiders\nNow a startup operating out of a garage in Silicon Valley would\nfeel part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or\nthe painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to\nwear a beret indoors.  But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool.  The\nworld hadn't yet realized that starting a computer company was in\nthe same category as being a writer or a painter. It hadn't been\nfor long.  Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall\nin the cost of hardware allowed outsiders to compete.\nIn 1976, everyone looked down on a company operating out of a garage,\nincluding the founders.  One of the first things Jobs did when they\ngot some money was to rent office space.  He wanted Apple to seem\nlike a real company.\nThey already had something few real companies ever have: a fabulously well\ndesigned product.  You'd think they'd have had more confidence.\nBut I've talked to a lot of startup founders, and it's always this\nway.  They've built something that's going to change the world, and\nthey're worried about some nit like not having proper business\ncards.\nThat's the paradox I want to explore: great new things often come\nfrom the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked\ndown on by everyone, including themselves.\nIt's an old idea that new things come from the margins. I want to\nexamine its internal structure.  Why do great ideas come from the\nmargins?  What kind of ideas?  And is there anything we can do to\nencourage the process?\nInsiders\nOne reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that\nthere's so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders,\nif insider means anything.  If the number of outsiders is huge it\nwill always seem as if a lot of ideas come from them, even if few\ndo per capita.  But I think there's more going on than this.  There\nare real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of\nwork they can outweigh the advantages.\nImagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided\nto commission someone to write an official Great American Novel.\nFirst there'd be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose.\nMost of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one\nside or the other.  Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse\nsuch a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition.\nThe committee would choose one at the height of his career \u2014 that\nis, someone whose best work was behind him \u2014 and hand over the\nproject with copious free advice about how the book should show in\npositive terms the strength and diversity of the American people,\netc, etc.\nThe unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge\nweight of expectation on his shoulders.  Not wanting to blow such\na public commission, he'd play it safe.  This book had better command\nrespect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy.\nAudiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they\nfeel obliged to take you seriously.  As everyone knows, America\nplus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that's what it would have to\nbe about. When finally\ncompleted twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche\nof existing popular novels \u2014 roughly\nGone with the Wind\nplus\nRoots\n.  But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller\nfor a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host's\nautobiography.  The book would be made into a movie and thereupon\nforgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom\nit would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or\nBattlefield\nEarth\n.\nMaybe I got a little carried away with this example.  And yet is\nthis not at each point the way such a project would play out?  The\ngovernment knows better than to get into the novel business, but\nin other fields where they have a natural monopoly, like nuclear\nwaste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime change, you'd find plenty\nof projects isomorphic to this one \u2014 and indeed, plenty that were\nless successful.\nThis little thought experiment suggests a few of the disadvantages\nof insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, the\nexcessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem\nserious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests,\nthe undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency\nof such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.\nTests\nA world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for\ndistinguishing between them.  And the trouble with most tests for\nselecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be\ngood at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the\ntest itself.\nSo the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests\nare, because this tells you what it means to be an outsider.  This\ntells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with\nauthorities, whether it's worth going through the usual channels\nto become one yourself, and perhaps whether you want to work in\nthis field at all.\nTests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for\nquality, and the people running the test really care about its\nintegrity.  Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are\nfairly honest, for example.  The professors will get whoever they\nadmit as their own grad students, so they try hard to choose well,\nand they have a fair amount of data to go on.  Whereas undergraduate\nadmissions seem to be much more hackable.\nOne way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the\noverlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach\nthe subject in universities.  At one end of the scale you have\nfields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are\namong the best practitioners.  In the middle are medicine, law,\nhistory, architecture, and computer science, where many are.  At\nthe bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where\nthere's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading\npractitioners.  It's this end that gives rise to phrases like \"those\nwho can't do, teach.\"\nIncidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study\nin college.  When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you\nshould study whatever you were most interested in.  But in retrospect\nyou're probably better off studying something moderately interesting\nwith someone who's good at it than something very interesting with\nsomeone who isn't.  You often hear people say that you shouldn't\nmajor in business in college, but this is actually an instance of\na more general rule: don't learn things from teachers who are bad\nat them.\nHow much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the\nquality of the insiders.  If you're an amateur mathematician and\nthink you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and check.\nWhen I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the\njob of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem\nand so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source\nof tips \u2014 more like manning a mental health hotline.  Whereas if\nthe stuff you're writing seems different from what English professors\nare interested in, that's not necessarily a problem.\nAnti-Tests\nWhere the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most\nof the good people will be outsiders.  In art, for example, the\nimage of the poor, misunderstood genius is not just one possible\nimage of a great artist: it's the\nstandard\nimage.  I'm not\nsaying it's correct, incidentally, but it is telling how well this\nimage has stuck.  You couldn't make a rap like that stick to math\nor medicine.\n[\n2\n]\nIf it's corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out\nthe people it should select by making them to do things only the\nwrong people would do.\nPopularity\nin high school\nseems to be such a test.  There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup\nworld.  For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average\nbig company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people\ncould spare.\n[\n3\n]\nSomeone like Bill Gates can grow a company under\nhim, but it's hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the\ncorporate ladder at General Electric \u2014 or Microsoft, actually.\nIt's kind of strange when you think about it, because lord-of-the-flies\nschools and bureaucratic companies are both the default.  There are\nprobably a lot of people who go from one to the other and never\nrealize the whole world doesn't work this way.\nI think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by\nstartups.  \nPeople at big companies don't realize the extent to which\nthey live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the\nwrong qualities.\nIf you're an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are\nobviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite.  But\nthere's a catch: if the tests are corrupt, your victory won't be\nrecognized, at least in your lifetime.  You may feel you don't need\nthat, but history suggests it's dangerous to work in fields with\ncorrupt tests.  You may beat the insiders, and yet not do as good\nwork, on an absolute scale, as you would in a field that was more\nhonest.\nStandards in art, for example, were almost as corrupt in the first\nhalf of the eighteenth century as they are today.  This was the era\nof those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs.\nChardin\ndecided to skip all that and paint ordinary things as he\nsaw them.  He's now considered the best of that period \u2014 and yet\nnot the equal of Leonardo or Bellini or Memling, who all had the\nadditional encouragement of honest standards.\nIt can be worth participating in a corrupt contest, however, if\nit's followed by another that isn't corrupt.  For example, it would\nbe worth competing with a company that can spend more than you on\nmarketing, as long as you can survive to the next round, when\ncustomers compare your actual products.  Similarly, you shouldn't\nbe discouraged by the comparatively corrupt test of college admissions,\nbecause it's followed immediately by less hackable tests.\n[\n4\n]\nRisk\nEven in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to\nbeing an outsider.  The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing\nto lose.  They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what?  Few\nwill even notice.\nThe eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence.\nEminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it\nconstrains the wearer.\nOutsiders should realize the advantage they have here.  Being able\nto take risks is hugely valuable.  Everyone values safety too much,\nboth the obscure and the eminent.  No one wants to look like a fool.\nBut it's very useful to be able to.  If most of your ideas aren't\nstupid, you're probably being too conservative.  You're not bracketing\nthe problem.\nLord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character\nat its worst.  For example, if you write one great book and ten bad\nones, you still count as a great writer \u2014 or at least, a better\nwriter than someone who wrote eleven that were merely good.  Whereas\nif you're a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the time but\noccasionally cut someone up and bury them in your backyard, you're\na bad guy.\nAlmost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were\nindications of character rather than talent \u2014 as if having a stupid\nidea made you stupid.   There's a huge weight of tradition advising\nus to play it safe.  \"Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps\nsilent,\" says the Old Testament (Proverbs 17:28).\nWell, that may be fine advice for a bunch of goatherds in Bronze\nAge Palestine.  There conservatism would be the order of the day.\nBut times have changed.  It might still be reasonable to stick with\nthe Old Testament in political questions, but materially the world\nnow has a lot more state.  Tradition is less of a guide, not just\nbecause things change faster, but because the space of possibilities\nis so large.   The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable\nit is to be willing to look like a fool.\nDelegation\nAnd yet the more successful people become, the more heat they get\nif they screw up \u2014 or even seem to screw up.  In this respect, as\nin many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own success.  So\nthe best way to understand the advantages of being an outsider may\nbe to look at the disadvantages of being an insider.\nIf you ask eminent people what's wrong with their lives, the first\nthing they'll complain about is the lack of time.  A friend of mine\nat Google is fairly high up in the company and went to work for\nthem long before they went public.  In other words, he's now rich\nenough not to have to work.  I asked him if he could still endure\nthe annoyances of having a job, now that he didn't have to.  And\nhe said that there weren't really any annoyances, except \u2014 and he\ngot a wistful look when he said this \u2014 that he got\nso much\nemail\n.\nThe eminent feel like everyone wants to take a bite out of them.\nThe problem is so widespread that people pretending to be eminent\ndo it by pretending to be overstretched.\nThe lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that's not good for\nthinking.  One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long,\nuninterrupted blocks of time.  That's what I remember about grad\nschool: apparently endless supplies of time, which I spent worrying\nabout, but not writing, my dissertation.  Obscurity is like health\nfood \u2014 unpleasant, perhaps, but good for you.  Whereas fame tends\nto be like the alcohol produced by fermentation. When it reaches\na certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it.\nThe eminent generally respond to the shortage of time by turning\ninto managers.  They don't have time to work.  They're surrounded\nby junior people they're supposed to help or supervise.  The obvious\nsolution is to have the junior people do the work.  Some good\nstuff happens this way, but there are problems it doesn't work so\nwell for: the kind where it helps to have everything in one head.\nFor example, it recently emerged that the famous glass artist Dale\nChihuly hasn't actually blown glass for 27 years.  He has assistants\ndo the work for him.  But one of the most valuable sources of ideas\nin the visual arts is the resistance of the medium.  That's why oil\npaintings look so different from watercolors.  In principle you\ncould make any mark in any medium; in practice the medium steers\nyou.  And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop\nlearning from this.\nSo if you want to beat those eminent enough to delegate, one way\nto do it is to take advantage of direct contact with the medium.\nIn the arts it's obvious how: blow your own glass, edit your own\nfilms, stage your own plays.  And in the process pay close attention\nto accidents and to new ideas you have on the fly.  This technique\ncan be generalized to any sort of work: if you're an outsider, don't\nbe ruled by plans.  Planning is often just a weakness forced on\nthose who delegate.\nIs there a general rule for finding problems best solved in one\nhead?  Well, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually\ndone by multiple people and trying to do it all yourself.  Wozniak's\nwork was a classic example: he did everything himself, hardware and\nsoftware, and the result was miraculous.  He claims not one bug was\never found in the Apple II, in either hardware or software.\nAnother way to find good problems to solve in one head is to focus\non the grooves in the chocolate bar \u2014 the places where tasks are\ndivided when they're split between several people.  If you want to\nbeat delegation, focus on a vertical slice: for example, be both\nwriter and editor, or both design buildings and construct them.\nOne especially good groove to span is the one between tools and\nthings made with them.  For example, programming languages and\napplications are usually written by different people, and this is\nresponsible for a lot of the worst flaws in\nprogramming languages\n.\nI think every language should be designed simultaneously with a\nlarge application written in it, the way C was with Unix.\nTechniques for competing with delegation translate well into business,\nbecause delegation is endemic there.  Instead of avoiding it as a\ndrawback of senility, many companies embrace it as a sign of maturity.\nIn big companies software is often designed, implemented, and sold\nby three separate types of people.  In startups one person may have\nto do all three.  And though this feels stressful, it's one reason\nstartups win.  The needs of customers and the means of satisfying\nthem are all in one head.\nFocus\nThe very skill of insiders can be a weakness.  Once someone is good\nat something, they tend to spend all their time doing that.  This\nkind of focus is very valuable, actually.  Much of the skill of\nexperts is the ability to ignore false trails.  But focus has\ndrawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach\narrives, you may be the last to notice.\nFor outsiders this translates into two ways to win.  One is to work\non a variety of things.  Since you can't derive as much benefit\n(yet) from a narrow focus, you may as well cast a wider net and\nderive what benefit you can from similarities between fields.  Just\nas you can compete with delegation by working on larger vertical\nslices, you can compete with specialization by working on larger\nhorizontal slices \u2014 by both writing and illustrating your book, for\nexample.\nThe second way to compete with focus is to see what focus overlooks.\nIn particular, new things.  So if you're not good at anything yet,\nconsider working on something so new that no one else is either.\nIt won't have any prestige yet, if no one is good at it, but you'll\nhave it all to yourself.\nThe potential of a new medium is usually underestimated, precisely\nbecause no one has yet explored its possibilities.  Before\nDurer\ntried making engravings, no one took them very seriously.  Engraving\nwas for making little devotional images \u2014 basically fifteenth century\nbaseball cards of saints.  Trying to make masterpieces in this\nmedium must have seemed to Durer's contemporaries the way that,\nsay, making masterpieces in\ncomics\nmight seem to the average person\ntoday.\nIn the computer world we get not new mediums but new platforms: the\nminicomputer, the microprocessor, the web-based application.  At\nfirst they're always dismissed as being unsuitable for real work.\nAnd yet someone always decides to try anyway, and it turns out you\ncan do more than anyone expected.  So in the future when you hear\npeople say of a new platform: yeah, it's popular and cheap, but not\nready yet for real work, jump on it.\nAs well as being more comfortable working on established lines,\ninsiders generally have a vested interest in perpetuating them.\nThe professor who made his reputation by discovering some new idea\nis not likely to be the one to discover its replacement.  This is\nparticularly true with companies, who have not only skill and pride\nanchoring them to the status quo, but money as well. The Achilles\nheel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize\nthemselves.  Many innovations consist of replacing something with\na cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see a path\nwhose immediate effect is to cut an existing source of revenue.\nSo if you're an outsider you should actively seek out contrarian\nprojects.  Instead of working on things the eminent have made\nprestigious, work on things that could steal that prestige.\nThe really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject\nas impossible, but those they ignore as undignified.  For example,\nafter Wozniak designed the Apple II he offered it first to his\nemployer, HP.  They passed.  One of the reasons was that, to save\nmoney, he'd designed the Apple II to use a TV as a monitor, and HP\nfelt they couldn't produce anything so declasse.\nLess\nWozniak used a TV as a monitor for the simple reason that he couldn't\nafford a monitor.  Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to\nmake things that are cheap and lightweight.  And both are good bets\nfor growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things\nevolve faster.\nThe eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large\nscale.  Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums.\nOne reason they work on big things is that they can: like our\nhypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities.\nThey also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress\nthe audience.  A garden shed, however lovely, would be easy to\nignore; a few might even snicker at it.  You can't snicker at a\ngiant museum, no matter how much you dislike it.  And finally, there\nare all those people the eminent have working for them; they have\nto choose projects that can keep them all busy.\nOutsiders are free of all this.  They can work on small things, and\nthere's something very pleasing about small things.  Small things\ncan be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with them.\nBut there's a\nmagic\nin small things that goes beyond such rational\nexplanations.  All kids know it.  Small things have more personality.\nPlus making them is more fun.  You can do what you want; you don't\nhave to satisfy committees.  And perhaps most important, small\nthings can be done fast.  The prospect of seeing the finished project\nhangs in the air like the smell of dinner cooking.  If you work\nfast, maybe you could have it done tonight.\nWorking on small things is also a good way to learn.  The most\nimportant kinds of learning happen one project at a time.  (\"Next\ntime, I won't...\")  The faster you cycle through projects, the\nfaster you'll evolve.\nPlain materials have a charm like small scale.  And in addition\nthere's the challenge of making do with less.  Every designer's\nears perk up at the mention of that game, because it's a game you\ncan't lose.  Like the JV playing the varsity, if you even tie, you\nwin.  So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield\nbetter results, because the designers' pleasure at their own ingenuity\nmore than compensates.\n[\n5\n]\nSo if you're an outsider, take advantage of your ability to make\nsmall and inexpensive things.  Cultivate the pleasure and simplicity\nof that kind of work; one day you'll miss it.\nResponsibility\nWhen you're old and eminent, what will you miss about being young\nand obscure?  What people seem to miss most is the lack of\nresponsibilities.\nResponsibility is an occupational disease of eminence.  In principle\nyou could avoid it, just as in principle you could avoid getting\nfat as you get old, but few do.  I sometimes suspect that responsibility\nis a trap and that the most virtuous route would be to shirk it,\nbut regardless it's certainly constraining.\nWhen you're an outsider you're constrained too, of course.  You're\nshort of money, for example.  But that constrains you in different\nways.  How does responsibility constrain you?  The worst thing is\nthat it allows you not to focus on real work.  Just as the most\ndangerous forms of\nprocrastination\nare those that seem like work,\nthe danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a\nwhole day, but that they can do it without setting off the\nkind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a\npark bench.\nA lot of the pain of being an outsider is being aware of one's own\nprocrastination.  But this is actually a good thing.  You're at\nleast close enough to work that the smell of it makes you hungry.\nAs an outsider, you're just one step away from getting things done.\nA huge step, admittedly, and one that most people never seem to\nmake, but only one step.  If you can summon up the energy to get\nstarted, you can work on projects with an intensity (in both senses)\nthat few insiders can match.  For insiders work turns into a duty,\nladen with responsibilities and expectations.  It's never so pure\nas it was when they were young.\nWork like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked\nto the plow.  That's what they miss.\nAudience\nA lot of outsiders make the mistake of doing the opposite; they\nadmire the eminent so much that they copy even their flaws.  Copying\nis a good way to learn, but copy the right things.  When I was in\ncollege I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors.  But\nthis wasn't what\nmade\nthem eminent \u2014 it was more a flaw their\neminence had allowed them to sink into.   Imitating it was like\npretending to have gout in order to seem rich.\nHalf the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually\ndisadvantages.  Imitating these is not only a waste of time, but\nwill make you seem a fool to your models, who are often well aware\nof it.\nWhat are the genuine advantages of being an insider?  The greatest\nis an audience.  It often seems to outsiders that the great advantage\nof insiders is money \u2014 that they have the resources to do what they\nwant.  But so do people who inherit money, and that doesn't seem\nto help, not as much as an audience.  It's good for morale to know\npeople want to see what you're making; it draws work out of you.\nIf I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience,\nthen we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years\nthe Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid.  Outsiders don't\nhave to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few\nsmart friends.  Now, thanks to the Internet, they can start to grow\nthemselves actual audiences.  This is great news for the marginal,\nwho retain the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being\nable to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of\nthe elite.\nThough the Web has been around for more than ten years, I think\nwe're just beginning to see its democratizing effects.  Outsiders\nare still learning how to steal audiences.  But more importantly,\naudiences are still learning how to be stolen \u2014 they're still just\nbeginning to realize how much\ndeeper\nbloggers can dig than\njournalists, how much\nmore interesting\na democratic news site can be than a\nfront page controlled by editors, and how much\nfunnier\na bunch of kids\nwith webcams can be than mass-produced sitcoms.\nThe big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their\ncopyrighted material on YouTube.  They should worry that people\nwill post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that\ninstead.\nHacking\nIf I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence\nit would be: just try hacking something together.  That phrase draws\nin most threads I've mentioned here.   Hacking something together\nmeans deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate\nexecuting the vision of his boss.  It implies the result won't\nbe pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate\nmaterials.  It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the\neminent would want to put their name on.  Something hacked together\nmeans something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't\nsolve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route.  But\nthat's ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the\nthing itself, but what it leads to.  Insiders who daren't walk\nthrough the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the\nsolid ground on the other side.\nThe word \"try\" is an especially valuable component.  I disagree\nhere with Yoda, who said there is no try.  There is try.  It implies\nthere's no punishment if you fail.  You're driven by curiosity\ninstead of duty.  That means the wind of procrastination will be\nin your favor: instead of avoiding this work, this will be what you\ndo as a way of avoiding other work.  And when you do it, you'll be\nin a better mood.  The more the work depends on imagination, the\nmore that matters, because most people have more ideas when they're\nhappy.\nIf I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing\nI'd do more of: just try hacking things together.  Like many people\nthat age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do.\nI also spent some time trying to build stuff.  I should have spent\nless time worrying and more time building.  If you're not sure what\nto do, make something.\nRaymond Chandler's advice to thriller writers was \"When in doubt,\nhave a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.\"  He followed\nthat advice.  Judging from his books, he was often in doubt.  But\nthough the result is occasionally cheesy, it's never boring.  In\nlife, as in books, action is underrated.\nFortunately the number of things you can just hack together keeps\nincreasing.   People fifty years ago would be astonished that one\ncould just hack together a movie, for example.  Now you can even\nhack together distribution.  Just make stuff and put it online.\nInappropriate\nIf you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin\nof the margin: the territories only recently captured from the\ninsiders.  That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still\nundone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because\nthere were too few insiders to explore everything.\nThis is why I spend most of my time writing\nessays\nlately.  The\nwriting of essays used to be limited to those who could get them\npublished.  In principle you could have written them and just shown\nthem to your friends; in practice that didn't work.\n[\n6\n]\nAn\nessayist needs the resistance of an audience, just as an engraver\nneeds the resistance of the plate.\nUp till a few years ago, writing essays was the ultimate insider's\ngame.  Domain experts were allowed to publish essays about their\nfield, but the pool allowed to write on general topics was about\neight people who went to the right parties in New York.  Now the\nreconquista has overrun this territory, and, not surprisingly, found\nit sparsely cultivated.  There are so many essays yet unwritten.\nThey tend to be the naughtier ones; the insiders have pretty much\nexhausted the motherhood and apple pie topics.\nThis leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when\nyou're on the right track.  You're on the right track when people\ncomplain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something\ninappropriate.  If people are complaining, that means you're doing\nsomething rather than sitting around, which is the first step.  And\nif they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means\nyou've probably done something good.\nIf you make something and people complain that it doesn't\nwork\n,\nthat's a problem.  But if the worst thing they can hit you with is\nyour own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other\nrespect you've succeeded.  Pointing out that someone is unqualified\nis as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It's just a legitimate\nsounding way of saying: we don't like your type around here.\nBut the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing\ninappropriate.  I've been hearing this word all my life and I only\nrecently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the homing\nbeacon.  \"Inappropriate\" is the null criticism.  It's merely the\nadjective form of \"I don't like it.\"\nSo that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal.  Be\ninappropriate.  When you hear people saying that, you're golden.\nAnd they, incidentally, are busted.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nThe facts about Apple's early history are from an interview \nwith\nSteve \nWozniak\nin Jessica Livingston's\nFounders at Work\n.\n[\n2\n]\nAs usual the popular image is several decades behind reality.\nNow the misunderstood artist is not a chain-smoking drunk who pours\nhis soul into big, messy canvases that philistines see and say\n\"that's not art\" because it isn't a picture of anything.  The\nphilistines have now been trained that anything hung on a wall\nis art.  Now the misunderstood artist is a coffee-drinking vegan\ncartoonist whose work they see and say \"that's not art\" because it\nlooks like stuff they've seen in the Sunday paper.\n[\n3\n]\nIn fact this would do fairly well as a definition of politics:\nwhat determines rank in the absence of objective tests.\n[\n4\n]\nIn high school you're led to believe your whole future depends\non where you go to college, but it turns out only to buy you a couple\nyears. By your mid-twenties the people worth impressing\nalready judge you more by what\nyou've done than where you went to school.\n[\n5\n]\nManagers are presumably wondering, how can I make this miracle\nhappen?  How can I make the people working for me do more with less?\nUnfortunately the constraint probably has to be self-imposed.  If\nyou're\nexpected\nto do more with less, then you're being\nstarved, not eating virtuously.\n[\n6\n]\nWithout the prospect of publication, the closest most people\ncome to writing essays is to write in a journal.  I find I never\nget as deeply into subjects as I do in proper essays.  As the name\nimplies, you don't go back and rewrite journal entries over\nand over for two weeks.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Sarah\nHarlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Olin\nShivers, and Chris Small for reading drafts of this, and to Chris\nSmall and Chad Fowler for inviting me to speak.\nJapanese Translation\nChinese Translation"}
{"text": "@jesslivingston @chafkin 145 companies!\n\nMe: Most of the atoms in the Earth were made by suns, but other suns, not ours.\n\n13 yo: So you're saying our sun is really our stepsun?\n\n@matthiasoso @elonmusk It doesn't change anything at all. That's the point.\n\n@elonmusk Ok, here it is with a more normal aspect ratio. https://t.co/DyiyP0GpI5\n\n@therabbithole Whoah, look, the growth in the debt just got even worse. https://t.co/hxiztmNoL7\n\n@DKThomp @jayvanbavel What's the answer?\n\n@imdsms @CcibChris Sure enough. It's shot with a telephoto lens.\n\n@AGHamilton29 @aviramj Asking people a question they don't dare answer honestly is not dishonest. Rather the opposite.\n\n@misaligned_agi He only turned 13 less than 2 months ago.\n\n@nikitabier @pitdesi Or drugs of some sort."}
{"text": "Damn, I used an s instead of z without realizing it. Next thing you know I'll be writing \"colour,\" and it's only a step from that to \"aluminium.\"\n\n@bamitsmanas Before or while? Though to be honest I don't mind if it's the latter. I use some of my favorite books for that.\n\nInteresting. Privatisation is good for mass transit.\n\n@matthew_d_green @elonmusk @evilsocket Rozado's research is genuinely quite interesting though. There was a simultaneous and dramatic increase in the use of many words (you can probably guess which) in the early 2010s. It's still unclear why, but the most likely candidate is Twitter.\n\n@Suhail I think someone shot one once but I don't know what came of it. Maybe they couldn't raise enough to release it.\n\nThe distraction could be dangerous to the startups. Documentary filmmakers always say they're going to be inconspicuous, but boy are they not.\n\nThe Magic Roundabout. One day I will drive it. https://t.co/vQyPb64Vps\n\nAnd incidentally, there's more here than just this business. You could use paid reservations as a beachhead to displace OpenTable.\n\n@winterrose A firehose of mindless adulation mixed with mindless abuse.\n\nThere is a missing startup here. Restaurants should be making this money, not scalpers.\n\n@garrytan She seems to be bad news overall though. Banning M&A harms economic growth more than banning noncompetes helps it."}
{"text": "@jfgruner I would have loved to, but I grew up in America, and there was roughly zero rugby in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the 1970s.\n\n@LinkofSunshine \"I love the poorly educated.\"\n\n@F_Botha_USA I bet this is a minority opinion among Bothas.\n\n@ahistoryinart A polite dinner party sounds wonderful to be honest.\n\nRugby allows kids to experience something that would otherwise only exist in fairy tales: combat with giants. Here's 12 yo and two friends in action. (They did manage to keep the ball.) https://t.co/DC9WN9gY5w\n\n@peterboghossian A few people have actually used that term! https://t.co/X2St4PdC7I\n\n@peterboghossian \"Enslaved people\" is demeaning. It should be \"individuals experiencing enslavement.\"\n\n@ahistoryinart You haven't made a sudden change in what you post, so if you're losing followers suddenly, it can't be because of what you post.\n\nI said earlier that such a sudden change might be due to a purge of inactive accounts, but I'm starting to think it might be people leaving Twitter.\n\n\"I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results.\"\n\n\u2014 Alexandr Wang\n\n@perpetua1_stew In this case, smart and energetic, but inexperienced and working on an idea that's probably bad. I think he was 19 at the time."}
{"text": "The one good thing about Trump's wild policy oscillations is that they enable us to distinguish between his more principled supporters and the mere bootlickers. (The latter are the ones who rationalize each new move, only to be left hanging 12 hours later.)\n\n@gaborgurbacs They make far fewer mistakes if they have procedures to guard against mistakes. That's the point.\n\n@JuniperViews One of the things Twitter has taught me is how many people fail to understand the most basic things. It has presumably always been like this, but before everyone could tell you what they were thinking, it was hidden.\n\nIf anyone is wondering why we need that boring-sounding thing called \"due process,\" it's because if you don't have it you're depending entirely on the word of the guy on the left. https://t.co/tTWBsCRwA9\n\n@TeslaPrice Sure. You can hate someone for decades, and then suddenly lash out at them. In fact that's usually how such things happen.\n\n@amasad Thanks Amjad!\n\n@bregmafund The graph I posted doesn't show Republicans vs Democrats. It shows support for Trump declining among people who voted for him.\n\n@crankycatcoder @MrRobzilla @ctjlewis @AlecStapp Investors do a way more thorough job of vetting people's ability than immigration bureaucrats do.\n\n@HanchungLee But the situation is. So if you're not, you're simply mistaken.\n\n@jmatthews005 I can imagine plenty of benefits for Trump, but none for Americans in general."}
{"text": "@___rikh___ You can buy a ton of used books without being rich. At a typical shop in Hay I'd buy 25 books and they might cost \u00a3150.\n\n@Kappische All of some of them, some of most of them.\n\n@anoopjohn I never will. Some I bought to have in case I need them or because they're books a house should have, others because there's one part I want to read in them, others will turn out to be bad, and others I simply won't get around to.\n\n@AlecStapp I don't think admissions departments were against tests per se. They just made it harder for them to conceal what they were doing, because you could compare the admission rates for two groups with a given test score.\n\nHere are all the books I bought: https://t.co/Dvuadafm3z\n\n@FiskQuaid That's part of what I mean but only a small part.\n\n@anufella Patina. Tiny scratches, repeated applications of wax, the wood changes color as it ages. Even texture if it's really old.\n\n@genericdai They become softer. Ideally they fall open in your hand.\n\n@andreslaley 1. Cars can have patina like anything else. \n\n2. Old cars often look more interesting.\n\n3. Once a car has a few scratches you don't worry about it so much.\n\nWhen you buy things that are better used, your life doesn't automatically degrade over time the way it does when you buy things that are meant to be new and shiny. It's more restful."}
{"text": "@mblair If you look at the people trying to use it in this thread, that might change your mind. It's like a blooper compilation.\n\n@markessien @AlecStapp That is certainly scandalous, but from what I've heard they've closed that loophole. I suspect the number now is much lower.\n\n@EHumpierres Of course not. This doesn't apply to plays and poetry.\n\n@sreecharan93 British writing is on the whole simpler than American.\n\n@jk_rowling Don't feel bad. That's presumably not all that much hate.\n\n@c_kiruStrategy For the sake of your readers.\n\n@afrogodd Not always.\n\n@JMDemma Depends on the situation. There are some where it would sound really wrong not to.\n\n@dpachov Simplicity is one kind of beauty, and it's the kind most people will do best to aim for. A few writers can pull off ornateness, but if most people try it the result will be a McMansion.\n\n@laserquest_ag Ugh, you're proving my point."}
{"text": "The Acceleration of Addictiveness\nJuly 2010\nWhat hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is\nthat they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors.\nMost if not all the things we describe as addictive are.  And the\nscary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.\nWe wouldn't want to stop it.  It's the same process that cures\ndiseases: technological progress.  Technological progress means\nmaking things do more of what we want.  When the thing we want is\nsomething we want to want, we consider technological progress good.\nIf some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that\nseems strictly better.  When progress concentrates something we\ndon't want to want \u2014 when it transforms opium into heroin \u2014 it seems\nbad.  But it's the same process at work.\n[\n1\n]\nNo one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing\nnumbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like\ntoo much.\n[\n2\n]\nAs far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.\nThe closest is the colloquial sense of \"addictive.\" That usage has\nbecome increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why:\nthere are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the\nextreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been\ntransformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in\nfood processing into something with way more immediate bang for the\nbuck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers\nand solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille.\nTV has become much more engaging, and even so it\ncan't compete\nwith Facebook.\nThe world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.   And unless\nthe forms of technological progress that produced these things are\nsubject to different laws than technological progress in general,\nthe world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did\nin the last 40.\nThe next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.  I don't\nmean to imply they're all to be avoided.  Alcohol is a dangerous\ndrug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without.\nMost people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful.\nMore things we like will mean more things we have to be careful\nabout.\nMost people won't, unfortunately.  Which means that as the world\nbecomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a\nnormal life will be driven ever further apart.  One sense of \"normal\"\nis statistically normal: what everyone else does.  The other is the\nsense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a\npiece of machinery: what works best.\nThese two senses are already quite far apart.  Already someone\ntrying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of\nthe US.  That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced.\nYou can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if\npeople don't think you're weird, you're living badly.\nSocieties eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things.\nI've seen that happen with cigarettes.  When cigarettes first\nappeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through\na previously isolated population.  Smoking rapidly became a\n(statistically) normal thing.  There were ashtrays everywhere.  We\nhad ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of\nmy parents smoked.  You had to for guests.\nAs knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed.\nIn the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something\nthat seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something\nmovie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of\naddicts do outside the doors of office buildings.  A lot of the\nchange was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation\ncouldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.\nIt took a while though\u2014on the order of 100 years.  And unless the\nrate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the\naccelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new\naddictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to\nprotect us.\n[\n3\n]\nUnless we want to be canaries in the coal mine\nof each new addiction\u2014the people whose sad example becomes a\nlesson to future generations\u2014we'll have to figure out for ourselves\nwhat to avoid and how.  It will actually become a reasonable strategy\n(or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect\neverything new\n.\nIn fact, even that won't be enough.  We'll have to worry not just\nabout new things, but also about existing things becoming more\naddictive.  That's what bit me.  I've avoided most addictions, but\nthe Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using\nit.\n[\n4\n]\nMost people I know have problems with Internet addiction.  We're\nall trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.\nThat's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I\nwant is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.\n[\n5\n]\nMy latest trick is taking long hikes.  I used to think running was a\nbetter form of exercise than hiking because it took less time.  Now\nthe slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I\nspend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.\nSounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it?  It always will when you're\ntrying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide\nyou.  Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric.\nBut if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this\nkind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate\nof anyone who wants to get things done.  We'll increasingly be\ndefined by what we say no to.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nCould you restrict technological progress to areas where you\nwanted it?  Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state.\nAnd even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects.\n\"Good\" and \"bad\" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated,\nso you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the\nformer.  And in any case, as Prohibition and the \"war on drugs\"\nshow, bans often do more harm than good.\n[\n2\n]\nTechnology has always been accelerating.  By Paleolithic\nstandards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic\nperiod.\n[\n3\n]\nUnless we mass produce social customs.  I suspect the recent\nresurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction\nto drugs.  In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if\ntheir kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God.  But\nthat solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to\nsay no to drugs.  You end up saying no to\nscience\nas well.\nI worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people\nplot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books\na package tour.  Or worse still, has one booked for them by the\ngovernment.\n[\n4\n]\nPeople commonly use the word \"procrastination\" to describe\nwhat they do on the Internet.  It seems to me too mild to describe\nwhat's happening as merely not-doing-work.  We don't call it\nprocrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.\n[\n5\n]\nSeveral people have told me they like the iPad because it\nlets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would\nbe too conspicuous.  In other words, it's a hip flask.  (This is\ntrue of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as\nobvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those.)\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and\nRobert Morris for reading drafts of this."}
{"text": "@jessegenet It's a way both to diss the other person and excuse yourself for being fooled by them.\n\n@useintro @blakeaburge @bchesky If I did I was quoting Aiken, who was the first to say it.\n\n@JillFilipovic I care if they're using it to conceal their identity in order to do something bad.\n\n@jessesingal This whole excerpt is a tour de force of intellectually dishonest writing.\n\n@MicleMihai @CR_UK No, the form said it was just to keep track of repeat donors.\n\nDear @CR_UK, would you please make your online donation form not require a UK phone number? People with phone numbers from other countries want to donate too. I had to enter a fake number to donate. Presumably most people without UK numbers just give up.\n\n@_karthik They found cheaper infrastructure.\n\n@johnevigar Hmm, 1901 but the figures are 18th century.\n\n@ilyasu Thank God we can joke about it now. At the time it wasn't clear how far things would go.\n\n@jessesingal Presumably the fact-checkers correctly identify it as a mere ritual gesture rather than a statement of fact that would have to be checked."}
{"text": "The Hardware Renaissance\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nOctober 2012\nOne advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we\nsee trends before most other people.  And one of the most conspicuous\ntrends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups.\nOut of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware.  On the whole\nthey've done better than the companies that weren't.\nThey've faced resistance from investors of course.  Investors have\na deep-seated bias against hardware.  But investors' opinions are\na trailing indicator.  The best founders are better at seeing the\nfuture than the best investors, because the best founders are making\nit.\nThere is no one single force driving this trend.  Hardware\ndoes\nwell\non crowdfunding sites.  The spread of\ntablets\nmakes it\npossible to build new things\ncontrolled\nby\nand even\nincorporating\nthem.\nElectric motors\nhave improved.\nWireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted.\nIt's getting more straightforward to get things manufactured.\nArduinos, 3D printing, laser cutters, and more accessible CNC milling are making hardware easier to prototype.\nRetailers are less of a bottleneck as customers increasingly buy\nonline.\nOne question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool.\nIt always was cool.\nPhysical things are great.  They just haven't\nbeen as great a way to start a\nrapidly growing\nbusiness\nas software.  But that rule may not be permanent.  It's not even\nthat old; it only dates from about 1990.  Maybe the advantage\nof software will turn out to have been temporary.  Hackers love to\nbuild hardware, and customers love to buy it.  So if the ease of\nshipping hardware even approached the ease of shipping software,\nwe'd see a lot more hardware startups.\nIt wouldn't be the first time something was a bad idea till it\nwasn't.  And it wouldn't be the first time investors learned that\nlesson from founders.\nSo if you want to work on hardware, don't be deterred from doing\nit because you worry investors will discriminate against you.  And\nin particular, don't be deterred from\napplying\nto Y Combinator\nwith a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in hardware\nstartups.\nWe know there's room for the\nnext Steve Jobs\n.\nBut there's almost certainly also room for the first \n<Your Name Here>.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Cann, Sanjay Dastoor, \nPaul Gerhardt, Cameron Robertson, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.\nA Hardware Renaissance while \u0093Software Eats the World\u0094?"}
{"text": "@TheWorthyHouse Have you accomplished anything of this type?\n\n@abusulayman Not one, fortunately.\n\n@mattyglesias Or a thousand fake accounts run by some country that wants to cause trouble in America.\n\n@richardmcj You are on a roll.\n\nA Palestinian child's life is worth as much as an Israeli child's life.\n\n@Chris_arnade @growing_daniel It certainly helped a lot. But yes, I think so, because there are people whose judgment about art I respect who've never painted themselves.\n\n@dapppunk @AsyncCollab @eigenrobot Mainly because it's interesting to look at. It's astounding what a good painting will do to a room it's hung in. But in the case of very old paintings I'm also somewhat influenced by their interest as historical artifacts.\n\n@rmcwhorter99 @eigenrobot There are lots of people who buy art because they genuinely appreciate it. There are a huge number of artists who are good but relatively obscure and whose work is thus comparatively inexpensive. Anyone who buys it is presumably buying it simply because they like it.\n\n@AsyncCollab @eigenrobot It means buying good art instead of being tricked into buying meretricious and/or fashionable art.\n\nSigh. Should I even waste my time replying to this willful misrepresentation? I'll give it one last try.\n\nI care a lot about art. I spent several years studying painting at one point. I despise the idea of buying art to impress people. And it's precisely because the art world is so pervaded by this practice that it's hard to buy art well. If you walk at random into a prestigious gallery in a big city, chances are you're walking into a place that specializes in selling art for this purpose. It takes a conscious effort to avoid the pervasive bogusness of the art world and find the stuff that's actually good."}
{"text": "One of the most surprising things I've learned from Twitter is how petty and dishonest many professors are. When I was in college they seemed like gods. But I suspect pettiness and dishonesty were as prevalent then. They just didn't show like they do now.\n\n@UmarQadmiri He's not. He's one of the most upstanding people in the tech world.\n\n@garrytan Perhaps you could do an interview with him. Imagine yourself on the right. https://t.co/XVcXr1j4VN\n\nGarry Tan is now so popular that even Australian reporters are trying for the Tan look. https://t.co/dE38pI7CPG\n\n@nfergus Interesting. How far do you have to go back in time before debt service is lower than defense spending?\n\n@dconroybeam Wow, that was stunningly intellectually dishonest. You run away from criticism, and to cover your retreat you try to slur a Jew as nazi-adjacent?\n\n@nfergus The British Empire spent more on debt service than defense?\n\n@MermaidsPurseJ Yes. Strange as it may sound, Roman slaves could make money and could even use it to buy their freedom.\n\n@matthew_d_green Annual recurring revenue.\n\nNot surprisingly, the company with this graph was successful at fundraising. This is Speak, which just closed a round at a $500m valuation. They've been focusing on AI since long before it was cool, so when the technology matured, it shot them forward."}
{"text": "I notice they've been careful to write these laws so that they compare the median salary not to that of the highest paid employee but to that of the highest paid \"managerial\" employee, or all the SF sports teams would be fucked.\n\nWhy kids at British schools are usually called by their last name: 17 yo was in a five-a-side football match, and all five boys on the team had the same first name.\n\nOur dog, at right, with some of his colleagues. https://t.co/kbjGcvsWFe\n\nElon should call the combined company \" X\".\n\nPSA: It's 1950s, not 1950's. The apostrophe is for missing letters, and there are no missing letters here. \n\n(So what's the missing letter in the possessive? An e that became silent in speech in Chaucer's time.)\n\nDon't believe what xenophobes tell you: financially America is net ahead on immigrants. They're entitled to dislike people from certain countries if they want to (and are willing to admit that's what drives them), but the economic argument is bullshit.\n\nSomeone asked about tricks for meeting eminent people. I said the best plan is just to do really good work. Then you'll tend to meet them organically. In the worst case you'll see one whenever you look in the mirror.\n\nYou can tell how bad things got in the 9th century from how few things remain that were made then.\n\nI struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me at lunch. She turned out to be 93. It's not often you can compliment someone by saying they look 80.\n\nAs a child during the war she saw a German fighter plane shot down. It just missed their house. Her mother said she'd seen the pilot struggling with the controls, poor man. She was shocked to hear her mother call him \"poor man.\" He was a German!"}
{"text": "@wilgieseler Why wouldn't it have ChatGPT conversations in its training set?\n\n@wilgieseler I tried asking ChatGPT and here's what it said: https://t.co/R7oiOhZkZO\n\n@wilgieseler The first half of the answer seems plausible, and the second half is definitely correct. I use it mostly as a sort of encyclopedia.\n\nI asked ChatGPT what other people ask it about. Sounds a lot like the sections of a newspaper. https://t.co/UIRukfKIxD\n\n@pitdesi I asked it what I ask about unusually often. It told me \"you show a recurring interest in exploring linguistic nuances, scientific phenomena, and obscure historical facts.\" I think that's because I use it mostly as a sort of encyclopedia.\n\n@mwilcox @keshavchan I'd get drafted to write down the plan of whatever we decided to do. But since the details would be vague initially, most of the plan would be mine :^)\n\n@maircomm That's his favorite book.\n\n12 yo had to write a review of Waiting for Godot for school. He asked if he could be candid about how boring it was. I told him to go ahead, but that the reaction would be unpredictable. Sometimes you get \"How dare you?\", sometimes you get \"I secretly think so too.\"\n\n@KevinSVanHorn Learn to cook, loser.\n\n@jdbarelytweets Interesting thought. We didn't deliberately arrange that the founders would smell cooking when they showed up, but it did usually work out that way for the first few years."}
{"text": "Haters\nJanuary 2020\n(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often\nsurprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but\nit applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)\nIf you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who\nlike you too much. These people are sometimes called \"fanboys,\" and\nthough I dislike that term, I'm going to have to use it here.  We\nneed some word for them, because this is a distinct phenomenon from\nsomeone simply liking your work.\nA fanboy is obsessive and uncritical. Liking you becomes part of\ntheir identity, and they create an image of you in their own head\nthat is much better than reality. Everything you do is good, because\nyou do it. If you do something bad, they find a way to see it as\ngood. And their love for you is not, usually, a quiet, private one.\nThey want everyone to know how great you are.\nWell, you may be thinking, I could do without this kind of obsessive\nfan, but I know there are all kinds of people in the world, and if\nthis is the worst consequence of fame, that's not so bad.\nUnfortunately this is not the worst consequence of fame. As well\nas fanboys, you'll have haters.\nA hater is obsessive and uncritical. Disliking you becomes part of\ntheir identity, and they create an image of you in their own head\nthat is much worse than reality. Everything you do is bad, because\nyou do it. If you do something good, they find a way to see it as\nbad. And their dislike for you is not, usually, a quiet, private\none. They want everyone to know how awful you are.\nIf you're thinking of checking, I'll save you the trouble. The\nsecond and fifth paragraphs are identical except for \"good\" being\nswitched to \"bad\" and so on.\nI spent years puzzling about haters.  What are they, and where do\nthey come from? Then one day it dawned on me. Haters are just fanboys\nwith the sign switched.\nNote that by haters, I don't simply mean trolls. I'm not talking about \npeople who say bad things about you and then move on. I'm talking\nabout the much smaller group of people for whom this becomes a \nkind of obsession and who do it repeatedly over a long period.\nLike fans, haters seem to be an automatic consequence of fame.\nAnyone sufficiently famous will have them. And like fans, haters\nare energized by the fame of whoever they hate. They hear a song\nby some pop singer. They don't like it much. If the singer were an\nobscure one, they'd just forget about it. But instead they keep\nhearing her name, and this seems to drive some people crazy.\nEveryone's always going on about this singer, but she's no good!\nShe's a fraud!\nThat word \"fraud\" is an important one. It's the spectral signature\nof a hater to regard the object of their hatred as a\nfraud\n. They\ncan't deny their fame. Indeed, their fame is if anything exaggerated\nin the hater's mind. They notice every mention of the singer's name,\nbecause every mention makes them angrier. In their own minds they\nexaggerate both the singer's fame and her lack of talent, and the\nonly way to reconcile those two ideas is to conclude that she has\ntricked everyone.\nWhat sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not\nsure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally\nlosers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally\ntalented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone\nsuccessful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely\nto regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because\nanyone famous knows how random fame is.\nBut haters are not always complete losers. They are not always the\nproverbial guy living in his mom's basement. Many are, but some\nhave some amount of talent. In fact I suspect that a sense of\nfrustrated talent is what drives some people to become haters.\nThey're not just saying \"It's unfair that so-and-so is famous,\" but\n\"It's unfair that so-and-so is famous, and not me.\"\nCould a hater be cured if they achieved something impressive? My\nguess is that's a moot point, because they\nnever will\n. I've been\nable to observe for long enough that I'm fairly confident the pattern\nworks both ways: not only do people who do great work never become\nhaters, haters never do great work. Although I dislike the word\n\"fanboy,\" it's evocative of something important about both haters\nand fanboys. It implies that the fanboy is so slavishly predictable in his admiration\nthat he's diminished as a result, that he's less than a man.\nHaters seem even more diminished. I can imagine being a fanboy.\nI can think of people whose work I admire so much that I could abase\nmyself before them out of sheer gratitude. If P. G.  Wodehouse were\nstill alive, I could see myself being a Wodehouse fanboy. But I\ncould not imagine being a hater.\nKnowing that haters are just fanboys with the sign bit flipped makes\nit much easier to deal with them. We don't need a separate theory\nof haters. We can just use existing techniques for dealing with\nobsessive fans.\nThe most important of which is simply not to think much about them.\nIf you're like most people who become famous enough to acquire\nhaters, your initial reaction will be one of mystification. Why\ndoes this guy seem to have it in for me? Where does his obsessive\nenergy come from, and what makes him so appallingly nasty? What did\nI do to set him off? Is it something I can fix?\nThe mistake here is to think of the hater as someone you have a\ndispute with. When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a\ngood idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things\nif you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to\nthink of a hater as someone you have a dispute with.  It's an\nunderstandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before.\nBut when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what a\nhater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about\nthem. If you have obsessive fans, do you spend any time wondering\nwhat makes them love you so much? No, you just think \"some\npeople are kind of crazy,\" and that's the end of it.\nSince haters are equivalent to fanboys, that's the way to deal with\nthem too. There may have been something that set them off. But it's\nnot something that would have set off a normal person, so there's\nno reason to spend any time thinking about it. It's not you, it's\nthem.\nNotes\n[1] There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can\nyou distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater,\nand because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds\nare usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken\nin by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you\ncan usually assume y is not a fraud.\n[2] I would make an exception for teenagers, who sometimes act in\nsuch extreme ways that they are literally not themselves. I can\nimagine a teenage kid being a hater and then growing out of it. But\nnot anyone over 25.\n[3] I have a much worse memory for misdeeds than my wife Jessica,\nwho is a connoisseur of character, but I don't wish it were better.\nMost disputes are a waste of time even if you're in the right, and\nit's easy to bury the hatchet with someone if you can't remember\nwhy you were mad at them.\n[4] A competent hater will not merely attack you individually but\nwill try to get mobs after you. In some cases you may want to refute\nwhatever bogus claim they made in order to do so. But err on the\nside of not, because ultimately it probably won't matter.\nThanks\nto Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison,\nChristine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, \nElon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this.\nJapanese Translation\nArabic Translation\nPolish Translation"}
{"text": "How You Know\nDecember 2014\nI've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least\ntwo times, maybe three.  And yet if I had to write down everything\nI remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a\npage.  Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy\nfeeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all\nthese books if I remember so little from them?\nA few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent\nbiography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this\nquestion, at least something that made me feel better about it.\nShe writes:\nHilbert had no patience with mathematical lectures which filled\n  the students with facts but did not teach them how to frame a\n  problem and solve it. He often used to tell them that \"a perfect\n  formulation of a problem is already half its solution.\"\nThat has always seemed to me an important point, and I was even\nmore convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert.\nBut how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place?  A\ncombination of my own experience and other things I'd read.  None\nof which I could at that moment remember!  And eventually I'd forget\nthat Hilbert had confirmed it too.  But my increased belief in the\nimportance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from\nthis book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it.\nReading and experience train your model of the world.  And even if\nyou forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model\nof the world persists.  Your mind is like a compiled program you've\nlost the source of.  It works, but you don't know why.\nThe place to look for what I learned from Villehardouin's chronicle\nis not what I remember from it, but my mental models of the crusades,\nVenice, medieval culture, siege warfare, and so on.  Which doesn't\nmean I couldn't have read more attentively, but at least the harvest\nof reading is not so miserably small as it might seem.\nThis is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect.  But\nit was a surprise to me and presumably would be to anyone else who\nfelt uneasy about (apparently) forgetting so much they'd read.\nRealizing it does more than make you feel a little better about\nforgetting, though.  There are specific implications.\nFor example, reading and experience are usually \"compiled\" at the\ntime they happen, using the state of your brain at that time.  The\nsame book would get compiled differently at different points in\nyour life.  Which means it is very much worth reading important\nbooks multiple times.  I always used to feel some misgivings about\nrereading books.  I unconsciously lumped reading together with work\nlike carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you\ndid it wrong the first time.  Whereas now the phrase \"already read\"\nseems almost ill-formed.\nIntriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books.  Technology\nwill increasingly make it possible to relive our experiences.  When\npeople do that today it's usually to enjoy them again (e.g. when\nlooking at pictures of a trip) or to find the origin of some bug in\ntheir compiled code (e.g. when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering\nthe childhood trauma that prevented him from singing).  But as\ntechnologies for recording and playing back your life improve, it\nmay become common for people to relive experiences without any goal\nin mind, simply to learn from them again as one might when rereading\na book.\nEventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but\nalso to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you\nknow things may seem part of being human, it may not be.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading \ndrafts of this.\nJapanese Translation"}
{"text": "@Austen I have one in my trunk that I use as a backup. I actually had to use it a couple months ago when the M4 was closed. (Usually you can assume they're not going to close the M4).\n\n@soona I don't think so, and for a sad reason: there's not enough demand. Most people just want to have their biases confirmed.\n\nIn practice, you have to be politically neutral, or more precisely, an accidental moderate (https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d), to be good at not being tricked. The partisan are too tempted by disinformation that favors their cause.\n\nWhen can you believe things? My rule is when I hear them from people whose judgement I trust. It's not enough to be smart. They also have to be good at not being tricked.\n\nAI plus social media are going to create such a supply of disinformation that anyone who wants to live in a political dream world will easily be able to find the necessary materials.\n\nFor those of us who don't, the rule is going to have to be: disbelieve by default.\n\n@DrFrancisYoung It's true that there was a fashion for Egyptian-looking things in the early 20th century, but this is a bad example. This looks modern because it's so simple, and the simplicity of modernism didn't come from this fashion.\n\n@VcWabKDHN9OVdYq @francoisfleuret These are YC founders, who tend to be good programmers, and good programmers wouldn't tolerate AI filling their source files with crap.\n\n@francoisfleuret One of the most obvious indicators is the percentage of code that's now written by AI. I ask all the software companies I meet about this. The number is rarely lower than 40%. For some young programmers it's 90%.\n\nI was astounded when a friend told me that 30 year old BMW 325is now sell for $15k or more. He said that the prices of good old piston-engined cars have risen dramatically, because new ones are \"nerfed by regulations\".\n\n@nikitabier @samdaceo 15.3% richer. (If you avoid losing 13.3%, you're 15.3% better off.)"}
{"text": "A Version 1.0\nOctober 2004\nAs E. B. White said, \"good writing is rewriting.\"  I didn't\nrealize this when I was in school.  In writing, as in math and \nscience, they only show you the finished product.\nYou don't see all the false starts.  This gives students a\nmisleading view of how things get made.\nPart of the reason it happens is that writers don't want   \npeople to see their mistakes.  But I'm willing to let people\nsee an early draft if it will show how much you have\nto rewrite to beat an essay into shape.\nBelow is the oldest version I can find of\nThe Age of the Essay\n(probably the second or third day), with\ntext that ultimately survived in\nred\nand text that later\ngot deleted in\ngray\n.\nThere seem to be several categories of cuts: things I got wrong,\nthings that seem like bragging, flames,\ndigressions, stretches of awkward prose, and unnecessary words.\nI discarded more from the beginning.  That's\nnot surprising; it takes a while to hit your stride.  There\nare more digressions at the start, because I'm not sure where\nI'm heading.\nThe amount of cutting is about average.  I probably write\nthree to four words for every one that appears in the final\nversion of an essay.\n(Before anyone gets mad at me for opinions expressed here, remember\nthat anything you see here that's not in the final version is obviously\nsomething I chose not to publish, often because I disagree\nwith it.)\nRecently a friend said that what he liked about\nmy essays was that they weren't written the way\nwe'd been taught to write essays in school.  You\nremember:\ntopic sentence, introductory paragraph,\nsupporting paragraphs, conclusion.\nIt hadn't\noccurred to me till then that those horrible things\nwe had to write in school were even connected to\nwhat I was doing now.  But sure enough, I thought,\nthey did call them \"essays,\" didn't they?\nWell, they're not.  Those things you have to write\nin school are not only not essays, they're one of the\nmost pointless of all the pointless hoops you have\nto jump through in school.  And I worry that they\nnot only teach students the wrong things about writing,\nbut put them off writing entirely.\nSo I'm going to give the other side of the story: what\nan essay really is, and how you write one.  Or at least,\nhow I write one.\nStudents be forewarned: if you actually write\nthe kind of essay I describe, you'll probably get bad\ngrades.  But knowing how it's really done should\nat least help you to understand the feeling of futility\nyou have when you're writing the things they tell you to.\nThe most obvious difference between real essays and\nthe things one has to write in school is that real\nessays are not exclusively about English literature.\nIt's a fine thing for schools to\nteach students how to\nwrite.\nBut for some bizarre reason (actually, a very specific bizarre\nreason that I'll explain in a moment),\nthe teaching of\nwriting has gotten mixed together with the study\nof literature.  And so all over the country, students are\nwriting not about how a baseball team with a small budget \nmight compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in\nfashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about\nsymbolism in Dickens.\nWith\nobvious\nresult\ns.  Only a few people really\ncare about\nsymbolism in Dickens.\nThe teacher doesn't.\nThe students don't.  Most of the people who've had to write PhD\ndisserations about Dickens don't.  And certainly\nDickens himself would be more interested in an essay\nabout color or baseball.\nHow did things get this way?  To answer that we have to go back\nalmost a thousand years.\nBetween about 500 and 1000, life was\nnot very good in Europe.  The term \"dark ages\" is presently\nout of fashion as too judgemental (the period wasn't dark; \nit was just\ndifferent\n), but if this label didn't already\nexist, it would seem an inspired metaphor.  What little\noriginal thought there was took place in lulls between\nconstant wars and had something of the character of\nthe thoughts of parents with a new baby.\nThe most amusing thing written during this\nperiod, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is,\nI suspect, mostly inadvertantly so.\nAround 1000\nEurope began to catch its breath.\nAnd once they\nhad the luxury of curiosity,\none of the first things they discovered\nwas\nwhat we call \"the classics.\"\nImagine if\nwe were visited  \nby\naliens.  If they could even get here they'd presumably know a\nfew things we don't.  Immediately Alien Studies would become\nthe most dynamic field of scholarship: instead of painstakingly\ndiscovering things for ourselves, we could simply suck up\neverything they'd discovered.  So it was in Europe in 1200.\nWhen classical texts began to circulate in Europe, they contained\nnot just new answers, but new questions.  (If anyone proved\na theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, there\nis no record of it.)\nFor a couple centuries, some of the most important work\nbeing done was intellectual archaelogy.  Those were also\nthe centuries during which schools were first established.\nAnd since reading ancient texts was the\nessence of what\nscholars did\nthen, it became the basis of the curriculum.\nBy 1700,\nsomeone who wanted to learn about\nphysics didn't need to start by mastering Greek in order to read\nAristotle.  But schools\nchange slower than scholarship\n:\nthe study of\nancient texts\nhad such prestige that it remained\nthe backbone of\neducation\nuntil the late 19th century.  By then it was merely a tradition.\nIt did serve some purposes: reading a foreign language was difficult,\nand thus taught discipline, or at least, kept students busy;\nit introduced students to\ncultures quite different from their own; and its very uselessness\nmade it function (like white gloves) as a social bulwark.\nBut it certainly wasn't\ntrue, and hadn't been true for centuries, that students were\nserving apprenticeships in the hottest area of scholarship.\nClassical scholarship had also changed.  In the early era, philology\nactually mattered.  The texts that filtered into Europe were\nall corrupted to some degree by the errors of translators and\ncopyists.  Scholars had to figure out what Aristotle said\nbefore they could figure out what he meant.  But by the modern\nera such questions were answered as well as they were ever\ngoing to be.  And so the study of ancient texts became less\nabout ancientness and more about texts.\nThe time was then ripe for the question: if the study of\nancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern\ntexts?  The answer, of course, is that the raison d'etre\nof classical scholarship was a kind of intellectual archaelogy that\ndoes not need to be done in the case of contemporary authors.\nBut for obvious reasons no one wanted to give that answer.\nThe archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that\nthe people studying the classics were, if not wasting their\ntime, at least working on problems of minor importance.\nAnd so began the study of modern literature. There was\nsome\ninitial\nresistance\n, but it didn't last long.\nThe limiting\nreagent in the growth of university departments is what\nparents will let undergraduates study.  If parents will let\ntheir children major in x, the rest follows straightforwardly.\nThere will be jobs teaching x, and professors to fill them.\nThe professors will establish scholarly journals and publish\none another's papers.  Universities with x departments will\nsubscribe to the journals.  Graduate students who want jobs\nas professors of x will write dissertations about it.  It may\ntake a good long while for the more prestigious universities\nto cave in and establish departments in cheesier xes,  but\nat the other end of the scale there are so many universities\ncompeting to attract students that the mere establishment of\na discipline requires little more than the desire to do it.\nHigh schools imitate universities.\nAnd so once university\nEnglish departments were established in the late nineteenth century,\nthe 'riting component of the 3 Rs\nwas\nmorphed into English.\nWith the bizarre consequence that high school students now\nhad to write about English literature-- to write, without\neven realizing it, imitations of whatever\nEnglish professors had been publishing in their journals a\nfew decades before.   It's no wonder if this seems to the\nstudent a pointless exercise, because we're now three steps\nremoved from real work: the students are imitating English\nprofessors, who are imitating classical scholars, who are\nmerely the inheritors of a tradition growing out of what\nwas, 700 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work.\nPerhaps high schools should drop English and just teach writing.\nThe valuable part of English classes is learning to write, and\nthat could be taught better by itself.  Students learn better\nwhen they're interested in what they're doing, and it's hard\nto imagine a topic less interesting than symbolism in Dickens.\nMost of the people who write about that sort of thing professionally\nare not really interested in it.  (Though indeed, it's been a\nwhile since they were writing about symbolism; now they're\nwriting about gender.)\nI have no illusions about how eagerly this suggestion will  \nbe adopted.  Public schools probably couldn't stop teaching\nEnglish even if they wanted to; they're probably required to by\nlaw.  But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain\ninstead of against it: that universities establish a\nwriting major.  Many of the students who now major in English\nwould major in writing if they could, and most would\nbe better off.\nIt will be argued that it is a good thing for students to be\nexposed to their literary heritage.  Certainly.  But is that\nmore important than that they learn to write well?  And are\nEnglish classes even the place to do it?  After all,\nthe average public high school student gets zero exposure to  \nhis artistic heritage.  No disaster results.\nThe people who are interested in art learn about it for\nthemselves, and those who aren't don't.  I find that American\nadults are no better or worse informed about literature than\nart, despite the fact that they spent years studying literature\nin high school and no time at all studying art.  Which presumably\nmeans that what they're taught in school is rounding error \ncompared to what they pick up on their own.\nIndeed, English classes may even be harmful.  In my case they\nwere effectively aversion therapy.  Want to make someone dislike\na book?  Force him to read it and write an essay about it.\nAnd make the topic so intellectually bogus that you\ncould not, if asked, explain why one ought to write about it.\nI love to read more than anything, but by the end of high school\nI never read the books we were assigned.  I was so disgusted with\nwhat we were doing that it became a point of honor\nwith me to write nonsense at least as good at the other students'\nwithout having more than glanced over the book to learn the names\nof the characters and a few random events in it.\nI hoped this might be fixed in college, but I found the same\nproblem there.  It was not the teachers.  It was English.   \nWe were supposed to read novels and write essays about them.\nAbout what, and why?  That no one seemed to be able to explain.\nEventually by trial and error I found that what the teacher  \nwanted us to do was pretend that the story had really taken\nplace, and to analyze based on what the characters said and did (the\nsubtler clues, the better) what their motives must have been.\nOne got extra credit for motives having to do with class,\nas I suspect one must now for those involving gender and  \nsexuality.  I learned how to churn out such stuff well enough\nto get an A, but I never took another English class.\nAnd the books we did these disgusting things to, like those\nwe mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks\nagainst them in my mind.  The one saving grace was that   \nEnglish courses tend to favor pompous, dull writers like\nHenry James, who deserve black marks against their names anyway.\nOne of the principles the IRS uses in deciding whether to\nallow deductions is that, if something is fun, it isn't work.\nFields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on\na similar principle.  Reading P.G. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or\nRaymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like\nserious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been before \nEnglish evolved enough to make it an effort to understand him. [sh]\nAnd so good writers (just you wait and see who's still in\nprint in 300 years) are less likely to have readers turned   \nagainst them by clumsy, self-appointed tour guides.\nThe other big difference between a real essay and the \nthings\nthey make you write in school is that a real essay doesn't \ntake a position and then defend it.  That principle,\nlike the idea that we ought to be writing about literature,   \nturns out to be another intellectual hangover of long\nforgotten origins.  It's often mistakenly believed that\nmedieval universities were mostly seminaries.  In fact they\nwere more law schools.  And at least in our tradition\nlawyers are advocates\n: they are\ntrained to\nbe able to\ntake\neither side of an argument and make as good a case for it  \nas they can.\nWhether or not this is a good idea (in the case of prosecutors,\nit probably isn't), it tended to\npervade\nthe atmosphere of\nearly universities.  After the lecture the most common form\nof discussion was the disputation.  This\nidea\nis at least\nnominally preserved in our present-day thesis defense\n-- indeed,\nin the very word thesis.\nMost people treat the words \nthesis\nand dissertation as interchangeable, but originally, at least,\na thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was\nthe argument by which one defended it.\nI'm not complaining that we blur these two words together.\nAs far as I'm concerned, the sooner we lose the original\nsense of the word thesis, the better.  For many, perhaps most,  \ngraduate students, it is stuffing a square peg into a round\nhole to try to recast one's work as a single thesis.  And\nas for the disputation, that seems clearly a net lose.\nArguing two sides of a case\nmay be a necessary evil in a\nlegal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth,\nas I think lawyers would be the first to admit.\nAnd yet this principle is built into the very structure of  \nthe\nessays\nthey teach you to write in high school.  The topic\nsentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting \nparagraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the\nconclusion--- uh, what it the conclusion?  I was never sure  \nabout that in high school.\nIf your thesis was well expressed,\nwhat need was there to restate it?  In theory it seemed that\nthe conclusion of a really good essay ought not to need to   \nsay any more than QED.\nBut when you understand the origins\nof this sort of \"essay\", you can see where the\nconclusion comes from.  It's the concluding remarks to the \njury.\nWhat other alternative is there?  To answer that\nwe have to\nreach back into history again, though this time not so far.\nTo Michel de Montaigne,\ninventor of the essay.\nHe was\ndoing something quite different from what\na\nlawyer do\nes,\nand\nthe difference is embodied in the name.  Essayer is the French\nverb meaning \"to try\"\n(the cousin of our word assay),\nand an \"essai\" is an\neffort.\nAn essay is something you\nwrite\nin order\nto figure something out.\nFigure out what?  You don't know yet.  And so you can't begin with a\nthesis, because you don't have one, and may never have \none.  An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a  \nquestion.  In a real essay, you don't take a position and\ndefend it.  You see a door that's ajar, and you open it and\nwalk in to see what's inside.\nIf all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need\nto write anything, though?  Why not just sit and think?  Well,\nthere precisely is Montaigne's great discovery.  Expressing\nideas helps to form them.  Indeed, helps is far too weak a\nword.\n90%\nof what ends up in my essays\nwas stuff\nI only\nthought of when I sat down to write them.  That's why I\nwrite them.\nSo there's another difference between essays and\nthe things\nyou have to write in school\n.   In school\nyou are, in theory,\nexplaining yourself to\nsomeone else.  In the best case---if\nyou're really organized---you're just writing it\ndown.\nIn a real essay you're writing for yourself.  You're\nthinking out loud.\nBut not quite.  Just as inviting people over forces you to\nclean up your apartment, writing something that\nyou know\nother people will read forces you to think well.  So it\ndoes matter to have an audience.  The things I've written\njust for myself are no good.\nIndeed, they're bad in\na particular way:\nthey tend to peter out.  When I run into\ndifficulties, I\nnotice that I\ntend to conclude with a few vague\nquestions and then drift off to get a cup of tea.\nThis seems a common problem.\nIt's practically the standard\nending in blog entries--- with the addition of a \"heh\" or an \nemoticon, prompted by the all too accurate sense that\nsomething is missing.\nAnd indeed, a lot of\npublished essays peter out in\nthis\nsame way.\nParticularly the sort written by the staff writers of newsmagazines.  Outside writers tend to supply\neditorials of the defend-a-position variety, which\nmake a beeline toward a rousing (and\nforeordained) conclusion.   But the staff writers feel\nobliged to write something\nmore\nbalanced\n, which in\npractice ends up meaning blurry.\nSince they're\nwriting for a popular magazine, they start with the\nmost radioactively controversial questions, from which\n(\nbecause they're writing for a popular magazine\n)\nthey then proceed to recoil\nfrom\nin terror.\nGay marriage,\nfor or\nagainst?  This group says one thing.  That group says\nanother.  One thing is certain: the question is a\ncomplex one.  (But don't get mad at us.  We didn't\ndraw any conclusions.)\nQuestions aren't enough.  An essay has to come up with answers.\nThey don't always, of course.  Sometimes you start with a  \npromising question and get nowhere.  But those you don't\npublish.  Those are like experiments that get inconclusive\nresults.   Something you publish ought to tell the reader  \nsomething he didn't already know.\nBut\nwhat\nyou tell him doesn't matter, so long as   \nit's interesting.  I'm sometimes accused of meandering.\nIn defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw.\nThere you're not concerned with truth.  You already\nknow where you're going, and you want to go straight there,\nblustering through obstacles, and hand-waving\nyour way across swampy ground.  But that's not what\nyou're trying to do in an essay.  An essay is supposed to\nbe a search for truth.  It would be suspicious if it didn't\nmeander.\nThe Meander is a river in\nAsia Minor (aka\nTurkey\n).\nAs you might expect, it winds all over the place.\nBut\ndoes it\ndo this out of frivolity\n?   Quite the opposite.\nLike all rivers, it's rigorously following the laws of physics.\nThe path it has discovered\n,\nwinding as it is, represents\nthe most economical route to the sea.\nThe river's algorithm is simple.  At each step, flow down.\nFor the essayist this translates to: flow interesting.\nOf all the places to go next, choose\nwhichever seems\nmost interesting.\nI'm pushing this metaphor a bit.  An essayist\ncan't have\nquite as little foresight as a river.\nIn fact what you do\n(or what I do) is somewhere between a river and a roman\nroad-builder.  I have a general idea of the direction\nI want to go in, and\nI choose the next topic with that in mind.  This essay is\nabout writing, so I do occasionally yank it back in that\ndirection, but it is not all the sort of essay I\nthought I was going to write about writing.\nNote too that hill-climbing (which is what this algorithm is\ncalled) can get you in trouble.\nSometimes,\njust\nlike a river,\nyou\nrun up against a blank wall.\nWhat\nI do\nthen is just\nwhat the river does: backtrack.\nAt one point in this essay\nI found that after following a certain thread I ran out\nof ideas.  I had to go back\nn\nparagraphs and start over\nin another direction.\nFor illustrative purposes I've left\nthe abandoned branch as a footnote.\nErr on the side of the river.  An essay is not a reference\nwork.  It's not something you read looking for a specific\nanswer, and feel cheated if you don't find it.  I'd much\nrather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but\ninteresting direction than one that plodded dutifully along\na prescribed course.\nSo what's interesting?  For me, interesting means surprise.\nDesign, as\nMatz\nhas said, should follow the principle of\nleast\nsurprise.\nA button that looks like it will make a\nmachine stop should make it stop, not speed up.  Essays\nshould do the opposite.  Essays should aim for maximum\nsurprise.\nI was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel\nvicariously.  When friends came back from faraway places,\nit wasn't just out of politeness that I asked them\nabout\ntheir trip.\nI really wanted to know.  And I found\nthat\nthe best way to get information out of them was to ask\nwhat surprised them.  How was the place different from what\nthey expected?  This is an extremely useful question.\nYou can ask it of\neven\nthe most unobservant people, and it will\nextract information they didn't even know they were\nrecording.\nIndeed, you can ask it in real time.  Now when I go somewhere\nnew, I make a note of what surprises me about it.  Sometimes I\neven make a conscious effort to visualize the place beforehand,\nso I'll have a detailed image to diff with reality.\nSurprises are\nfacts\nyou didn't\nalready\nknow\n.\nBut\nthey're\nmore than that.  They're facts\nthat contradict things you\nthought you knew.  And so they're the most valuable sort of\nfact you can get.  They're like a food that's not merely\nhealthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things\nyou've already eaten.\nHow do you find surprises?  Well, therein lies half\nthe work of essay writing.  (The other half is expressing\nyourself well.)\nYou can at least\nuse yourself as a\nproxy for the reader.  You should only write about things\nyou've thought about a lot.  And anything you come across\nthat surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot,\nwill probably surprise most readers.\nFor example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because\nyou can only judge computer programmers by working with\nthem, no one knows\nin programming who the heroes should\nbe.\nI\ncertainly\ndidn't realize this when I\nstarted writing\nthe\nessay, and even now I find it kind of weird.  That's\nwhat you're looking for.\nSo if you want to write essays, you need two ingredients:\nyou need\na few topics that you think about a lot, and\nyou\nneed\nsome ability to ferret out the unexpected.\nWhat should you think about?  My guess is that it\ndoesn't matter\n.  Almost everything is\ninteresting if you get deeply\nenough into it.\nThe\none possible exception\nare\nthings\nlike working in fast food,\nwhich\nhave deliberately had all\nthe variation sucked out of them\n.\nIn retrospect, was there\nanything interesting about working in Baskin-Robbins?\nWell, it was interesting\nto notice\nhow important color was\nto the customers.  Kids a certain age would point into\nthe case and say that they wanted yellow.  Did they want\nFrench Vanilla or Lemon?  They would just look at you\nblankly.  They wanted yellow.  And then there was the\nmystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines n' Cream\nwas so appealing. I\n'm inclined now to\nthink it was the salt.\nAnd the mystery of why Passion Fruit tasted so disgusting.\nPeople would order it because of the name, and were always\ndisappointed.  It should have been called In-sink-erator\nFruit.\nAnd\nthere was\nthe difference in the way fathers and\nmothers bought ice cream for their kids\n.\nFathers\ntended to\nadopt the attitude of\nbenevolent kings bestowing largesse,\nand\nmothers\nthat of\nharried\nbureaucrats,\ngiving in to\npressure\nagainst their better judgement.\nSo, yes, there does seem to be material, even in\nfast food.\nWhat about the other half, ferreting out the unexpected?\nThat may require some natural ability.  I've noticed for\na long time that I'm pathologically observant.  ....\n[That was as far as I'd gotten at the time.]\nNotes\n[sh] In Shakespeare's own time, serious writing meant theological\ndiscourses, not the bawdy plays acted over on the other  \nside of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses.\nThe other extreme, the work that seems formidable from the moment\nit's created (indeed, is deliberately intended to be)\nis represented by Milton.  Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost is a\nrock imitating a butterfly that happened to get fossilized.\nEven Samuel Johnson seems to have balked at this, on the one  \nhand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive biography,\nand on the other writing of Paradise Lost that \"none who read it\never wished it longer.\""}
{"text": "@Noahpinion Resource extraction.\n\n@benmharrison @StephenFleming Robert Morris does this before hitting return when typing something momentous into the command line.\n\nA friend who's a former British military officer told me that when he was training soldiers in jungle warfare they were taught that if they got lost in the jungle, the first thing they should do was to brew a cup of tea and think about what to do next.\n\n12 yo is refining his evil villain laugh in the next room and it's quite disconcerting.\n\n@nick_sinai @eshear Musing?\n\n@AlmostMedia @KeturahAbigail What, no. I said the middling writers will disappear. The good ones will remain, because they like doing it.\n\nhttps://t.co/GdwU5KKU6M\n\n@eshear Since editing is part of writing, that reduces to: why bother to write when the AI will do it for you? And since writing is thinking, that reduces in turn to: why bother to think when the AI will do it for you?\n\n@archaeologyart This was made for tourists.\n\nAI will punish those who aren't concise.\n\n@TheRealN8works Compared to venture debt it is, because VCs' incentives are much more aligned with founders'."}
{"text": "@rauchg Why is it the most powerful?\n\n@AnalyticaCamil1 If you think I supported Trump in the election, you really have not been paying attention. In fact that would have been so easy to check that I have to assume you're being deliberately dishonest here. \n\nI'm not trying to convince you, just explaining why I blocked you.\n\n@artee_49 @Austen Presumably there are powerful Democrats in there too.\n\n@toomzheng Our World in Data is a nonprofit funded by YC.\n\n@Austen It was known that he flew on Epstein's plane. But presumably Elon means the Epstein files contain evidence of something more serious than that (e.g. sex with underage girls), or it wouldn't make the government withhold the files, or be a \"bomb\" to disclose it.\n\n@electricave3 Do you think Trump should remain in office if the allegations are true?\n\nA lot of people seem to be treating this as if it were just a beef. But the underlying allegation is a very serious one. If it's true, Trump is surely going to have to resign.\n\n@lisperati Not if it's true.\n\n@JasonKander What? Presumably he didn't learn about this till after the Republicans won and they got access to the files.\n\n@SpencrGreenberg The Selfish Gene"}
{"text": "@aaronsibarium precisely\n\n@elonmusk Come on, tourists aren't getting killed. Their cars are getting broken into, sure, but no one's getting killed.\n\n@yuris That was where we got the banana cream pie I got hit in the face with.\n\nhttps://t.co/L8Lx2Z6D9m\n\nThis is true. I often have to explain to people in Britain that it's not actually dangerous to visit SF, as long as you stay out of a few bad bits.\n\n@Rufus87078959 If +2 is right for reading a book 2 feet away, then +1 will be right for looking at a painting 6 feet away.\n\nSomething I taught 12 yo: There are, unfortunately, people in the world who enjoy hurting other people. And they don't wear signs advertising this, or everyone would avoid them.\n\nTip for people who use reading glasses: save your older, weaker ones for looking at paintings in museums.\n\n@scarletinked If there was only one of them, you didn't need to measure his efficiency. He must have been stupendously efficient.\n\n@pritika_mehta All you need is nerds, rich people, a government that doesn't get in the way, and time.\n\n@LifeMathMoney Write Like You Talk: https://t.co/K1ZWs2v6RF"}
{"text": "@TimSuzman @garrytan We had A/C on Pioneer Way too. It just couldn't keep up on the hottest days.\n\n@Niklas_Sikorra @DudespostingWs Dealing with bats flying around inside the house.\n\nKaraoke in our household. https://t.co/DSDv6xKJ9B\n\n12 yo is writing a zombie story where instead of turning into zombies people turn into some politician. He asked me what politician he should use. I told him Ted Cruz.\n\nAlthough two parties to a private settlement can agree to a confidentiality clause if they want to, perhaps in a matter of national security we should know what actually happened.\n\n@GarettJones The funny thing is that Armstrong himself muffed the quote he was supposed to deliver. He was supposed to say \"small step for a man\" but instead said \"small step for man.\"\n\n@xpasky @fermatslibrary When I reproduce a quote in an essay, I make sure to get the correct version. And this can take a surprising amount of work, because even recent quotes have often been mangled. But if you don't do it you just perpetuate the drift.\n\n@xpasky @fermatslibrary Not mangling quoted passages is a more important hill to die on than you might think. Errors and (supposed) amendments introduced into quotes are a constant problem for scholars.\n\n@tjdonegan @fermatslibrary That's not the origin of this quote. I believe Teller quoted Bohr at least twice, once in 1954 and once in 1972. This is the 1972 quote. The 1954 quote is longer and more awkward, and incidentally will also tempt people to rewrite it for the same reason.\n\n@fermatslibrary The original version is \"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.\" \n\nParaphrase or use quotes, but don't put quotes around a paraphrase."}
{"text": "@jdmccafferty Whoah, that actually surpasses the Pollaiuolos' record for lack of back of head. https://t.co/nhJNJ7fKZT\n\nThe more inflated the language in your startup's pitch, the less convincing it seems. If you're a seed stage company, don't tell me you're transforming global this or poised to dominate that. Tell me you noticed something that might turn out to be an overlooked opportunity.\n\n@russian_cosmist @kevinvdahlgren @GraduatedBen Not in many other countries.\n\n@KyleTibbitts @synopsi I don't want capital gains rates to be increased either, but Carter lost because Reagan was more charismatic.\n\nhttps://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8\n\n@Noahpinion I was about to write \"Does the New York Times really want Trump as president?\" and then it occurred to me that they might. It made them a lot of money last time.\n\nhttps://t.co/YJRvok9Ajo\n\n@andrewbean Ugh, yes, and National Geographic.\n\n@robinhanson I wonder if that's true. I'm not disagreeing. It might be true. It's just so hard to say for sure about something like that. It would be interesting if there were some way to measure it.\n\n@Coruscating @devesh_khare @0xKNL__ Woke mobs are a much narrower phenomenon than  someone disagreeing with you. They're people attacking you for very specific things (basically heresy) in a very specific way.\n\nOne thing we've learned from the past decade is that there's a reason western legal traditions have safeguards like penalties for perjury, making the jury be separate from the accusers, and so on, and without them you're going to get miscarriages of justice.\n\n@yuris Ack, that's awful. I can't believe it."}
{"text": "@Hooman323 Someone has to. Imagine if no one did.\n\n@Jonathangel5 Because this is probably the most notorious instance of this type of xenophobia in US history. If we can imagine her doing it then, as we easily can, then she's not just a little bad. She's really bad.\n\n@EV_Trapper Of course. There were a lot of people like her at the time. But it's even less excusable now.\n\n@Jonathangel5 She should not get her way.\n\n@theunusualflow At the very least he's opportunistically xenophobic.\n\nIf Laura Loomer had been around in 1940, she'd have been trying to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the US. You know she would. And if Trump had been president then, she'd have succeeded.\n\n@SaukkonenVille @rickasaurus Here's one famous example:\n\nhttps://t.co/4jDtF3XNsx\n\n@rickasaurus This is less likely at YC. One of the things YC is good at is protecting naive founders.\n\n@traders_guild In fact one of the startups in the current batch specializes in testing vibe coded apps.\n\n@ya_asmarani Thanks, Asmarani. Brandon's style of storytelling is ideal for a situation like this. It reminds us that we're talking about 2 million individuals."}
{"text": "@jeazous Secular = not cyclical.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil I always make a point of telling the truth (e.g. about drinks a week) and it's weird to sense that doctors think I'm lying.\n\nPrediction: This is a secular trend. The pendulum will never swing back. https://t.co/G4NttLBHMl\n\nJessica is hosting a girls' Rummikub night. I was warned to keep away from both the Rummikub and all the party food. Then one of the guests cancelled and they don't have enough players, and now I'm suddenly in demand...\n\n@elonmusk @NoahCarl90 I was thinking mainly of conversations I've had with ordinary people. I don't think you realize the size of the gap between how your tweets about the UK seem to people in Texas and how they seem to people in the UK.\n\n@Timmystravels @NoahCarl90 That's definitely false. The mums and dads I run into at dinner parties are so far from woke that they've never even heard of SJWs.\n\n@NoahCarl90 I worry Elon has no idea how much he has damaged his personal brand in the UK. He thinks he's just tweeting away, and meanwhile ordinary British people now think of him like some sinister rich bad guy in a Batman movie.\n\n@mattyglesias I don't see anything there that he'd disagree with now.\n\n@FRANKDIAZ All the time, when the desk was called a table and was inside a restaurant.\n\n@mccartydan Room to pace was one of the design specs of my office. That and bookshelves and natural light."}
{"text": "How to Get Startup Ideas\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nNovember 2012\nThe way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup\nideas.  It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have\nyourself.\nThe very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common:\nthey're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves\ncan build, and that few others realize are worth doing.  Microsoft,\nApple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.\nProblems\nWhy is it so important to work on a problem you have?  Among other\nthings, it ensures the problem really exists.  It sounds obvious\nto say you should only work on problems that exist.  And yet by far\nthe most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one\nhas.\nI made it myself.  In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries\nonline.  But galleries didn't want to be online.  It's not how the\nart business works.  So why did I spend 6 months working on this\nstupid idea?  Because I didn't pay attention to users.  I invented\na model of the world that didn't correspond to reality, and worked\nfrom that.  I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried\nto convince users to pay for what we'd built.  Even then I took\nembarrassingly long to catch on.  I was attached to my model of the\nworld, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software.  They had to\nwant it!\nWhy do so many founders build things no one wants?  Because they\nbegin by trying to think of startup ideas.  That m.o. is doubly\ndangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad\nideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.\nAt YC we call these \"made-up\" or \"sitcom\" startup ideas.  Imagine\none of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup.  The\nwriters would have to invent something for it to do.  But coming\nup with good startup ideas is hard.  It's not something you can do\nfor the asking.  So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers\nwould come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually\nbad.\nFor example, a social network for pet owners.  It doesn't sound\nobviously mistaken.  Millions of people have pets.  Often they care\na lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them.  Surely\nmany of these people would like a site where they could talk to\nother pet owners.  Not all of them perhaps, but if just 2 or 3\npercent were regular visitors, you could have millions of users.\nYou could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium\nfeatures.\n[\n1\n]\nThe danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your\nfriends with pets, they don't say \"I would\nnever\nuse this.\" They\nsay \"Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that.\" Even when\nthe startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people.\nThey don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but\nthey could imagine other people wanting it.  Sum that reaction\nacross the entire population, and you have zero users.\n[\n2\n]\nWell\nWhen a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who\nreally need what they're making \u2014 not just people who could see\nthemselves using it one day, but who want it urgently.  Usually\nthis initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that\nif there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed\nand that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually\nputs into a version one, it would probably already exist.  Which\nmeans you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build\nsomething a large number of people want a small amount, or something\na small number of people want a large amount.  Choose the latter.\nNot all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all\ngood startup ideas are of that type.\nImagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might\nwant what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they\nwant it.  If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision\ncompanies as holes.  Google is an immense crater: hundreds of\nmillions of people use it, and they need it a lot.  A startup just\nstarting out can't expect to excavate that much volume.  So you\nhave two choices about the shape of hole you start with.  You can\neither dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow\nand deep, like a well.\nMade-up startup ideas are usually of the first type.  Lots of people\nare mildly interested in a social network for pet owners.\nNearly all good startup ideas are of the second type.  Microsoft\nwas a well when they made Altair Basic.  There were only a couple\nthousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming\nin machine language.  Thirty years later Facebook had the same\nshape.  Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of\nwhich there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users\nwanted it a lot.\nWhen you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this\nright now?  Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when\nit's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never\nheard of?  If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.\n[\n3\n]\nYou don't need the narrowness of the well per se.  It's depth you\nneed; you get narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth\n(and speed).  But you almost always do get it.  In practice the\nlink between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good\nsign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific\ngroup or type of user.\nBut while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition\nfor a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one.  If Mark\nZuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed\nto Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea.\nFacebook was a good idea because it started with a small market\nthere was a fast path out of.  Colleges are similar enough that if\nyou build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any\ncollege. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges.  Once you\nhave all the college students, you get everyone else simply by\nletting them in.\nSimilarly for Microsoft: Basic for the Altair; Basic for other\nmachines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems;\napplications; IPO.\nSelf\nHow do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea?  How do you\ntell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a\nniche product?  Often you can't. The founders of Airbnb didn't\nrealize at first how big a market they were tapping.  Initially\nthey had a much narrower idea.  They were going to let hosts rent\nout space on their floors during conventions.  They didn't foresee\nthe expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually.\nAll they knew at first is that they were onto something.  That's\nprobably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.\nOccasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path\nout of the initial niche.  And sometimes I can see a path that's\nnot immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC.  But\nthere are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how much\nexperience you have.  The most important thing to understand about\npaths out of the initial idea is the meta-fact that these are hard\nto see.\nSo if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how\ndo you choose between ideas?  The truth is disappointing but\ninteresting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right\nsort of hunches.  If you're at the leading edge of a field that's\nchanging fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing,\nyou're more likely to be right.\nIn\nZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance\n, Robert Pirsig says:\nYou want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy.  Make\n  yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.\nI've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school.\nI'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically,\nbut it fits this situation well.  Empirically, the way to have good\nstartup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.\nBeing at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be\none of the people pushing it forward.  You can also be at the leading\nedge as a user.  It was not so much because he was a programmer\nthat Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he\nused computers so much.  If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004\nwhether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the\nInternet, they'd have been horrified at the idea.  But Mark already\nlived online; to him it seemed natural.\nPaul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly\nchanging field \"live in the future.\"  Combine that with Pirsig and\nyou get:\nLive in the future, then build what's missing.\nThat describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got\nstarted.  Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even\nsupposed to be companies at first.  They grew out of things their\nfounders built because there seemed a gap in the world.\nIf you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas,\nit's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a\nprepared mind.  Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and\nthink \"I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it.\" Drew Houston\nrealizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks \"I really need to\nmake my files live online.\" Lots of people heard about the Altair.\nLots forgot USB sticks.  The reason those stimuli caused those\nfounders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared\nthem to notice the opportunities they represented.\nThe verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not\n\"think up\" but \"notice.\" At YC we call ideas that grow naturally\nout of the founders' own experiences \"organic\" startup ideas.  The\nmost successful startups almost all begin this way.\nThat may not have been what you wanted to hear.  You may have\nexpected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm\ntelling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the\nright way.  But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth.\nAnd it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes\na year rather than a weekend.\nIf you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field,\nyou can get to one.  For example, anyone reasonably smart can\nprobably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps)\nin a year.  Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5\nyears of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable\ninvestment.  Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder.\n[\n4\n]\nYou don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a\ndomain that's changing fast.  Other domains change fast.  But while\nlearning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future\nsufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world,\nand this trend has decades left to run.\nKnowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be\nable to implement them.  That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos\ncouldn't) but it's an advantage.  It's a big advantage, when you're\nconsidering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if\ninstead of merely thinking \"That's an interesting idea,\" you can\nthink instead \"That's an interesting idea.  I'll try building an\ninitial version tonight.\"  It's even better when you're both a\nprogrammer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating\nnew versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.\nNoticing\nOnce you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice\nstartup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing.  If\nyou're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there\nwill be things that are obviously missing.  What won't be obvious\nis that they're startup ideas.  So if you want to find startup\nideas, don't merely turn on the filter \"What's missing?\" Also turn\noff every other filter, particularly \"Could this be a big company?\"\nThere's plenty of time to apply that test later.  But if you're\nthinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots\nof good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones.\nMost things that are missing will take some time to see.  You almost\nhave to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you.\nBut you\nknow\nthe ideas are out there.  This is not one of those\nproblems where there might not be an answer.  It's impossibly\nunlikely that this is the exact moment when technological progress\nstops.  You can be sure people are going to build things in the\nnext few years that will make you think \"What did I do before x?\"\nAnd when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly\nobvious in retrospect.  What you need to do is turn off the filters\nthat usually prevent you from seeing them.  The most powerful is\nsimply taking the current state of the world for granted.  Even the\nmost radically open-minded of us mostly do that.  You couldn't get\nfrom your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything.\nBut if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of\nthe efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to\nquestion things.  Why is your inbox overflowing?  Because you get\na lot of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox?\nWhy do you get so much email?  What problems are people trying to\nsolve by sending you email?  Are there better ways to solve them?\nAnd why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox?  Why do you\nkeep emails around after you've read them?  Is an inbox the optimal\ntool for that?\nPay particular attention to things that chafe you.  The advantage\nof taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life\n(locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable.\nIf you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but\ndon't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining,\njust as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50\nyears in a time machine.  When something annoys you, it could be\nbecause you're living in the future.\nWhen you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be\nable to describe it as\nobvious\n, at least to you.  When we started\nViaweb, all the online stores were built by hand, by web designers\nmaking individual HTML pages.  It was obvious to us as programmers\nthat these sites would have to be generated by software.\n[\n5\n]\nWhich means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas\nis a question of seeing the obvious.  That suggests how weird this\nprocess is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet\nthat you hadn't seen.\nSince what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may\nbe best not to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the\nproblem \u2014 i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas.  The best\nplan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for\nthings that seem to be missing.  Work on hard problems, driven\nmainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your\nshoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies.\n[\n6\n]\nGive yourself some time.  You have a lot of control over the rate\nat which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less\ncontrol over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it.  If\nBill Gates and Paul Allen had constrained themselves to come up\nwith a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month\nbefore the Altair appeared?  They probably would have worked on a\nless promising idea.  Drew Houston did work on a less promising\nidea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup.  But Dropbox was a much\nbetter idea, both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his\nskills.\n[\n7\n]\nA good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on\nprojects that seem like they'd be cool.  If you do that, you'll\nnaturally tend to build things that are missing.  It wouldn't seem\nas interesting to build something that already existed.\nJust as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones,\nworking on things that could be dismissed as \"toys\" often produces\ngood ones.  When something is described as a toy, that means it has\neverything an idea needs except being important.  It's cool; users\nlove it; it just doesn't matter.  But if you're living in the future\nand you build something cool that users love, it may matter more\nthan outsiders think.  Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple\nand Microsoft started working on them.  I'm old enough to remember\nthat era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers\nwas \"hobbyists.\"  BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science\nproject.  The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one\nanother.\nAt YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that\nwe could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys.  To us\nthat's positive evidence an idea is good.\nIf you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford\nnot to), you can turn \"Live in the future and build what's missing\"\ninto something even better:\nLive in the future and build what seems interesting.\nSchool\nThat's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying\nto learn about \"entrepreneurship.\"  \"Entrepreneurship\" is something\nyou learn best by doing it.  The examples of the most successful\nfounders make that clear.  What you should be spending your time\non in college is ratcheting yourself into the future.  College is\nan incomparable opportunity to do that.  What a waste to sacrifice\nan opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup \u2014 becoming \nthe sort of person who can have organic startup ideas \u2014 by \nspending time learning about the easy part.  Especially since\nyou won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn\nabout sex in a class.  All you'll learn is the words for things.\nThe clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas.\nIf you know a lot about programming and you start learning about\nsome other field, you'll probably see problems that software could\nsolve.  In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in\nanother domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely\nas software people to have already solved their problems with\nsoftware, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant,\nyou don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.\nSo if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead\nof taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a\nclass on, say, genetics.  Or better still, go work for a biotech\ncompany.  CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware\nor software companies.  But if you want to find startup ideas, you\nmight do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field.\n[\n8\n]\nOr don't take any extra classes, and just build things.  It's no\ncoincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January.\nAt Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no\nclasses to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals.\n[\n9\n]\nBut don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups.  That's\npremature optimization. Just build things.  Preferably with other\nstudents.  It's not just the classes that make a university such a\ngood place to crank oneself into the future.  You're also surrounded\nby other people trying to do the same thing.  If you work together\nwith them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic\nideas, but organic ideas with organic founding teams \u2014 and that,\nempirically, is the best combination.\nBeware of research.  If an undergrad writes something all his friends\nstart using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea.\nWhereas a PhD dissertation is extremely unlikely to.  For some\nreason, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely\nit is to be something that could be turned into a startup.\n[\n10\n]\nI think the reason is that the subset of ideas that count as research\nis so narrow that it's unlikely that a project that satisfied that\nconstraint would also satisfy the orthogonal constraint of solving\nusers' problems.  Whereas when students (or professors) build\nsomething as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward\nsolving users' problems \u2014 perhaps even with an additional energy\nthat comes from being freed from the constraints of research.\nCompetition\nBecause a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll\ntend to feel that you're late.  Don't let that deter you.  Worrying\nthat you're late is one of the signs of a good idea.  Ten minutes\nof searching the web will usually settle the question.  Even if you\nfind someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not\ntoo late.  It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by\ncompetitors \u2014 so rare that you can almost discount the possibility.\nSo unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that\nwould prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.\nIf you're uncertain, ask users.  The question of whether you're too\nlate is subsumed by the question of whether anyone urgently needs\nwhat you plan to make.  If you have something that no competitor\ndoes and that some subset of users urgently need, you have a\nbeachhead.\n[\n11\n]\nThe question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more\nimportantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing\nsomething lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's\nprobably big enough no matter how small it is.  For example, if\nyou're building something differentiated from competitors by the\nfact that it works on phones, but it only works on the newest phones,\nthat's probably a big enough beachhead.\nErr on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors.\nInexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than\nthey deserve.  Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on\nyour competitors.  So better a good idea with competitors than a\nbad one without.\nYou don't need to worry about entering a \"crowded market\" so long\nas you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking.\nIn fact that's a very promising starting point.  Google was that\ntype of idea.  Your thesis has to be more precise than \"we're going\nto make an x that doesn't suck\" though. You have to be able to\nphrase it in terms of something the incumbents are overlooking.\nBest of all is when you can say that they didn't have the courage\nof their convictions, and that your plan is what they'd have done\nif they'd followed through on their own insights.  Google was that\ntype of idea too.  The search engines that preceded them shied away\nfrom the most radical implications of what they were doing \u2014 particularly \nthat the better a job they did, the faster users would\nleave.\nA crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both\nthat there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are\ngood enough.  A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously\nbig and yet in which they have no competitors.  So any startup that\nsucceeds is either going to be entering a market with existing\ncompetitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will get them\nall the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small\nbut which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft).\n[\n12\n]\nFilters\nThere are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to\nnotice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.\nMost programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing\nsome brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay\nthem lots of money.  They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems\nor get involved in messy ways with the real world.  Which is a\nreasonable preference, because such things slow you down.  But this\npreference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup\nideas has been stripped pretty clean.  If you let your mind wander\na few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll\nfind valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.\nThe schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay\nabout the condition it induces, which I called\nschlep blindness\n.\nI gave Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning\noff this filter, and a pretty striking example it is.  Thousands\nof programmers were in a position to see this idea; thousands of\nprogrammers knew how painful it was to process payments before\nStripe.  But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see\nthis one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal\nwith payments.  And dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe,\nbut not an intolerable one.  In fact they might have had net less\npain; because the fear of dealing with payments kept most people\naway from this idea, Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing\nin other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition.\nThey didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users,\nbecause users were desperately waiting for what they were building.\nThe unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps\nyou from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear.\nWe overcame this one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting\nthings about the architecture of our software, but we weren't\ninterested in ecommerce per se.  We could see the problem was one\nthat needed to be solved though.\nTurning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off\nthe unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be\nan illusion.  And even to the degree it isn't, it's a worse form\nof self-indulgence.  Starting a successful startup is going to be\nfairly laborious no matter what.  Even if the product doesn't entail\na lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors,\nhiring and firing people, and so on.  So if there's some idea you\nthink would be cool but you're kept away from by fear of the schleps\ninvolved, don't worry: any sufficiently good idea will have as many.\nThe unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely\nuseless as the schlep filter.  If you're at the leading edge of a\nfield that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will\nbe somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice.  Particularly\nas you get older and more experienced.  Plus if you find an idea\nsexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically.\n[\n13\n]\nRecipes\nWhile the best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort\nof person who has them and then build whatever interests you,\nsometimes you don't have that luxury.  Sometimes you need an idea\nnow.  For example, if you're working on a startup and your initial\nidea turns out to be bad.\nFor the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up\nwith startup ideas on demand.  Although empirically you're better\noff using the organic strategy, you could succeed this way. You\njust have to be more disciplined.  When you use the organic method,\nyou don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something\nis truly missing.  But when you make a conscious effort to think\nof startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with\nself-discipline.  You'll see a lot more ideas, most of them bad,\nso you need to be able to filter them.\nOne of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the\nexample of the organic method.  Organic ideas feel like inspirations.\nThere are a lot of stories about successful startups that began\nwhen the founders had what seemed a crazy idea but \"just knew\" it\nwas promising.  When you feel that about an idea you've had while\ntrying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken.\nWhen searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise.\nIf you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers\n(unless you're also a teenager).  Maybe it's a good idea, but you\ncan't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it.  There have to\nbe other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can\njudge.  Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving\ndatabases?  That's because your expertise raises your standards.\nYour ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving\nyourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.\nThe place to start looking for ideas is things you need.  There\nmust\nbe things you need.\n[\n14\n]\nOne good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you\never found yourself saying \"Why doesn't someone make x?  If someone\nmade x we'd buy it in a second.\" If you can think of any x people\nsaid that about, you probably have an idea.  You know there's demand,\nand people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.\nMore generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual\nabout you that makes your needs different from most other people's.\nYou're probably not the only one.  It's especially good if you're\ndifferent in a way people will increasingly be.\nIf you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea\nyou'd previously been working on.  Did you discover any needs while\nworking on it?  Several well-known startups began this way.  Hotmail\nbegan as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous\nstartup idea while they were working at their day jobs.\n[\n15\n]\nA particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young.  Some\nof the most valuable new ideas take root first among people in their\nteens and early twenties.  And while young founders are at a\ndisadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really\nunderstand their peers.  It would have been very hard for someone\nwho wasn't a college student to start Facebook.  So if you're a\nyoung founder (under 23 say), are there things you and your friends\nwould like to do that current technology won't let you?\nThe next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need\nof someone else.  Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps\nthey find in the world.  What's missing?  What would they like to\ndo that they can't?  What's tedious or annoying, particularly in\ntheir work?  Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too\nhard to find startup ideas.  You're just looking for something to\nspark a thought.  Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously\nrealize they had, because you know how to solve it.\nWhen you find an unmet need that isn't your own, it may be somewhat\nblurry at first.  The person who needs something may not know exactly\nwhat they need.  In that case I often recommend that founders act\nlike consultants \u2014 that they do what they'd do if they'd been\nretained to solve the problems of this one user.  People's problems\nare similar enough that nearly all the code you write this way will\nbe reusable, and whatever isn't will be a small price to start out\ncertain that you've reached the bottom of the well.\n[\n16\n]\nOne way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems\nis to make them your own.  When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided\nto write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn\nhow restaurants worked.  That may seem like taking things to extremes,\nbut startups are extreme.  We love it when founders do such things.\nIn fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is\nnot merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek\nout ideas that are unsexy or involve schleps.  Don't try to start\nTwitter.  Those ideas are so rare that you can't find them by looking\nfor them.  Make something unsexy that people will pay you for.\nA good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy\nfilter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that\nyou could use it.  What would you pay for right now?\nSince startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries,\nit can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve\nto, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their\ndemise.  For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment.\nBut there may still be money to be made from something like journalism.\nWhat sort of company might cause people in the future to say \"this\nreplaced journalism\" on some axis?\nBut imagine asking that in the future, not now.  When one company\nor industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side.\nSo don't look for a replacement for x; look for something that\npeople will later say turned out to be a replacement for x.  And\nbe imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs.\nTraditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get\ninformation and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and\nto get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of\nadvertising.  It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has\nalready started to be on most).\nWhen startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving\nsome small but important market that the big players ignore.  It's\nparticularly good if there's an admixture of disdain in the big\nplayers' attitude, because that often misleads them.  For example,\nafter Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he\nfelt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option\nto produce it.  Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one\nof the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which\nseemed intolerably d\u00e9class\u00e9 to a high-end hardware company like HP\nwas at the time.\n[\n17\n]\nAre there groups of\nscruffy\nbut sophisticated users like the early\nmicrocomputer \"hobbyists\" that are currently being ignored by the\nbig players?  A startup with its sights set on bigger things can\noften capture a small market easily by expending an effort that\nwouldn't be justified by that market alone.\nSimilarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some\nwave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for\nwaves and ask how one could benefit from them.  The prices of gene\nsequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like\ndeclines.  What new things will we be able to do in the new world\nwe'll have in a few years?  What are we unconsciously ruling out\nas impossible that will soon be possible?\nOrganic\nBut talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that\nsuch recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas.  Looking for\nwaves is essentially a way to simulate the organic method.  If\nyou're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't\nhave to look for waves; you are the wave.\nFinding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most\npeople who try fail so miserably.  It doesn't work well simply to\ntry to think of startup ideas.  If you do that, you get bad ones\nthat sound dangerously plausible.  The best approach is more indirect:\nif you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will\nseem obvious to you.  But even then, not immediately.  It takes\ntime to come across situations where you notice something missing.\nAnd often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just\nthings that would be interesting to build.  Which is why it's good\nto have the time and the inclination to build things just because\nthey're interesting.\nLive in the future and build what seems interesting.  Strange as\nit sounds, that's the real recipe.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nThis form of bad idea has been around as long as the web.  It\nwas common in the 1990s, except then people who had it used to say\nthey were going to create a portal for x instead of a social network\nfor x.  Structurally the idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying\n\"this is the place for people interested in x,\" and all those people\nshow up and you make money from them.  What lures founders into\nthis sort of idea are statistics about the millions of people who\nmight be interested in each type of x.  What they forget is that\nany given person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and no\none is going to visit 20 different communities regularly.\n[\n2\n]\nI'm not saying, incidentally, that I know for sure a social\nnetwork for pet owners is a bad idea.  I know it's a bad idea the\nway I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism.\nThe set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many times larger\nthan the set of good ones, and many of the good ones don't even\nsound that plausible.  So if all you know about a startup idea is\nthat it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad.\n[\n3\n]\nMore precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient\nactivation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary\na lot.  For example, the activation energy for enterprise software\nsold through traditional channels is very high, so you'd have to\nbe a\nlot\nbetter to get users to switch.  Whereas the activation\nenergy required to switch to a new search engine is low.  Which in\nturn is why search engines are so much better than enterprise\nsoftware.\n[\n4\n]\nThis gets harder as you get older.  While the space of ideas\ndoesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does.\nThere are fairly high walls between most of the paths people take\nthrough life, and the older you get, the higher the walls become.\n[\n5\n]\nIt was also obvious to us that the web was going to be a big\ndeal.  Few non-programmers grasped that in 1995, but the programmers\nhad seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers.\n[\n6\n]\nMaybe it would work to have this second self keep a journal,\nand each night to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies\nyou'd noticed that day.  Not startup ideas, just the raw gaps and\nanomalies.\n[\n7\n]\nSam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an\nidea is not merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also\nlike an undervalued stock in that so few founders do it.\nThere's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because\nfew founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them.\nWhereas there is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas,\nbecause when people make up startup ideas, they tend to make up the\nsame ones.\n[\n8\n]\nFor the computer hardware and software companies, summer jobs\nare the first phase of the recruiting funnel.  But if you're good\nyou can skip the first phase.  If you're good you'll have no trouble\ngetting hired by these companies when you graduate, regardless of\nhow you spent your summers.\n[\n9\n]\nThe empirical evidence suggests that if colleges want to help\ntheir students start startups, the best thing they can do is leave\nthem alone in the right way.\n[\n10\n]\nI'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.\n[\n11\n]\nThis is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users,\nnot competitors.  The most important information about competitors\nis what you learn via users anyway.\n[\n12\n]\nIn practice most successful startups have elements of both.\nAnd you can describe each strategy in terms of the other by adjusting\nthe boundaries of what you call the market.  But it's useful to\nconsider these two ideas separately.\n[\n13\n]\nI almost hesitate to raise that point though.  Startups are\nbusinesses; the point of a business is to make money; and with that\nadditional constraint, you can't expect you'll be able to spend all\nyour time working on what interests you most.\n[\n14\n]\nThe need has to be a strong one.  You can retroactively\ndescribe any made-up idea as something you need.  But do you really\nneed that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew\nHouston needed Dropbox, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb?\nQuite often at YC I find myself asking founders \"Would you use this\nthing yourself, if you hadn't written it?\" and you'd be surprised\nhow often the answer is no.\n[\n15\n]\nPaul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad\ncan be a source of better ideas:\n\"The best technique I've found for dealing with YC companies that\nhave bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before\nwasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody\nwants what they are building, they very often come back with a\nreal idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell\nthe bad idea.\"\n[\n16\n]\nHere's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if\nyou're college students.  If you have a connection to one of the\nmore powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees\nthereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building\nanything they could imagine needing in their social lives that\ndidn't already exist.  Anything that got built this way would be\nvery promising, because such users are not just the most demanding\nbut also the perfect point to spread from.\nI have no idea whether this would work.\n[\n17\n]\nAnd the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak\nstarted out by solving his own problems.  He, like most of his\npeers, couldn't afford a monitor.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison,\nPatrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of\nthis, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan,\nMike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about\nstartup history.\nJapanese Translation\nItalian Translation\nSpanish Translation"}
{"text": "@bscholl Would server-based apps solve the problem at the software end?\n\n@AdHaque110 Since it was predictable, we have to assume it was intentional.\n\n\"A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a pastime.\"\n\n\u2014 Major General Yair Golan, former deputy chief of staff of the Israeli army https://t.co/oRQrNCoIXN\n\n@benthompson You're right that they're being outcompeted, but it's also true that a lot of people in tech have deliberately turned their back on legacy media because of its overall anti-tech bias.\n\n@AssalRad @LatitudePodcast Why are the soldiers masked?\n\n@EricLeeAtty Weird that they'd do all this work of writing these reports rather than just letting him hold his kid. That is real malice.\n\n@ericmigi One reason you're good at hardware is that you are a true hardware nerd.\n\n@eshear I think it's when something that once got you from feeling normal to feeling good becomes something you need just to feel normal.\n\n@adrianionel @Kayodeodeleye The result was that while the majority of SV founders probably still *voted* for Harris, the ones supporting Trump were more excited and donated more money.\n\n@adrianionel @Kayodeodeleye Elizabeth Warren lost Silicon Valley for the Democrats. She asked Biden for several powerful appointments as the price of her support. She hates the tech world, so her network of appointees then set out to undermine it. Especially Gensler at the SEC."}
{"text": "After Credentials\nDecember 2008\nA few months ago I read a\nNew York Times\narticle on South\nKorean cram schools that said\nAdmission to the right university can make or break an ambitious\n  young South Korean.\nA parent added:\n\"In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent\n  of a person's future.\"\nIt was striking how old fashioned this sounded.  And\nyet when I was in high school it wouldn't have seemed too far off\nas a description of the US.  Which means things must have been\nchanging here.\nThe course of people's lives in the US now seems to be determined\nless by credentials and more by performance than it was 25 years\nago.  Where you go to college still matters, but not like it used\nto.\nWhat happened?\n_____\nJudging people by their academic credentials was in its time an\nadvance.  The practice seems to have begun in China, where starting\nin 587 candidates for the imperial civil service had to take an\nexam on classical literature.\n[\n1\n]\nIt was also a test of wealth,\nbecause the knowledge it tested was so specialized that passing\nrequired years of expensive training.  But though wealth was a\nnecessary condition for passing, it was not a sufficient one.  By\nthe standards of the rest of the world in 587, the Chinese system\nwas very enlightened.  Europeans didn't introduce formal civil\nservice exams till the nineteenth century, and even then they seem\nto have been influenced by the Chinese example.\nBefore credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by\nfamily influence, if not outright bribery.   It was a great step\nforward to judge people by their performance on a test.  But by no\nmeans a perfect solution.  When you judge people that way, you tend\nto get cram schools\u2014which they did in Ming China and nineteenth\ncentury England just as much as in present day South Korea.\nWhat cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal.  The use of\ncredentials\nwas an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between\ngenerations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes\nin the seal.  Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into\ncredentials in the next.\nIt's hard to beat this phenomenon, because the schools adjust to suit\nwhatever the tests measure.  When the tests are narrow and\npredictable, you get cram schools on the classic model, like those\nthat prepared candidates for Sandhurst (the British West Point) or\nthe classes American students take now to improve their SAT scores.\nBut as the tests get broader, the schools do too.  Preparing a\ncandidate for the Chinese imperial civil service exams took years,\nas prep school does today.  But the raison d'etre of all these\ninstitutions has been the same: to beat the system.\n[\n2\n]\n_____\nHistory suggests that, all other things being equal, a society\nprospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from\ninfluencing their children's success directly.  It's a fine thing\nfor parents to help their children indirectly\u2014for example,\nby helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then\nmakes them more successful.  The problem comes when parents use\ndirect methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power\nas a substitute for their children's qualities.\nParents will tend to do this when they can.  Parents will die for\ntheir kids, so it's not surprising to find they'll also push their\nscruples to the limits for them.  Especially if other parents are\ndoing it.\nSealing off this force has a double advantage.  Not only does a\nsociety get \"the best man for the job,\" but\nparents' ambitions are diverted from direct methods to indirect\nones\u2014to actually trying to raise their kids well.\nBut we should expect it to be very hard to contain parents' efforts\nto obtain an unfair advantage for their kids.  We're dealing with\none of the most powerful forces in human nature.  We shouldn't expect\nnaive solutions to work, any more than we'd expect naive solutions\nfor keeping heroin out of a prison to work.\n_____\nThe obvious way to solve the problem is to make credentials better.\nIf the tests a society uses are currently hackable, we can study\nthe way people beat them and try to plug the holes.  You can use\nthe cram schools to show you where most of the holes are.  They\nalso tell you when you're succeeding in fixing them: when cram\nschools become less popular.\nA more general solution\nwould be to push for increased transparency, especially at critical\nsocial bottlenecks like college admissions.  In the US this process\nstill shows many outward signs of corruption.  For example, legacy\nadmissions.  The official story is that legacy status doesn't carry\nmuch weight, because all it does is break ties: applicants are\nbucketed by ability, and legacy status is only used to decide between\nthe applicants in the bucket that straddles the cutoff.  But what\nthis means is that a university can make legacy status have as much\nor as little weight as they want, by adjusting the size of the\nbucket that straddles the cutoff.\nBy gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could\nprobably make them more airtight.  But what a long fight it would\nbe.  Especially when the institutions administering the tests don't\nreally want them to be airtight.\n_____\nFortunately there's a better way to prevent the direct transmission\nof power between generations.  Instead of trying to make credentials\nharder to hack, we can also make them matter less.\nLet's think about what credentials are for.  What they are,\nfunctionally, is a way of predicting performance.  If you could\nmeasure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.\nSo why did they even evolve?  Why haven't we just been measuring\nactual performance?  Think about where credentialism first appeared:\nin selecting candidates for large organizations.  Individual\nperformance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the\nharder performance is to measure, the more important it is\nto predict it.  If an organization could immediately and cheaply\nmeasure the performance of recruits, they wouldn't need to examine\ntheir credentials.  They could take everyone and keep just the good\nones.\nLarge organizations can't do this.  But a bunch of small organizations\nin a market can come close.  A market takes every organization and\nkeeps just the good ones.  As organizations get smaller, this\napproaches taking every person and keeping just the good ones.  So\nall other things being equal, a society consisting of more, smaller\norganizations will care less about credentials.\n_____\nThat's what's been happening in the US.  That's why those quotes\nfrom Korea sound so old fashioned.  They're talking about an economy\nlike America's a few decades ago, dominated by a few big companies.\nThe route for the ambitious in that sort of environment is to join\none and climb to the top.  Credentials matter a lot then.  In the \nculture of a large organization, an elite pedigree becomes a self-fulfilling\nprophecy.\nThis doesn't work in small companies.  Even if your colleagues were\nimpressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if\nyour performance didn't match, because the company would go out of\nbusiness and the people would be dispersed.\nIn a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares\nabout.  People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even\ngraduated from college, let alone which one.  All they care about\nis what you can do.  Which is in fact all that should matter, even\nin a large organization.  The reason credentials have such prestige\nis that for so long the large organizations\nin a society tended to be the most powerful.  But in the US at least\nthey don't have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely\nbecause they can't measure (and thus reward) individual performance.\nWhy spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder when you can\nget rewarded directly by the market?\nI realize I see a more exaggerated version of the change than most\nother people.  As a partner at an early stage venture funding firm,\nI'm like a jumpmaster shoving people out of the old world of\ncredentials and into the new one of performance.  I'm an agent of\nthe change I'm seeing.  But I don't think I'm imagining it.  It was\nnot so easy 25 years ago for an ambitious person to choose to be\njudged directly by the market.  You had to go through bosses, and\nthey were influenced by where you'd been to college.\n_____\nWhat made it possible for small organizations to succeed in America?\nI'm still not entirely sure.  Startups are certainly a large part\nof it.  Small organizations can develop new ideas faster than large\nones, and new ideas are increasingly valuable.\nBut I don't think startups account for all the shift from credentials\nto measurement.  My friend Julian Weber told me that when he went\nto work for a New York law firm in the 1950s they paid associates\nfar less than firms do today.  Law firms then made no pretense of\npaying people according to the value of the work they'd done.  Pay\nwas based on seniority.  The younger employees were paying their\ndues.  They'd be rewarded later.\nThe same principle prevailed at industrial companies.  When my\nfather was working at Westinghouse in the 1970s, he had people\nworking for him who made more than he did, because they'd been there\nlonger.\nNow companies increasingly have to pay employees market price for\nthe work they do.   One reason is that employees no longer trust\ncompanies to deliver\ndeferred rewards\n: why work to accumulate\ndeferred rewards at a company that might go bankrupt, or be taken\nover and have all its implicit obligations wiped out?  The other\nis that some companies broke ranks and started to pay young employees\nlarge amounts.  This was particularly true in consulting, law, and\nfinance, where it led to the phenomenon of yuppies.  The word is\nrarely used today because it's no longer surprising to see a 25\nyear old with money, but in 1985 the sight of a 25 year old\nprofessional\nable to afford a new BMW was so novel that it\ncalled forth a new word.\nThe classic yuppie worked for a small organization.  He didn't work\nfor General Widget, but for the law firm that handled General\nWidget's acquisitions or the investment bank that floated their\nbond issues.\nStartups and yuppies entered the American conceptual vocabulary\nroughly simultaneously in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  I don't\nthink there was a causal connection.  Startups happened because\ntechnology started to change so fast that big companies could no\nlonger keep a lid on the smaller ones.  I don't think the rise of\nyuppies was inspired by it; it seems more as if there was a change\nin the social conventions (and perhaps the laws) governing the way\nbig companies worked.  But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce\na principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people\nmarket rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from\nthem.\nAt about the same time the US economy rocketed out of the doldrums\nthat had afflicted it for most of the 1970s.  Was there a connection?\nI don't know enough to say, but it felt like it at the time.  There\nwas a lot of energy released.\n_____\nCountries worried about their competitiveness are right to be\nconcerned about the number of startups started within them.  But\nthey would do even better to examine the underlying principle.  Do\nthey let energetic young people get paid market rate for the work\nthey do?  The young are the test, because when people aren't rewarded\naccording to performance, they're invariably rewarded according to\nseniority instead.\nAll it takes is a few beachheads in your economy that pay for\nperformance.  Measurement spreads like heat.  If one part of a\nsociety is better at measurement than others, it tends to push the\nothers to do better.  If people who are young but smart and driven\ncan make more by starting their own companies than by working for\nexisting ones, the existing companies are forced to pay more to\nkeep them.  So market rates gradually permeate every organization,\neven the government.\n[\n3\n]\nThe measurement of performance will tend to push even the organizations\nissuing credentials into line.  When we were kids I used to annoy\nmy sister by ordering her to do things I knew she was about to do\nanyway.  As credentials are superseded by performance, a similar\nrole is the best former gatekeepers can hope for.  Once credential\ngranting institutions are no longer in the self-fullfilling prophecy\nbusiness, they'll have to work harder to predict the future.\n_____\nCredentials are a step beyond bribery and influence.  But they're\nnot the final step.  There's an even better way to block the\ntransmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend\ntoward an economy made of more, smaller units.  Then you can measure\nwhat credentials merely predict.\nNo one likes the transmission of power between generations\u2014not\nthe left or the right.  But the market forces favored by the right\nturn out to be a better way of preventing it than the credentials\nthe left are forced to fall back on.\nThe era of credentials began to end when the power of large\norganizations\npeaked\nin the late twentieth century.  Now we seem\nto be entering a new era based on measurement.  The reason the new\nmodel has advanced so rapidly is that it works so much better.  It\nshows no sign of slowing.\nNotes\n[\n1\n] Miyazaki, Ichisada\n(Conrad Schirokauer trans.),\nChina's Examination Hell: The Civil\nService Examinations of Imperial China,\nYale University Press,\n1981.\nScribes in ancient Egypt took exams, but they were more the type\nof proficiency test any apprentice might have to pass.\n[\n2\n] When I say the\nraison d'etre of prep schools is to get kids into better colleges,\nI mean this in the narrowest sense.  I'm not saying that's all prep\nschools do, just that if they had zero effect on college admissions\nthere would be far less demand for them.\n[\n3\n] Progressive tax\nrates will tend to damp this effect, however, by decreasing the\ndifference between good and bad measurers.\nThanks\nto Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and David\nSloo for reading drafts of this."}
{"text": "@DudespostingWs She was trying to make an angry feminist point. It's hilarious how no guys reading this even noticed, and just regard the guy as lucky.\n\nIt often seems to people in the tech world that the journalists who seem to have it in for us are crazy, but it looks like this may be literally the case. (via @SteveStuWill) https://t.co/EyoU6Qr2bN\n\nWhat an insane decade the 2020s have turned out to be, and we're only halfway through.\n\n@lulumeservey The sad thing is, I don't think they even care whether their attacks work or not. It's just a bunch of random individuals hunting clicks.\n\nSurely there's orders of magnitude more waste in the Department of Defense than USAID. But if you just show up at the Pentagon and try to push your way in and get access to every classified system, I bet there will be a good deal more resistance.\n\n@Baba_Ayoola Roughly 100 ft.\n\nIn both cases what's going on is that the dismisser didn't really, fully have the idea earlier. He (it's usually a he) *began* to have the idea, but it was nowhere near complete and never would be. It's very easy to lie to yourself about this though.\n\nThe people who dismiss such ideas as \"obvious\" are in much the same position as those (in fact they're probably often the same people) who, when someone creates something new, respond by saying \"I had that idea years ago.\" Really? Where's the evidence?\n\nThe most valuable insights tend to be the most general, so a lot of people will have almost had them. When you write about them, some readers say \"you put my thoughts into words\" and others dismiss your observations as \"obvious.\" And both are describing the same experience!\n\n@tempest_books After a few drinks maybe."}
{"text": "@XFaure @typesfast @zipline If you think that's small, how about the memory capacity of the first microcomputers? 4k of RAM. What a joke. They'll never succeed.\n\n@XFaure \"No wireless? Less space than a Nomad? Lame.\"  \n\nIf anyone can understand how rapidly a startup's initial product can scale, you should...\n\nAnd incidentally if the Democrats did such a thing, I'd be speaking out against them. Suppressing free speech and ignoring due process are equally bad whether done from the right or the left.\n\nTo understand the danger of giving the government overreaching powers, imagine your opponents with them. How are you going to feel in 10 years when the Democrats are in power and label those against abortion as \"terrorist sympathizers\" because some extremist bombed a clinic?\n\n@MacaesBruno Two thirds?\n\nA day later there's a perfect illustration of my point. Whatever the political and economic conditions happen to be, drone delivery is happening now.\n\nhttps://t.co/tMXcB5AYpq\n\n@gdelujo Using weird superlatives for good is a phenomenon that happens in many if not most languages. I doubt there's a part of human language where usage evolves faster.\n\n@TheStalwart The real problem would be parking spaces. Roads in Europe are wide enough. They have to fit semis. But if you drove an F-150 you couldn't take it to the supermarket, or anywhere really.\n\n@Scholars_Stage Could it be because senators serve 6 year terms and representatives 2?\n\nNotice I didn't say I thought *well* about it, just that I was occasionally able to think about this instead of what was happening in my mouth. I also made an intensive study of the ceiling lights. I could probably draw them from memory."}
{"text": "@typesfast Wow, really? That's even better.\n\nIn-person Startup School is back, and boy was it good. I didn't realize what good public speakers so many of the YC partners are. Dalton and Michael had the timing of a comedy team.\n\n@typesfast Ah, ok, this was watching presentations, not vertebrae office hours. I wondered how the hell I had ever managed to do 42 of those.\n\n@typesfast That made me laugh out loud. It's not the only time that's happened. But at least I'm consistent. It's better than me saying \"This is terrible, you have to change everything.\"\n\n@brian_t_muldoon Free public transport might actually be a good idea though.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil That doesn't quite answer my question, because some 65 year olds are older than others. How about this: is it because a lot is spent in the last years of old people's lives?\n\n@cremieuxrecueil Is this just because far more is spent on the very old? What does that graph look like?\n\n@das_munch Good thing you didn't suggest this earlier or they might actually have done it.\n\n@JonathanRoseD They blur together after 5.\n\n@patrickc The boring answer is just that I'd get tired sooner. But there's also an interesting answer: one's expectations. I couldn't have done 42 office hours 20 years ago either. I'd worked my way up to it."}
{"text": "How to Write Usefully\nFebruary 2020\nWhat should an essay be? Many people would say persuasive. That's\nwhat a lot of us were taught essays should be. But I think we can\naim for something more ambitious: that an essay should be useful.\nTo start with, that means it should be correct. But it's not enough\nmerely to be correct. It's easy to make a statement correct by\nmaking it vague. That's a common flaw in academic writing, for\nexample. If you know nothing at all about an issue, you can't go\nwrong by saying that the issue is a complex one, that there are\nmany factors to be considered, that it's a mistake to take too\nsimplistic a view of it, and so on.\nThough no doubt correct, such statements tell the reader nothing.\nUseful writing makes claims that are as strong as they can be made\nwithout becoming false.\nFor example, it's more useful to say that Pike's Peak is near the\nmiddle of Colorado than merely somewhere in Colorado. But if I say\nit's in the exact middle of Colorado, I've now gone too far, because\nit's a bit east of the middle.\nPrecision and correctness are like opposing forces. It's easy to\nsatisfy one if you ignore the other. The converse of vaporous\nacademic writing is the bold, but false, rhetoric of demagogues.\nUseful writing is bold, but true.\nIt's also two other things: it tells people something important,\nand that at least some of them didn't already know.\nTelling people something they didn't know doesn't always mean\nsurprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they\nknew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may\nbe the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more\nfundamental.\nLet's put them all together. Useful writing tells people something\ntrue and important that they didn't already know, and tells them\nas unequivocally as possible.\nNotice these are all a matter of degree. For example, you can't\nexpect an idea to be novel to everyone. Any insight that you have\nwill probably have already been had by at least one of the world's\n7 billion people. But it's sufficient if an idea is novel to a lot\nof readers.\nDitto for correctness, importance, and strength. In effect the four\ncomponents are like numbers you can multiply together to get a score\nfor usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly reductive, but\nnonetheless true.\n_____\nHow can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and\nimportant? Believe it or not, there is a trick for doing this. I\nlearned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying\nanything dumb. His trick is not to say anything unless he's sure\nit's worth hearing. This makes it hard to get opinions out of him,\nbut when you do, they're usually right.\nTranslated into essay writing, what this means is that if you write\na bad sentence, you don't publish it. You delete it and try again.\nOften you abandon whole branches of four or five paragraphs. Sometimes\na whole essay.\nYou can't ensure that every idea you have is good, but you can\nensure that every one you publish is, by simply not publishing the\nones that aren't.\nIn the sciences, this is called publication bias, and is considered\nbad. When some hypothesis you're exploring gets inconclusive results,\nyou're supposed to tell people about that too. But with essay\nwriting, publication bias is the way to go.\nMy strategy is loose, then tight. I write the first draft of an\nessay fast, trying out all kinds of ideas. Then I spend days rewriting\nit very carefully.\nI've never tried to count how many times I proofread essays, but\nI'm sure there are sentences I've read 100 times before publishing\nthem. When I proofread an essay, there are usually passages that\nstick out in an annoying way, sometimes because they're clumsily\nwritten, and sometimes because I'm not sure they're true. The\nannoyance starts out unconscious, but after the tenth reading or\nso I'm saying \"Ugh, that part\" each time I hit it. They become like\nbriars that catch your sleeve as you walk past. Usually I won't\npublish an essay till they're all gone \u0097 till I can read through\nthe whole thing without the feeling of anything catching.\nI'll sometimes let through a sentence that seems clumsy, if I can't\nthink of a way to rephrase it, but I will never knowingly let through\none that doesn't seem correct. You never have to. If a sentence\ndoesn't seem right, all you have to do is ask why it doesn't, and\nyou've usually got the replacement right there in your head.\nThis is where essayists have an advantage over journalists. You\ndon't have a deadline. You can work for as long on an essay as you\nneed to get it right. You don't have to publish the essay at all,\nif you can't get it right. Mistakes seem to lose courage in the\nface of an enemy with unlimited resources. Or that's what it feels\nlike. What's really going on is that you have different expectations\nfor yourself. You're like a parent saying to a child \"we can sit\nhere all night till you eat your vegetables.\" Except you're the\nchild too.\nI'm not saying no mistake gets through. For example, I added condition\n(c) in\n\"A Way to Detect Bias\"\nafter readers pointed out that I'd\nomitted it. But in practice you can catch nearly all of them.\nThere's a trick for getting importance too. It's like the trick I\nsuggest to young founders for getting startup ideas: to make something\nyou yourself want. You can use yourself as a proxy for the reader.\nThe reader is not completely unlike you, so if you write about\ntopics that seem important to you, they'll probably seem important\nto a significant number of readers as well.\nImportance has two factors. It's the number of people something\nmatters to, times how much it matters to them. Which means of course\nthat it's not a rectangle, but a sort of ragged comb, like a Riemann\nsum.\nThe way to get novelty is to write about topics you've thought about\na lot. Then you can use yourself as a proxy for the reader in this\ndepartment too. Anything you notice that surprises you, who've\nthought about the topic a lot, will probably also surprise a\nsignificant number of readers. And here, as with correctness and\nimportance, you can use the Morris technique to ensure that you\nwill. If you don't learn anything from writing an essay, don't\npublish it.\nYou need humility to measure novelty, because acknowledging the\nnovelty of an idea means acknowledging your previous ignorance of\nit. Confidence and humility are often seen as opposites, but in\nthis case, as in many others, confidence helps you to be humble.\nIf you know you're an expert on some topic, you can freely admit\nwhen you learn something you didn't know, because you can be confident\nthat most other people wouldn't know it either.\nThe fourth component of useful writing, strength, comes from two\nthings: thinking well, and the skillful use of qualification. These\ntwo counterbalance each other, like the accelerator and clutch in\na car with a manual transmission. As you try to refine the expression\nof an idea, you adjust the qualification accordingly. Something\nyou're sure of, you can state baldly with no qualification at all,\nas I did the four components of useful writing. Whereas points that\nseem dubious have to be held at arm's length with perhapses.\nAs you refine an idea, you're pushing in the direction of less\nqualification. But you can rarely get it down to zero. Sometimes\nyou don't even want to, if it's a side point and a fully refined\nversion would be too long.\nSome say that qualifications weaken writing. For example, that you\nshould never begin a sentence in an essay with \"I think,\" because\nif you're saying it, then of course you think it. And it's true\nthat \"I think x\" is a weaker statement than simply \"x.\" Which is\nexactly why you need \"I think.\" You need it to express your degree\nof certainty.\nBut qualifications are not scalars. They're not just experimental\nerror. There must be 50 things they can express: how broadly something\napplies, how you know it, how happy you are it's so, even how it\ncould be falsified. I'm not going to try to explore the structure\nof qualification here. It's probably more complex than the whole\ntopic of writing usefully. Instead I'll just give you a practical\ntip: Don't underestimate qualification. It's an important skill in\nits own right, not just a sort of tax you have to pay in order to\navoid saying things that are false. So learn and use its full range.\nIt may not be fully half of having good ideas, but it's part of\nhaving them.\nThere's one other quality I aim for in essays: to say things as\nsimply as possible. But I don't think this is a component of\nusefulness. It's more a matter of consideration for the reader. And\nit's a practical aid in getting things right; a mistake is more\nobvious when expressed in simple language. But I'll admit that the\nmain reason I write simply is not for the reader's sake or because\nit helps get things right, but because it bothers me to use more\nor fancier words than I need to. It seems inelegant, like a program\nthat's too long.\nI realize florid writing works for some people. But unless you're\nsure you're one of them, the best advice is to write as simply as\nyou can.\n_____\nI believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty +\ncorrectness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay. But I should\nwarn you that it's also a recipe for making people mad.\nThe root of the problem is novelty. When you tell people something\nthey didn't know, they don't always thank you for it. Sometimes the\nreason people don't know something is because they don't want to\nknow it. Usually because it contradicts some cherished belief. And\nindeed, if you're looking for novel ideas, popular but mistaken\nbeliefs are a good place to find them. Every popular mistaken belief\ncreates a\ndead zone\nof ideas around \nit that are relatively unexplored because they contradict it.\nThe strength component just makes things worse. If there's anything\nthat annoys people more than having their cherished assumptions\ncontradicted, it's having them flatly contradicted.\nPlus if you've used the Morris technique, your writing will seem\nquite confident. Perhaps offensively confident, to people who\ndisagree with you. The reason you'll seem confident is that you are\nconfident: you've cheated, by only publishing the things you're\nsure of.  It will seem to people who try to disagree with you that\nyou never admit you're wrong. In fact you constantly admit you're\nwrong. You just do it before publishing instead of after.\nAnd if your writing is as simple as possible, that just makes things\nworse. Brevity is the diction of command. If you watch someone\ndelivering unwelcome news from a position of inferiority, you'll\nnotice they tend to use lots of words, to soften the blow. Whereas\nto be short with someone is more or less to be rude to them.\nIt can sometimes work to deliberately phrase statements more weakly\nthan you mean. To put \"perhaps\" in front of something you're actually\nquite sure of. But you'll notice that when writers do this, they\nusually do it with a wink.\nI don't like to do this too much. It's cheesy to adopt an ironic\ntone for a whole essay. I think we just have to face the fact that\nelegance and curtness are two names for the same thing.\nYou might think that if you work sufficiently hard to ensure that\nan essay is correct, it will be invulnerable to attack. That's sort\nof true. It will be invulnerable to valid attacks. But in practice\nthat's little consolation.\nIn fact, the strength component of useful writing will make you\nparticularly vulnerable to misrepresentation. If you've stated an\nidea as strongly as you could without making it false, all anyone\nhas to do is to exaggerate slightly what you said, and now it is\nfalse.\nMuch of the time they're not even doing it deliberately. One of the\nmost surprising things you'll discover, if you start writing essays,\nis that people who disagree with you rarely disagree with what\nyou've actually written. Instead they make up something you said\nand disagree with that.\nFor what it's worth, the countermove is to ask someone who does\nthis to quote a specific sentence or passage you wrote that they\nbelieve is false, and explain why. I say \"for what it's worth\"\nbecause they never do. So although it might seem that this could\nget a broken discussion back on track, the truth is that it was\nnever on track in the first place.\nShould you explicitly forestall likely misinterpretations? Yes, if\nthey're misinterpretations a reasonably smart and well-intentioned\nperson might make. In fact it's sometimes better to say something\nslightly misleading and then add the correction than to try to get\nan idea right in one shot. That can be more efficient, and can also\nmodel the way such an idea would be discovered.\nBut I don't think you should explicitly forestall intentional\nmisinterpretations in the body of an essay. An essay is a place to\nmeet honest readers. You don't want to spoil your house by putting\nbars on the windows to protect against dishonest ones. The place\nto protect against intentional misinterpretations is in end-notes.\nBut don't think you can predict them all. People are as ingenious\nat misrepresenting you when you say something they don't want to\nhear as they are at coming up with rationalizations for things they\nwant to do but know they shouldn't. I suspect it's the same skill.\n_____\nAs with most other things, the way to get better at writing essays\nis to practice. But how do you start? Now that we've examined the\nstructure of useful writing, we can rephrase that question more\nprecisely. Which constraint do you relax initially? The answer is,\nthe first component of importance: the number of people who care\nabout what you write.\nIf you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something\nyou're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only\nhave ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and\nyou're writing. Later you can expand the breadth of topics you write\nabout.\nThe other constraint you can relax is a little surprising: publication.\nWriting essays doesn't have to mean publishing them. That may seem\nstrange now that the trend is to publish every random thought, but\nit worked for me. I wrote what amounted to essays in notebooks for\nabout 15 years. I never published any of them and never expected\nto. I wrote them as a way of figuring things out. But when the web\ncame along I'd had a lot of practice.\nIncidentally,\nSteve \nWozniak\ndid the same thing. In high school he\ndesigned computers on paper for fun. He couldn't build them because\nhe couldn't afford the components. But when Intel launched 4K DRAMs\nin 1975, he was ready.\n_____\nHow many essays are there left to write though? The answer to that\nquestion is probably the most exciting thing I've learned about\nessay writing. Nearly all of them are left to write.\nAlthough\nthe essay\nis an old form, it hasn't been assiduously\ncultivated. In the print era, publication was expensive, and there\nwasn't enough demand for essays to publish that many. You could\npublish essays if you were already well known for writing something\nelse, like novels. Or you could write book reviews that you took\nover to express your own ideas. But there was not really a direct\npath to becoming an essayist. Which meant few essays got written,\nand those that did tended to be about a narrow range of subjects.\nNow, thanks to the internet, there's a path. Anyone can publish\nessays online. You start in obscurity, perhaps, but at least you\ncan start. You don't need anyone's permission.\nIt sometimes happens that an area of knowledge sits quietly for\nyears, till some change makes it explode. Cryptography did this to\nnumber theory. The internet is doing it to the essay.\nThe exciting thing is not that there's a lot left to write, but\nthat there's a lot left to discover. There's a certain kind of idea\nthat's best discovered by writing essays. If most essays are still\nunwritten, most such ideas are still undiscovered.\nNotes\n[1] Put railings on the balconies, but don't put bars on the windows.\n[2] Even now I sometimes write essays that are not meant for\npublication. I wrote several to figure out what Y Combinator should\ndo, and they were really helpful.\nThanks\nto Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and\nRobert Morris for reading drafts of this.\nSpanish Translation\nJapanese Translation"}
{"text": "@jonatanpallesen Do we know that he was fired for this?\n\n@5j0rs Almost everyone. Basic programming is much, much easier than getting a degree in math or physics.\n\n@johpickard Some kinds of programming.\n\n@archiexzzz Fortran II on the IBM 1401. It didn't even have subroutines.\n\n(You can worry about the fact that you think in Blub when you reach that point...)\n\nThe only thing that matters about the first programming language you learn is that it get you to the point where you learn your second, and almost every language can do that.\n\nDon't stress over what to learn as your first programming language. If you have a friend who's a programmer and will help you get started, just use whatever language they use.\n\n@levie Would this get counted in productivity statistics @ATabarrok?\n\n@Ander663352 Yes, actually.\n\n@thebrowndipper It's a long story: https://t.co/owrYC46NAb"}
{"text": "@Kahlissee I investigated and this is misleading. Their problem with Israel has to do with airport charges.\n\n@FakePsyho That's a good point. It depends how many lines of code are still written by humans. But this multiplier does at least suggest the 10k claim is not insane.\n\n@xavitime That *other people* are more productive.\n\n@unclesam_001 For a given programmer working at a constant level, it's a decent approximation of value.\n\nThe other strange thing about the responses to that tweet was that they were only half bitterly angry. The other half were people reporting that they hit similar numbers themselves.\n\nJust a month ago I got a lot of strangely angry responses after reporting that a founder told me he could write 10k lines of code in day with AI. But 10k/20 = 500, and one could easily do that in a long day, on a new project, in a verbose language.\n\nParis buildings by age. https://t.co/1m5SH2Tl3c\n\n@MacaesBruno By who then?\n\n@SpencerHakimian You're probably not helping by posting things like this. \n\nDire predictions based on incomplete initial information.\n\n@carl_feynman I keep the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary open. It catches just about everything."}
{"text": "@daltonc I find I'm unable to suggest specific types of work. The future seems too unpredictable. The best I can tell my kids is to go deep into skills that seem interestingly difficult.\n\n@PP_Rubens Yes! Finally I got one right.\n\n@pranavdandekar I have some experience in this: it's because the distributors don't want it to happen.\n\nSince journalists and indignant social media sharers tend to focus on bad news, it's easy to think things are changing for the worse, but this isn't true.\n\n@iam_aditya_m Fancy brands that won't let their stuff be sold on Amazon, and think they're above using Shopify.\n\n@ParthaSundaram Trying to buy something.\n\n@GrugNotes I doubt if the site I just tried to order from used Shopify. They probably think they're above that.\n\nAlmost thirty years in, online shopping is still not a solved problem. Big sites like Amazon work, but if you try to order from a manufacturer's site, there's still a good chance it will break. In a very high production value way, with lots of Javascript, but still break.\n\n@perveritatmvita Elon has other things to work on beside this fight. The bureaucrats don't.\n\nPrediction: The bureaucrats will mostly wait out DOGE. I hope I'm wrong. But slow-rolling things they oppose is bureaucrats' number one skill."}
{"text": "@ViktorBunin The depth of moral decline.\n\nThis seems a new low.\n\n@ATabarrok There was less CO2 in the atmosphere.\n\n@NikithaRai135 \"Has more to do with\" needs to be split into \"is motivated by\" and \"will have the effect of.\"\n\nI.e. the call for \"no more billionaires\" is motivated by wealth inequality, but will have the effect of suppressing innovators.\n\n@tkanthh @artenpedia I'm pointing out that their relative position helped make the subject acceptable to the Victorians, and that they even had furniture with the same aim.\n\n@SpencerHakimian Or he's simply starting another party.\n\n@angelonuoha7 @ycombinator @ahmxrd Nice shirt.\n\n@charliedavidman That's close but it seems to have one more mast than the ships in the painting.\n\nThere's certainly a list of people who wired large amounts to Epstein. Banks keep records of those. Let's start with that.\n\n@ButlerianIdeal @ESYudkowsky @garrytan Not compared to Americans."}
{"text": "@ecomarxi Now we're talking about a very precise proposition. Do you believe it's false? If so do you have any counterexamples from the past that disprove it? If there are any genuine counterexamples, we can use them to refine it further.\n\n@ecomarxi The modification I suggest is that a protest can be successful if it inconveniences people incidentally, but if its purpose is merely to inconvenience people, it will decrease support for your cause among the majority of those inconvenienced.\n\n@ecomarxi When you discover a counterexample that invalidates a proposed rule, the answer is not to dismiss it, but to figure out how the rule has to be modified in order to be valid.\n\n@JillFilipovic That's intellectually dishonest. She says locker rooms and bathrooms, and you're pretending she just said bathrooms.\n\n@megacorpKid Better than the Principia? Seems unlikely.\n\n@matthew_d_green In my experience the most valuable thing about college is the other people there \u2014 the faculty and students. And that is inherently constrained. If you want to be among the n smartest collections of people, there are only n places you can go.\n\n@eemaguire It increases the number of applications, but not the number of applicants.\n\nSomething Robert Morris taught me that I've since observed repeatedly: the best books are about much more than they claim to be.\n\nHe was talking about Kernighan and Ritchie, but the most famous example is probably Gibbon's Decline and Fall.\n\n@mattyglesias If you changed \"the classes\" to \"some majors\" you might not be far off.\n\n@boudbeuk It's the US in 1980."}
{"text": "A conversation that's happened 100 times.\n\nMe: What do I have to wear to this thing?\n\nJessica: You can wear anything you want.\n\nMe: Can I wear &lt;clothes I usually wear&gt;?\n\nJessica: Come on, you can't wear that.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil Well, you have to build them first. But relatively soon I hope.\n\n@anopenhandle @atrupar On the contrary. This is the President of the United States we're talking about. It's important to have an accurate model of his thinking in order to predict how he'll react. Is he merely Bush dumb, or something below that?\n\n@StefanFSchubert Do the conspicuously huge disc brakes on fancy cars generate proportionately more air pollution?\n\n@jdmccafferty Who does that figure represent?\n\n@atrupar (I went to ask my 13 yo about this, and he pointed out that the price of something can decrease 400 percent. It means the seller pays you 3x the original price to take it.)\n\n@atrupar At what age, on average, do you think a child would know that the price of something can't come down 400 percent? Ten?\n\n@hankgreen Thanks Hank!\n\n@zhil_arf The younger one is still only 13.\n\n@chrishartdev @JohndMeyer @WSJ Thanks! I not only like planes, but funded this one."}
{"text": "Where to See Silicon Valley\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nOctober 2010\nSilicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl.  At first glance\nit doesn't seem there's anything to see.  It's not the sort of place\nthat has conspicuous monuments.  But if you look, there are subtle\nsigns you're in a place that's different from other places.\n1.\nStanford\nUniversity\nStanford is a strange place.  Structurally it is to an ordinary\nuniversity what suburbia is to a city.  It's enormously spread out,\nand feels surprisingly empty much of the time.  But notice the\nweather.  It's probably perfect.  And notice the beautiful mountains\nto the west.  And though you can't see it, cosmopolitan San Francisco\nis 40 minutes to the north.  That combination is much of the reason\nSilicon Valley grew up around this university and not some other\none.\n2.\nUniversity\nAve\nA surprising amount of the work of the Valley is done in the cafes\non or just off University Ave in Palo Alto.  If you visit on a\nweekday between 10 and 5, you'll often see founders pitching\ninvestors.  In case you can't tell, the founders are the ones leaning\nforward eagerly, and the investors are the ones sitting back with\nslightly pained expressions.\n3.\nThe Lucky\nOffice\nThe office at 165 University Ave was Google's first.  Then it was\nPaypal's.  (Now it's\nWepay\n's.)  The interesting thing about it is\nthe location.  It's a smart move to put a startup in a place with\nrestaurants and people walking around instead of in an office park,\nbecause then the people who work there want to stay there, instead\nof fleeing as soon as conventional working hours end.  They go out\nfor dinner together, talk about ideas, and then come back and\nimplement them.\nIt's important to realize that Google's current location in an\noffice park is not where they started; it's just where they were\nforced to move when they needed more space.  Facebook was till\nrecently across the street, till they too had to move because they\nneeded more space.\n4.\nOld\nPalo Alto\nPalo Alto was not originally a suburb.  For the first 100 years or\nso of its existence, it was a college town out in the countryside.\nThen in the mid 1950s it was engulfed in a wave of suburbia that\nraced down the peninsula.  But Palo Alto north of Oregon expressway\nstill feels noticeably different from the area around it.  It's one\nof the nicest places in the Valley.  The buildings are old (though\nincreasingly they are being torn down and replaced with generic\nMcMansions) and the trees are tall.  But houses are very\nexpensive\u2014around $1000 per square foot. This is post-exit\nSilicon Valley.\n5.\nSand\nHill Road\nIt's interesting to see the VCs' offices on the north side of Sand\nHill Road precisely because they're so boringly uniform.  The\nbuildings are all more or less the same, their exteriors express\nvery little, and they are arranged in a confusing maze.  (I've been\nvisiting them for years and I still occasionally get lost.) It's\nnot a coincidence.  These buildings are a pretty accurate reflection\nof the VC business.\nIf you go on a weekday you may see groups of founders there to meet\nVCs. But mostly you won't see anyone; bustling is the last word\nyou'd use to describe the atmos.  Visiting Sand Hill Road reminds\nyou that the opposite of \"down and dirty\" would be \"up and clean.\"\n6.\nCastro\nStreet\nIt's a tossup whether Castro Street or University Ave should be\nconsidered the heart of the Valley now.  University Ave would have\nbeen 10 years ago.  But Palo Alto is getting expensive.  Increasingly\nstartups are located in Mountain View, and Palo Alto is a place\nthey come to meet investors.  Palo Alto has a lot of different\ncafes, but there is one that clearly dominates in Mountain View:\nRed\nRock\n.\n7.\nGoogle\nGoogle spread out from its first building in Mountain View \nto a lot of the surrounding ones.  But because the\nbuildings were built at different times by different people,\nthe place doesn't have the sterile, walled-off feel that a typical\nlarge company's headquarters have.  It definitely has a flavor of\nits own though.  You sense there is something afoot.  The general\natmos is vaguely utopian; there are lots of Priuses, and people who\nlook like they drive them.\nYou can't get into Google unless you know someone there.  It's very\nmuch worth seeing inside if you can, though.   Ditto for Facebook,\nat the end of California Ave in Palo Alto, though there is nothing\nto see outside.\n8.\nSkyline\nDrive\nSkyline Drive runs along the crest of the Santa Cruz mountains.  On\none side is the Valley, and on the other is the sea\u2014which\nbecause it's cold and foggy and has few harbors, plays surprisingly\nlittle role in the lives of people in the Valley, considering how\nclose it is.  Along some parts of Skyline the dominant trees are\nhuge redwoods, and in others they're live oaks.  Redwoods mean those\nare the parts where the fog off the coast comes in at night; redwoods\ncondense rain out of fog.  The MROSD manages a collection of\ngreat walking trails\noff\nSkyline.\n9.\n280\nSilicon Valley has two highways running the length of it: 101, which\nis pretty ugly, and 280, which is one of the more beautiful highways\nin the world.  I always take 280 when I have a choice.  Notice the\nlong narrow lake to the west? That's the San Andreas Fault.  It\nruns along the base of the hills, then heads uphill through Portola\nValley.  One of the MROSD trails runs\nright along\nthe fault\n.  A string of rich neighborhoods runs along the\nfoothills to the west of 280: Woodside, Portola Valley, Los Altos\nHills, Saratoga, Los Gatos.\nSLAC\ngoes right under 280 a little bit south of Sand Hill Road.  And a couple miles south of that is the Valley's equivalent of the \"Welcome to Las Vegas\" sign:\nThe Dish\n.\nNotes\nI skipped the\nComputer\nHistory Museum\nbecause this is a list of where to see the Valley\nitself, not where to see artifacts from it.  I also skipped San\nJose.  San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley, but\nwhen people in the Valley use the phrase \"the city,\" they mean San\nFrancisco.  San Jose is a dotted line on a map.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston\nfor reading drafts of this."}
{"text": "When I was a kid it seemed like America was run by stiffs. But that turned out to be infinitely preferable to having the country run by thugs.\n\n@brianluidog Not in my experience.\n\n@independentabe If you're American, call your member of Congress.\n\n@DarwinianVyas My guess is a Limitless Pendant.\n\nSomething I taught 13 yo: When you're in the idea business, there will be times when you stop having them. For the first 20 years or so, every time this happens you'll worry it's permanent. But eventually you'll learn to stop worrying.\n\n@ahistoryinart Wow is that good. He outmotherwells Motherwell.\n\n@dcxStep @jessesingal Seems like it should be.\n\n@TrevMcKendrick @mwseibel Hmm, interesting idea...\n\n(The actual concert was packed. We were just early.)\n\n@davidfelsmann He's 80 and he's still got it."}
{"text": "Subject: Airbnb\nMarch 2011\nYesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable\npost\nabout missing\nAirbnb\n.   VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily\nrare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward.  So\nthat post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred is.  He's\nprobably the nicest VC I know.\nReading Fred's post made me go back and look at the emails I exchanged\nwith him at the time, trying to convince him to invest in Airbnb.\nIt was quite interesting to read.  You can see Fred's mind at work \nas he circles the deal.\nFred and the Airbnb founders have generously agreed to let me publish\nthis email exchange (with one sentence redacted about something\nthat's strategically important to Airbnb and not an important part\nof the conversation).  It's an interesting illustration of an element\nof the startup ecosystem that few except the participants ever see:\ninvestors trying to convince one another to invest in their portfolio\ncompanies.  Hundreds if not thousands of conversations of this type\nare happening now, but if one has ever been published, I haven't\nseen it.  The Airbnbs themselves never even saw these emails at the\ntime.\nWe do a lot of this behind the scenes stuff at YC, because we invest\nin such a large number of companies, and we invest so early that\ninvestors sometimes need a lot of convincing to see their merits.\nI don't always try as hard as this though.  Fred must \nhave found me quite annoying.\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders\ndate: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:42 AM\nsubject: meet the airbeds\nOne of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast,\nis in NYC right now meeting their users.  (NYC is their biggest\nmarket.) I'd recommend meeting them if your schedule allows.\nI'd been thinking to myself that though these guys were going to\ndo really well, I should introduce them to angels, because VCs would\nnever go for it.  But then I thought maybe I should give you more\ncredit.  You'll certainly like meeting them.  Be sure to ask about\nhow they funded themselves with breakfast cereal.\nThere's no reason this couldn't be as big as Ebay.  And this team\nis the right one to do it.\n--pg\nfrom: Brian Chesky\nto: Paul Graham\ncc: Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia\ndate: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:40 AM\nsubject: Re: meet the airbeds\nPG,\nThanks for the intro!\nBrian\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Brian Chesky\ncc: Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia\ndate: Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 12:38 PM\nsubject: Re: meet the airbeds\nIt's a longshot, at this stage, but if there was any VC who'd get\nyou guys, it would be Fred.  He is the least suburban-golf-playing\nVC I know.\nHe likes to observe startups for a while before acting, so don't\nbe bummed if he seems ambivalent.\n--pg\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham,\ndate: Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 5:28 PM\nsubject: Re: meet the airbeds\nThanks Paul\nWe are having a bit of a debate inside our partnership about the\nairbed concept. We'll finish that debate tomorrow in our weekly\nmeeting and get back to you with our thoughts\nThanks\nFred\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson\ndate: Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 10:48 PM\nsubject: Re: meet the airbeds\nI'd recommend having the debate after meeting them instead of before.\nWe had big doubts about this idea, but they vanished on meeting the\nguys.\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham\ndate: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:08 AM\nsubject: RE: meet the airbeds\nWe are still very suspect of this idea but will take a meeting as\nyou suggest\nThanks\nfred\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham, AirBedAndBreakfast Founders\ndate: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 11:09 AM\nsubject: RE: meet the airbeds\nAirbed team -\nAre you still in NYC?\nWe'd like to meet if you are\nThanks\nfred\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson\ndate: Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 1:42 PM\nsubject: Re: meet the airbeds\nIdeas can morph.  Practically every really big startup could say,\nfive years later, \"believe it or not, we started out doing ___.\"\nIt just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually\non the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users.\nOn top of several previous good signs.\n--pg\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham\ndate: Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 7:15 AM\nsubject: Re: meet the airbeds\nIt's interesting\nOur two junior team members were enthusiastic\nThe three \"old guys\" didn't get it\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson\ndate: Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 5:58 PM\nsubject: airbnb\nThe Airbeds just won the first poll among all the YC startups in\ntheir batch by a landslide.  In the past this has not been a 100%\nindicator of success (if only anything were) but much better than\nrandom.\n--pg\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham\ndate: Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 5:29 PM\nsubject: Re: airbnb\nI met them today\nThey have an interesting business\nI'm just not sure how big it's going to be\nfred\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson\ndate: Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 9:50 AM\nsubject: Re: airbnb\nDid they explain the long-term goal of being the market in accommodation\nthe way eBay is in stuff?  That seems like it would be huge.  Hotels\nnow are like airlines in the 1970s before they figured out how to\nincrease their load factors.\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham\ndate: Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 2:05 PM\nsubject: Re: airbnb\nThey did but I am not sure I buy that\nABNB reminds me of Etsy in that it facilitates real commerce in a\nmarketplace model directly between two people\nSo I think it can scale all the way to the bed and breakfast market\nBut I am not sure they can take on the hotel market\nI could be wrong\nBut even so, if you include short term room rental, second home\nrental, bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations,\nyou get to a pretty big opportunity\nfred\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson\ndate: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 12:21 AM\nsubject: Re: airbnb\nSo invest in them!  They're very capital efficient.  They would\nmake an investor's money go a long way.\nIt's also counter-cyclical.  They just arrived back from NYC, and\nwhen I asked them what was the most significant thing they'd observed,\nit was how many of their users actually needed to do these rentals\nto pay their rents.\n--pg\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham\ndate: Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 2:21 AM\nsubject: Re: airbnb\nThere's a lot to like\nI've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who\nwere investors in Service Metrics and understand this model\nI am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like\nthis a few years ago.\nSo we are working on it\nThanks for the lead\nFred\nfrom: Paul Graham\nto: Fred Wilson\ndate: Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:00 PM\nsubject: airbnb already spreading to pros\nI know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's a\ncontinuum between private sofas and hotel rooms, and they just moved\none step further along it.\n[link to an airbnb user]\nThis is after only a few months.  I bet you they will get hotels\neventually.  It will start with small ones.  Just wait till all the\n10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site.  And once it spreads\nto hotels, where is the point (in size of chain) at which it stops?\nOnce something becomes a big marketplace, you ignore it at your\nperil.\n--pg\nfrom: Fred Wilson\nto: Paul Graham\ndate: Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 4:26 AM\nsubject: Re: airbnb already spreading to pros\nThat's true. It's also true that there are quite a few marketplaces\nout there that serve this same market\nIf you look at many of the people who list at ABNB, they list\nelsewhere too\nI am not negative on this one, I am interested, but we are still\nin the gathering data phase.\nfred"}
{"text": "@aProductCreator Some of the ones I describe in the file I've since written. And there is presumably some duplication, since I never read the file.\n\n@micsolana Funding is down, but founding isn't down as much.\n\n@ashish_pov It varies from minutes to months, but a couple weeks usually.\n\n@micsolana That article looks like nonsense. Their graph is completely implausible.\n\n@JimSkazas I did years ago.\n\nSo maybe it was useful to write down the idea when I first thought about it. Maybe that caused me to think about it later. Things you've read can be useful long after you've forgotten reading them (https://t.co/Icj6P7OqHu), and this is probably true for things you've written too.\n\nThat's not to say that I don't write the essays described in the file though. I often do. But not because I found them by scrolling through the file. I just ended up thinking about the same topic again.\n\nIn practice this file is practically write-only. When I have an idea for an essay but don't have time to write it (e.g. because I'm in the middle of another) I make a note of it in the file. But I pretty much never go back and read them.\n\nI have a file of notes about essays I might write in the future. Typically I'll have about a paragraph about each. I was curious how long the file was. 1792 lines!\n\n@matthewgburgess I'll admit that it's a very attractive flavor for dictators. When the state owns everything, it also tends to control everything."}
{"text": "In fact the hugeness of the outcome explains why it's rational for n to be large. If there were 100 delivery apps, the expected value of starting one would be a founder's share of at least a billion dollars.\n\nThe \"nth delivery app\" is a terrible idea, unless it happens to be Doordash, in which case it's worth 100 billion dollars and no one ever describes it in those terms.\n\nIt's an illusion that there was a \"bad old days\" when Silicon Valley was funding crap startups. Most startups fail, and failed ideas sound bad, even if they could have evolved into something good. So past cohorts of startups will always seem crappy.\n\n@mike_thefounder Following YC's advice does.\n\n@BenjaminPDixon I know, of course, that it originally had a different meaning. But for the last several years the default sense has been the pejorative one.\n\n@staysaasy The web. https://t.co/HDSpTGD5jO\n\n@nikillinit Learn to program, listen to users, make something people want, focus on building instead of fundraising, build something you yourself need.\n\nJournalism was still a thriving industry in 1980. People like Woodward and Bernstein still aspired to work in it. By 2010 you could no longer make either of those claims. That left a gap, and the gap was filled by different people with different motives.\n\nIn retrospect one of the things that allowed wokeness to become so powerful, at its peak, was the decline of journalism as an industry. The kind of people who undertook its institutional capture in 2010 mostly couldn't have gotten hired in 1980.\n\n\"All those things we tell founders to do, she actually *does* them.\"\n\n\u2014 Jessica on Christina Cacioppo"}
{"text": "@winterrose @cremieuxrecueil I find it's good just to talk to them about math.\n\n@kendrictonn I didn't own one till I was about 50.\n\n@metapills @ahistoryinart Ok, I watched a lot of Tim's Vermeer, and he used two devices: a mirror within a camera obscura. (His mirror isn't a camera lucida, which is more complicated, but it can be used in a similar way.)\n\n@LKrauss1 I read a good deal of ancient stuff (in translation). It's reassuring in a way to know that people were as quarrelsome and irresponsible as they are now. But what's not reassuring is how often this ended in disaster.\n\n@SamGichuru This is a gratuitously bizarre way to display a bulleted list...\n\n@skdh Not exactly. I think you were better at math.\n\n@Noahpinion You're contradicted by the next tweet. You just have to follow different people (and set your account to show you only tweets by people you follow). https://t.co/i2tWVMeWwd\n\n@edsull Obviously it depends how they disagree.\n\n@ifulido Actually that's true. I often find myself wondering if they're bots, which I rarely if ever did with left-wing trolls.\n\n@rogteran I think it's a combination of wokeness losing steam, left-wing users leaving, and the ones that remain not wanting to pay Elon for blue checks and thus getting their tweets deprioritized."}
{"text": "The Roots of Lisp\nMay 2001\n(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly\nwhat McCarthy discovered.  You don't need to know this stuff\nto program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to \nanyone who wants to\nunderstand the essence of Lisp \u0097 both in the sense of its\norigins and its semantic core.  The fact that it has such a core\nis one of Lisp's distinguishing features, and the reason why,\nunlike other languages, Lisp has dialects.)\nIn 1960,\nJohn \nMcCarthy\npublished a remarkable paper in\nwhich he did for programming something like what Euclid did for\ngeometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple\noperators and a notation for functions, you can\nbuild a whole programming language.\nHe called this language Lisp, for \"List Processing,\"\nbecause one of his key ideas was to use a simple\ndata structure called a\nlist\nfor both\ncode and data.\nIt's worth understanding what McCarthy discovered, not\njust as a landmark in the history of computers, but as\na model for what programming is tending to become in\nour own time.  It seems to me that there have been\ntwo really clean, consistent models of programming so\nfar: the C model and the Lisp model.\nThese two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands\nbetween them.  As computers have grown more powerful,\nthe new languages being developed have been\nmoving\nsteadily\ntoward the Lisp model.  A popular recipe\nfor new programming languages in the past 20 years \nhas been to take the C model of computing and add to\nit, piecemeal, parts taken from the Lisp model,\nlike runtime typing and garbage collection.\nIn this article I'm going to try to explain in the\nsimplest possible terms what McCarthy discovered.\nThe point is not just to learn about an interesting\ntheoretical result someone figured out forty years ago,\nbut to show where languages are heading.\nThe unusual thing about Lisp \u0097 in fact, the defining\nquality of Lisp \u0097 is that it can be written in\nitself.  To understand what McCarthy meant by this,\nwe're going to retrace his steps, with his mathematical\nnotation translated into running Common Lisp code.\nComplete Article (Postscript)\nWhat Made Lisp Different\nThe Code\nChinese Translation\nJapanese Translation\nPortuguese Translation\nKorean Translation"}
{"text": "Learning from Founders\nJanuary 2007\n(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's\nFounders at Work\n.)\nApparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the\nblocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.  The winners\nslow down the least.  It's that way with most startups too.  The\nearliest phase is usually the most productive.  That's when they\nhave the really big ideas.  Imagine what Apple was like when 100%\nof its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.\nThe striking thing about this phase is that it's completely different\nfrom most people's idea of what business is like.  If you looked\nin people's heads (or stock photo collections) for images representing\n\"business,\" you'd get images of people dressed up in suits, groups\nsitting around conference tables looking serious, Powerpoint\npresentations, people producing thick reports for one another to\nread.   Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this.  And\nyet they're probably the most productive part of the whole economy.\nWhy the disconnect?  I think there's a general principle at work\nhere: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they\nexpend on appearances to compensate.  More often than not the energy\nthey expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance\nworse.  A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine\nmodified the \"sports\" model of some production car to get the fastest\npossible standing quarter mile.  You know how they did it?  They\ncut off all the crap the manufacturer had bolted onto the car to\nmake it\nlook\nfast.\nBusiness is broken the same way that car was.  The effort that goes\ninto looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes\norganizations less productive.  Suits, for example.  Suits do not\nhelp people to think better.  I bet most executives at big companies\ndo their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go\ndownstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee.  That's when\nyou have ideas.  Just imagine what a company would be like if people\ncould think that well at work.  People do in startups, at least\nsome of the time.  (Half the time you're in a panic because your\nservers are on fire, but the other half you're thinking as deeply\nas most people only get to sitting alone on a Sunday morning.)\nDitto for most of the other differences between startups and what\npasses for productivity in big companies.  And yet conventional\nideas of professionalism have such an iron grip on our minds that\neven startup founders are affected by them.  In our startup, when\noutsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem \"professional.\" We'd\nclean up our offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a\nlot of people were there during conventional office hours.  In fact,\nprogramming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks\nduring office hours.  It got done by badly dressed people (I was\nnotorious for programmming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn\nwith junk at 2 in the morning.  But no visitor would understand\nthat.  Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize\nreal productivity when they see it.  Even we were affected by the\nconventional wisdom.  We thought of ourselves as impostors, succeeding\ndespite being totally unprofessional.  It was as if we'd created a\nFormula 1 car but felt sheepish because it didn't look like a car\nwas supposed to look.\nIn the car world, there are at least some people who know that a\nhigh performance car looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan\nwith giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk.  Why not\nin business?  Probably because startups are so small.  The really\ndramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four people,\nso only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands\nsee business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.\nThis book can help fix that problem, by showing everyone what, till\nnow, only a handful people got to see: what happens in the first\nyear of a startup.  This is what real productivity looks like. This\nis the Formula 1 racecar.  It looks weird, but it goes fast.\nOf course, big companies won't be able to do everything these\nstartups do.  In big companies there's always going to be more\npolitics, and less scope for individual decisions.  But seeing what\nstartups are really like will at least show other organizations\nwhat to aim for.  The time may soon be coming when instead of\nstartups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to\nseem more like startups.  That would be a good thing.\nJapanese\nTranslation\nFounders at Work\nThere can't be more than a couple thousand\npeople who know first-hand what happens in the first month of a\nsuccessful startup.   Jessica Livingston got them to tell us.  \nSo despite the interview format, this is\nreally a how-to book.  It is probably the single most valuable \nbook a startup founder could read."}
{"text": "@WildCat_io And also comes from China...\n\n@notmaitham @tommycollison I was surprised to read that all the Christian kingdoms in the north recognized Abd-ar-Rahman III as their overlord in the early 10th century, so in that sense at least the greatest extent of Muslim control occurred 200 years after the initial invasion.\n\nA good illustration to show kids. You do not want to get anywhere near this stuff. https://t.co/LAxVfeMkbO\n\n@tommycollison Watt and Cachia's History of Islamic Spain.\n\n@kendrictonn I once tried having the photograph of the smaller scale work printed on canvas and using it as an underpainting. It worked well technically. The problem is they use bad quality canvas for this. And the inks aren't lightfast, as you see if you leave any underpainting showing.\n\n@winterrose Wow, really? That makes me very happy to read.\n\nI'd been procrastinating by reading Twitter, but now I'm going to get back to work writing.\n\n@codenamefnatic @dened21 @footballmood I had to keep doing consulting work to pay the rent.\n\n@harjtaggar This memo helped cause it to peak. Lots of people on the far left smugly predicted disaster for Coinbase. In fact they've done great. And that has inspired many other founder/CEOs (in fact, probably most of them) to quietly do the same thing.\n\n@dadiomov This sounds like George Costanza taking his parents for Waymo rides.\n\n@dened21 @footballmood Yes, I wanted to get rich so I could paint."}
{"text": "@Rezsa No, I'm quoting Mandy Patinkin. You clearly did not even watch the video.\n\n@avidseries What Israel is doing to Palestinian civilians in Gaza is not on the scale of the Holocaust. But Patinkin wasn't just talking about the Holocaust. He was talking about the whole long history of pogroms against Jews. And it does resemble those.\n\n@4thewisdom @wideofthepost No you won't.\n\n@avidseries I drew?\n\n@SpencerHakimian I predict @cremieuxrecueil will have something to say about this study.\n\n@atokdase @wideofthepost He's a supporter of the current administration's attack on universities, which I consider one of their most dangerous mistakes.\n\n@jdmccafferty I have this print! I saw it in a Persian restaurant in Cambridge, MA and tracked one down.\n\n@ADerkshan Is Mandy Patinkin?\n\n\"How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and you do it to someone else?\"\n\n@ElijahSchaffer Dissimilar than? You mean dissimilar to.\n\nAt least we know you don't use AIs to write your tweets, though. An AI would never make such a mistake."}
{"text": "@jdupl1 That's an encouraging thought! You just might. Probably not, but you might.\n\n@matrixbender69 @michelletandler It's because (a) wokeness has so permeated American universities and (b) because so many are based in the Bay Area.\n\nBut startups are less woke now than they were 5 years ago. Founders have cracked down.\n\n@chinmay @michelletandler No. Some political extremists try to start startups, but they tend not to do very well.\n\n@Noahpinion Why was the birthrate so low in China around 2000?\n\n@FilArons Me too!\n\n@michelletandler There aren't many successful founders on the far right or the far left. Nearly all are accidental moderates (https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF). That comes with being independent-minded, which you have to be to succeed as a startup founder.\n\n@markessien Based on the technology used by Neanderthals, I think they'd be smart enough to fit into current society.\n\n@2021Ufo People who want that.\n\n@Algon_33 @benkohlmann @GarettJones Yes. You only turn them off initially, when you're in the first phase of searching for ideas.\n\n@Aella_Girl Our house was one of the first built in what later became a large development, so I had construction sites to play on (and take scrap wood for tree forts from) for my whole childhood."}
{"text": "@rajatsuri He's so old that they'll be picking new leaders soon either way.\n\n@Scholars_Stage The world is full of them, but it's usually hidden. Twitter brings out all the nasty people's hidden nastiness into the open. It's interesting in a way. But not fun.\n\nLooking at old pictures with 12 yo.  \n\nMe: Look what a happy childhood you had.  \n\n12 yo: I'm still having it. https://t.co/blaVZtrmBO\n\n@NNunnelee Yes. She thought that Jessica and I must be funding these things in order to encourage him.\n\n@0hAims50921 He's not actually starting any of these companies.\n\nAt a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults.\n\nIf your university is still paying Elsevier, what do they think they know that MIT doesn't?\n\nI was talking recently to Andy Lapsa of Stoke Space, and at least two of his customers are other YC companies. As another founder observed, even rocket companies can find customers at YC.\n\n\"Some things don't change. Ron Conway is one of them.\"\n\n\u2014 Steve Huffman\n\nPlus this phrase tends to signal other undesirable baggage, like professors who want to be founders in the sense of equity but not in the sense of commitment, and university bureaucrats who do nothing but put obstacles in the company's way."}
{"text": "How to Present to Investors\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nAugust 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010\nIn a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded\nthis summer present to investors.  Y Combinator funds startups twice\na year, in January and June.  Ten weeks later we invite all the\ninvestors we know to hear them present what they've built so far.\nTen weeks is not much time.  The average startup probably doesn't\nhave much to show for itself after ten weeks.  But the average\nstartup fails.  When you look at the ones that went on to do great\nthings, you find a lot that began with someone pounding out a\nprototype in a week or two of nonstop work.  Startups are a\ncounterexample to the rule that haste makes waste.\n(Too much money seems to be as bad for startups as too much time,\nso we don't give them much money either.)\nA week before Demo Day, we have a dress rehearsal called Rehearsal Day.\nAt other Y Combinator events we allow outside guests, but not at\nRehearsal Day.  No one except the other founders gets to see the rehearsals.\nThe presentations on Rehearsal Day are often pretty rough.  But this is\nto be expected.  We try to pick founders who are good at building\nthings, not ones who are slick presenters.  Some of the founders\nare just out of college, or even still in it, and have never spoken\nto a group of people they didn't already know.\nSo we concentrate on the basics.  On Demo Day each startup will\nonly get ten minutes, so we encourage them to focus on just two\ngoals: (a) explain what you're doing, and (b) explain why users\nwill want it.\nThat might sound easy, but it's not when the speakers have no\nexperience presenting, and they're explaining technical matters to\nan audience that's mostly non-technical.\nThis situation is constantly repeated when startups present to\ninvestors: people who are bad at explaining, talking to people who\nare bad at understanding.  Practically every successful startup,\nincluding stars like Google, presented at some point to investors\nwho didn't get it and turned them down.  Was it because the founders\nwere bad at presenting, or because the investors were obtuse?  It's\nprobably always some of both.\nAt the most recent Rehearsal Day, we four Y Combinator partners found\nourselves saying a lot of the same things we said at the last two.\nSo at dinner afterward we collected all our tips about presenting\nto investors.  Most startups face similar challenges, so we hope\nthese will be useful to a wider audience.\n1. Explain what you're doing.\nInvestors' main question when judging a very early startup is whether\nyou've made a compelling product.  Before they can judge whether\nyou've built a good x, they have to understand what kind of x you've\nbuilt.  They will get very frustrated if instead of telling them\nwhat you do, you make them sit through some kind of preamble.\nSay what you're doing as soon as possible, preferably in the first\nsentence. \"We're Jeff and Bob and we've built an easy to use web-based\ndatabase.  Now we'll show it to you and explain why people need\nthis.\"\nIf you're a great public speaker you may be able to violate this\nrule.  Last year one founder spent the whole first half of his talk\non a fascinating analysis of the limits of the conventional desktop\nmetaphor.  He got away with it, but unless you're a captivating\nspeaker, which most hackers aren't, it's better to play it safe.\n2. Get rapidly to demo.\nThis section is now obsolete for YC founders presenting\nat Demo Day, because Demo Day presentations are now so short\nthat they rarely include much if any demo.  They seem to work\njust as well without, however, which makes me think I was\nwrong to emphasize demos so much before.\nA demo explains what you've made more effectively than any verbal\ndescription.  The only thing worth talking about first is the problem\nyou're trying to solve and why it's important.  But don't spend\nmore than a tenth of your time on that.  Then demo.\nWhen you demo, don't run through a catalog of features.  Instead\nstart with the problem you're solving, and then show how your product\nsolves it.  Show features in an order driven by some kind of purpose,\nrather than the order in which they happen to appear on the screen.\nIf you're demoing something web-based, assume that the network\nconnection will mysteriously die 30 seconds into your presentation,\nand come prepared with a copy of the server software running on\nyour laptop.\n3. Better a narrow description than a vague one.\nOne reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is\nthat, at this early stage, there are all kinds of possibilities.\nThe most concise descriptions seem misleadingly narrow.  So for\nexample a group that has built an easy web-based database might\nresist calling their applicaton that, because it could be so much\nmore.  In fact, it could be anything...\nThe problem is, as you approach (in the calculus sense) a description\nof something that could be anything, the content of your description\napproaches zero.  If you describe your web-based database as \"a\nsystem to allow people to collaboratively leverage the value of\ninformation,\" it will go in one investor ear and out the other.\nThey'll just discard that sentence as meaningless boilerplate, and\nhope, with increasing impatience, that in the next sentence you'll\nactually explain what you've made.\nYour primary goal is not to describe everything your system might\none day become, but simply to convince investors you're worth talking\nto further.  So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right\nanswer by successive approximations.  Begin with a description\nthat's gripping but perhaps overly narrow, then flesh it out to the\nextent you can.  It's the same principle as incremental development:\nstart with a simple prototype, then add features, but at every point\nhave working code.  In this case, \"working code\" means a working\ndescription in the investor's head.\n4. Don't talk and drive.\nHave one person talk while another uses the computer.  If the same\nperson does both, they'll inevitably mumble downwards at the computer\nscreen instead of talking clearly at the audience.\nAs long as you're standing near the audience and looking at them,\npoliteness (and habit) compel them to pay attention to you.  Once\nyou stop looking at them to fuss with something on your computer,\ntheir minds drift off to the errands they have to run later.\n5. Don't talk about secondary matters at length.\nIf you only have a few minutes, spend them explaining what your\nproduct does and why it's great.  Second order issues like competitors\nor resumes should be single slides you go through quickly at the\nend.  If you have impressive resumes, just flash them on the screen\nfor 15 seconds and say a few words.  For competitors, list the top\n3 and explain in one sentence each what they lack\nthat you have.  And put this kind of thing at the end, after you've\nmade it clear what you've built.\n6. Don't get too deeply into business models.\nIt's good to talk about how you plan to make money, but mainly\nbecause it shows you care about that and have thought about it.\nDon't go into detail about your business model, because (a) that's\nnot what smart investors care about in a brief presentation, and\n(b) any business model you have at this point is probably wrong\nanyway.\nRecently a VC who came to speak at Y Combinator talked about a\ncompany he just invested in.  He said their business model was wrong\nand would probably change three times before they got it right.\nThe founders were experienced guys who'd done startups before and\nwho'd just succeeded in getting millions from one of the top VC\nfirms, and even their business model was crap.  (And yet he invested\nanyway, because he expected it to be crap at this stage.)\nIf you're solving an important problem, you're going to sound a lot\nsmarter talking about that than the business model.  The business\nmodel is just a bunch of guesses, and guesses about stuff that's\nprobably not your area of expertise.  So don't spend your precious\nfew minutes talking about crap when you could be talking about\nsolid, interesting things you know a lot about: the problem you're\nsolving and what you've built so far.\nAs well as being a bad use of time, if your business model seems\nspectacularly wrong, that will push the stuff you want investors\nto remember out of their heads.  They'll just remember you as the\ncompany with the boneheaded plan for making money, rather than the\ncompany that solved that important problem.\n7. Talk slowly and clearly at the audience.\nEveryone at Rehearsal Day could see the difference between the people\nwho'd been out in the world for a while and had presented to groups,\nand those who hadn't.\nYou need to use a completely different voice and manner talking to\na roomful of people than you would in conversation.  Everyday life\ngives you no practice in this.  If you can't already do it, the\nbest solution is to treat it as a consciously artificial trick,\nlike juggling.\nHowever, that doesn't mean you should talk like some kind of\nannouncer.  Audiences tune that out.  What you need to do is talk\nin this artificial way, and yet make it seem conversational.  (Writing\nis the same.  Good writing is an elaborate effort to seem spontaneous.)\nIf you want to write out your whole presentation beforehand and\nmemorize it, that's ok.  That has worked for some groups in the\npast.  But make sure to write something that sounds like spontaneous,\ninformal speech, and deliver it that way too.\nErr on the side of speaking slowly.  At Rehearsal Day, one of the founders\nmentioned a rule actors use: if you feel you're speaking too slowly,\nyou're speaking at about the right speed.\n8. Have one person talk.\nStartups often want to show that all the founders are equal partners.\nThis is a good instinct; investors dislike unbalanced teams.  But\ntrying to show it by partitioning the presentation is going too\nfar.  It's distracting.  You can demonstrate your respect\nfor one another in more subtle ways.  For example, when one of the\ngroups presented at Demo Day, the more extroverted of the two\nfounders did most of the talking, but he described his co-founder\nas the best hacker he'd ever met, and you could tell he meant it.\nPick the one or at most two best speakers, and have them do most\nof the talking.\nException: If one of the founders is an expert in some specific\ntechnical field, it can be good for them to talk about that for a\nminute or so.  This kind of \"expert witness\" can add credibility,\neven if the audience doesn't understand all the details.  If Jobs\nand Wozniak had 10 minutes to present the Apple II, it might be a good plan\nto have Jobs speak for 9 minutes and have Woz speak for a minute\nin the middle about some of the technical feats he'd pulled off in\nthe design.  (Though of course if it were actually those two, Jobs\nwould speak for the entire 10 minutes.)\n9. Seem confident.\nBetween the brief time available and their lack of technical\nbackground, many in the audience will have a hard time evaluating\nwhat you're doing.  Probably the single biggest piece of evidence,\ninitially, will be your own confidence in it.   You have\nto show you're impressed with what you've made.\nAnd I mean show, not tell.  Never say \"we're passionate\" or \"our\nproduct is great.\"  People just ignore that\u2014or worse, write you\noff as bullshitters.  Such messages must be implicit.\nWhat you must not do is seem nervous and apologetic.  If you've\ntruly made something good, you're doing investors a\nfavor\nby\ntelling them about it.  If you don't genuinely believe that, perhaps\nyou ought to change what your company is doing.  If you don't believe\nyour startup has such promise that you'd be doing them a favor by\nletting them invest, why are you investing your time in it?\n10. Don't try to seem more than you are.\nDon't worry if your company is just a few months old and doesn't\nhave an office yet, or your founders are technical people with no\nbusiness experience.  Google was like that once, and they turned out\nok.  Smart investors can see past such superficial flaws.  They're\nnot looking for finished, smooth presentations.  They're looking\nfor raw talent.  All you need to convince them of is that you're\nsmart and that you're onto something good.  If you try too hard to\nconceal your rawness\u2014by trying to seem corporate, or pretending\nto know about stuff you don't\u2014you may just conceal your talent.\nYou can afford to be candid about what you haven't figured out yet.\nDon't go out of your way to bring it up (e.g. by having a slide\nabout what might go wrong), but don't try to pretend either that\nyou're further along than you are.  If you're a hacker and you're\npresenting to experienced investors, they're probably better at\ndetecting bullshit than you are at producing it.\n11. Don't put too many words on slides.\nWhen there are a lot of words on a slide, people just skip reading\nit.  So look at your slides and ask of each word \"could I cross\nthis out?\"  This includes gratuitous clip art.  Try to get your\nslides under 20 words if you can.\nDon't read your slides.  They should be something in the background\nas you face the audience and talk to them, not something you face\nand read to an audience sitting behind you.\nCluttered sites don't do well in demos, especially when they're\nprojected onto a screen.  At the very least, crank up the font size\nbig enough to make all the text legible.  But cluttered sites are\nbad anyway, so perhaps you should use this opportunity to make your\ndesign simpler.\n12. Specific numbers are good.\nIf you have any kind of data, however preliminary, tell the audience.\nNumbers stick in people's heads.  If you can claim that the median\nvisitor generates 12 page views, that's great.\nBut don't give them more than four or five numbers, and only give\nthem numbers specific to you.  You don't need to tell them the size\nof the market you're in.  Who cares, really, if it's 500 million\nor 5 billion a year?  Talking about that is like an actor at the\nbeginning of his career telling his parents how much Tom Hanks\nmakes.  Yeah, sure, but first you have to become Tom Hanks.  The\nimportant part is not whether he makes ten million a year or a\nhundred, but how you get there.\n13. Tell stories about users.\nThe biggest fear of investors looking at early stage startups is\nthat you've built something based on your own a priori theories of\nwhat the world needs, but that no one will actually want.  So it's\ngood if you can talk about problems specific users have and how you\nsolve them.\nGreg Mcadoo said one thing Sequoia looks for is the \"proxy for\ndemand.\"  What are people doing now, using inadequate tools, that\nshows they need what you're making?\nAnother sign of user need is when people pay a lot for something.\nIt's easy to convince investors there will be demand for\na cheaper alternative to something popular, if you preserve\nthe qualities that made it popular.\nThe best stories about user needs are about your own.  A remarkable\nnumber of famous startups grew out of some need the founders had:\nApple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google.  Experienced investors know that,\nso stories of this type will get their attention.  The next best\nthing is to talk about the needs of people you know personally,\nlike your friends or siblings.\n14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads.\nProfessional investors hear a lot of pitches.  After a while they\nall blur together.  The first cut is simply to be one of those\nthey remember.  And the way to ensure that is to create a descriptive\nphrase about yourself that sticks in their heads.\nIn Hollywood, these phrases seem to be of the form \"x meets y.\"\nIn the startup world, they're usually \"the x of y\" or \"the x y.\"\nViaweb's was \"the Microsoft Word of ecommerce.\"\nFind one and launch it clearly (but apparently casually) in your\ntalk, preferably near the beginning.\nIt's a good exercise for you, too, to sit down and try to figure\nout how to describe your startup in one compelling phrase.  If you\ncan't, your plans may not be sufficiently focused.\nHow to Fund a Startup\nHackers' Guide to Investors\nSpanish Translation\nJapanese Translation\nRussian Translation\nImage: Casey Muller: Trevor Blackwell at Rehearsal Day, summer 2006"}
{"text": "Exception: In some cases a sufficiently formidable person can stamp their personality on a company even if they're not one of the founders. E.g. IBM, Tesla.\n\nThe extent to which the Great Man Theory explains history varies a lot from case to case. But it definitely explains the histories of startups. Startups succeed because, and in the way that, their founders make them succeed.\n\n@ahistoryinart There's no Wikipedia page about Peter Kelly. Someone should make one.\n\n@pickover \"They used and abused her; they treated her bad!\"\n\n\u2014 Kyle Beaudette, The Garden Witch\n\n@therabbithole You want critical thinking? Here's some. We have no idea why he was fired, and if we claim we do, we're as bad as the bien pensants we despise. It might not have been for anything he said, but simply for posting a conversation with students online.\n\n@howard This is an instance of the general rule that you should be careful about launching any startup at any time, unless you have something special and know what you're doing.\n\n@amitay1599 These are two different sets of numbers, reported killed and body identified. Obviously the latter is going to be smaller when lots of people are buried under rubble. The Post either doesn't get this or is deliberately lying. Probably the latter.\n\n@jonatanpallesen It's irresponsible to claim he was \"fired for merely discussing\" something. We don't know he was fired for this video, and even if he was, we don't know it was for what he said rather than, say, the fact that he recorded and published conversations with students.\n\n@stylewarning Surely you can intern a string with a ' in it.\n\nInteresting: numerical evidence for the Great Man theory of history."}
{"text": "@BoyanSlat There's nothing significant about multiples of the product of the number of fingers you have and the time it takes the earth to orbit the sun.\n\n@mattyryze People who use that gag always think they're the first to.\n\n@sanjaypartly There is a real YC alum whose last name is Moriarty and who is a professor.\n\n@nikitabier He's trolling us with the chain at this point.\n\n@MarkMuro1 @MuiChristine @politico @BrookingsMetro Why do you need more silicon valleys? I understand how having more silicon valleys helps the cities in question, but how does it help founders?\n\nHere's a case for @communitynotes. There has been a Snopes entry about this urban legend since 2005.\n\n@DylanMAllman The claim that five signers were tortured is not only false, it's not even original. This text has been recycled for decades. There's been a Snopes entry about it since 2005.\n\nhttps://t.co/aOH7ATvYhf\n\n@eyeslasho I remember when Twitter was full of left-wing trolls quote-tweeting instances of wrongthink to summon mobs to attack it. Now right-wing trolls are doing it. I'd thought perhaps that this tactic was inherent to the left, but it seems to be a problem with Twitter itself.\n\n@lennysan @jesslivingston AI is torturing my thumb.\n\n@luoxiaxia @gmiller When I decided to retire as president I offered her the job first."}
{"text": "The Origins of Wokeness\nJanuary 2025\nThe word \"prig\" isn't very common now, but if you look up\nthe definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:\nA self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if\n  superior to others.\nThis sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and\nits age is an important clue: it shows that although\nwokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an\ninstance of a much older one.\nThere's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a\nshallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates\nhis purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every\nsociety has these people. All that changes is the rules they\nenforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In\nStalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the\nwoke, it's social justice.\nSo if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask\nis not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs.\nThe question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about\nthese ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to\nask when and where wokeness began.\nThe answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a\nsecond, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which\nstarted in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and\nthen returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally\npeaking after the riots of 2020.\nWhat was political correctness, exactly? I'm often asked to define\nboth this term and wokeness by people who think they're meaningless\nlabels, so I will. They both have the same definition:\nAn aggressively performative focus on social justice.\nIn other words, it's people being prigs about social\njustice. And that's the real problem \u2014 the\nperformativeness, not the social justice.\n[\n0\n]\nRacism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on\nthe scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.\nI don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The\nproblem with political correctness was not that it focused\non marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in\nwhich it did so. Instead of going out into the world and\nquietly helping members of marginalized groups, the\npolitically correct focused on getting people in trouble for\nusing the wrong words to talk about them.\nAs for where political correctness began, if you think about\nit, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin\noutside universities and spread to them from this external\nsource? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in\nuniversities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it\nbegin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and\nspread from there to the humanities and social sciences?\nThose are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the\nhumanities and social sciences.\nWhy there? And why then? What happened in the humanities and\nsocial sciences in the 1980s?\nA successful theory of the origin of political correctness\nhas to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why\ndidn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s,\nfor example? They were concerned with much the same issues.\n[\n1\n]\nThe reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to\npolitical correctness was precisely that \u2014 they were\nstudent movements. They didn't have any real power. The\nstudents may have been talking a lot about women's\nliberation and black power, but it was not what they were\nbeing taught in their classes. Not yet.\nBut in the early 1970s the student protestors of the 1960s\nbegan to finish their dissertations and get hired as\nprofessors. At first they were neither powerful nor\nnumerous. But as more of their peers joined them and the\nprevious generation of professors started to retire, they\ngradually became both.\nThe reason political correctness began in the humanities and\nsocial sciences was that these fields offered more scope for\nthe injection of politics. A 1960s radical who got a job as\na physics professor could still attend protests, but his\npolitical beliefs wouldn't affect his work. Whereas research\nin sociology and modern literature can be made as political\nas you like.\n[\n2\n]\nI saw political correctness arise. When I started college in\n1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if\nsomeone said something they considered sexist, but no one\nwas getting\nreported\nfor it. It was still not a thing when\nI started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in\n1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade\ncampus life.\nWhat happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were\nthe late 1980s the point at which protests against male\nchauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal\ncomplaints to university authorities about sexism?\nBasically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the\nEstablishment they'd protested against two decades before.\nNow they were in a position not just to speak out about\ntheir ideas, but to enforce them.\nA new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a\ncertain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting\nwas that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember\nnoticing that aspect of political correctness at the time.\nIt wasn't simply a grass-roots student movement. It was\nfaculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty\nmembers. In that respect it was like the Cultural\nRevolution. That wasn't a grass-roots movement either; that\nwas Mao unleashing the younger generation on his political\nopponents. And in fact when Roderick MacFarquhar started\nteaching a class on the Cultural Revolution at Harvard in\nthe late 1980s, many saw it as a comment on current events.\nI don't know if it actually was, but people thought it was,\nand that means the similarities were obvious.\n[\n3\n]\nCollege students larp. It's their nature. It's usually\nharmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous\ncombination. The result was a kind of moral etiquette,\nsuperficial but very complicated. Imagine having to explain\nto a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the\nphrase \"people of color\" is considered particularly\nenlightened, but saying \"colored people\" gets you fired. And\nwhy exactly one isn't supposed to use the word \"negro\" now,\neven though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his\nspeeches. There are no underlying principles. You'd just\nhave to give him a long list of rules to memorize.\n[\n4\n]\nThe danger of these rules was not just that they created\nland mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made\nthem an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society\nhas a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a\nsubstitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the\nworld, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than\neveryone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to\nbad people.\nBut for it to work as a substitute for virtue, orthodoxy\nmust be difficult. If all you have to do to be orthodox is\nwear some garment or avoid saying some word, everyone knows\nto do it, and the only way to seem more virtuous than other\npeople is to actually be virtuous. The shallow, complicated,\nand frequently changing rules of political correctness made\nit the perfect substitute for actual virtue. And the result\nwas a world in which good people who weren't up to date on\ncurrent moral fashions were brought down by people whose\ncharacters would make you recoil in horror if you could see\nthem.\nOne big contributing factor in the rise of political\ncorrectness was the lack of other things to be morally pure\nabout. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly\nabout religion and sex. But among the cultural elite these\nwere the deadest of dead letters by the 1980s; if you were\nreligious, or a virgin, this was something you tended to\nconceal rather than advertise. So the sort of people who\nenjoy being moral enforcers had become starved of things to\nenforce. A new set of rules was just what they'd been\nwaiting for.\nCuriously enough, the tolerant side of the 1960s left helped\ncreate the conditions in which the intolerant side\nprevailed. The relaxed social rules advocated by the old,\neasy-going hippy left became the dominant ones, at least\namong the elite, and this left nothing for the naturally\nintolerant to be intolerant about.\nAnother possibly contributing factor was the fall of the\nSoviet empire. Marxism had been a popular focus of moral\npurity on the left before political correctness emerged as a\ncompetitor, but the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Bloc\ncountries took most of the shine off it. Especially the fall\nof the Berlin Wall in 1989. You couldn't be on the side of\nthe Stasi. I remember looking at the moribund Soviet Studies\nsection of a used bookshop in Cambridge in the late 1980s\nand thinking \"what will those people go on about now?\" As it\nturned out the answer was right under my nose.\nOne thing I noticed at the time about the first phase of\npolitical correctness was that it was more popular with\nwomen than men. As many writers (perhaps most eloquently\nGeorge Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than\nmen to the idea of being moral enforcers. But there was\nanother more specific reason women tended to be the\nenforcers of political correctness. There was at this time a\ngreat backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were\nthe point when the definition of sexual harassment was\nexpanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a\n\"hostile environment.\" Within universities the classic form\nof accusation was for a (female) student to say that a\nprofessor made her \"feel uncomfortable.\" But the vagueness\nof this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior\nto expand to include talking about heterodox ideas. Those\nmake people uncomfortable too.\n[\n5\n]\nWas it sexist to propose that Darwin's greater male\nvariability hypothesis might explain some variation in human\nperformance? Sexist enough to get Larry Summers pushed out\nas president of Harvard, apparently. One woman who heard the\ntalk in which he mentioned this idea said it made her feel\n\"physically ill\" and that she had to leave halfway through.\nIf the test of a hostile environment is how it makes people\nfeel, this certainly sounds like one. And yet it does seem\nplausible that greater male variability explains some of the\nvariation in human performance. So which should prevail,\ncomfort or truth? Surely if truth should prevail anywhere,\nit should be in universities; that's supposed to be their\nspecialty; but for decades starting in the late 1980s the\npolitically correct tried to pretend this conflict didn't\nexist.\n[\n6\n]\nPolitical correctness seemed to burn out in the second half\nof the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that\nit literally became a joke. It offered rich material for\ncomedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action\nupon it. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against\npriggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless,\ncan't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian\nprudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same\nthing to political correctness.\nUnfortunately this was an illusion. Within universities the\nembers of political correctness were still glowing brightly.\nAfter all, the forces that created it were still there. The\nprofessors who started it were now becoming deans and\ndepartment heads. And in addition to their departments there\nwere now a bunch of new ones explicitly focused on social\njustice. Students were still hungry for things to be morally\npure about. And there had been an explosion in the number of\nuniversity administrators, many of whose jobs involved\nenforcing various forms of political correctness.\nIn the early 2010s the embers of political correctness burst\ninto flame anew. There were several differences between this\nnew phase and the original one. It was more virulent. It\nspread further into the real world, although it still burned\nhottest within universities. And it was concerned with a\nwider variety of sins. In the first phase of political\ncorrectness there were really only three things people got\naccused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the\ntime was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between\nthen and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying\nto invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which\ncould be made to stick.\nThe second phase was, in multiple senses, political\ncorrectness metastasized. Why did it happen when it did? My\nguess is that it was due to the rise of social media,\nparticularly Tumblr and Twitter, because one of the most\ndistinctive features of the second wave of political\ncorrectness was the\ncancel mob\n: a mob of angry people\nuniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired.\nIndeed this second wave of political correctness was\noriginally called \"cancel culture\"; it didn't start to be\ncalled \"wokeness\" till the 2020s.\nOne aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at\nfirst was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to\nlike\nbeing outraged. We're so used to this idea now that we take\nit for granted, but really it's pretty strange. Being\noutraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect\npeople to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want\nto share it. I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to\n2014, so I can actually quantify how much they want to share\nit: our users were about three times more likely to upvote\nsomething if it outraged them.\nThis tilt toward outrage wasn't due to wokeness. It's an\ninherent feature of social media, or at least this\ngeneration of it. But it did make social media the perfect\nmechanism for fanning the flames of wokeness.\n[\n7\n]\nIt wasn't just public social networks that drove the rise of\nwokeness though. Group chat apps were also critical,\nespecially in the final step, cancellation. Imagine if a\ngroup of employees trying to get someone fired had to do it\nusing only email. It would be hard to organize a mob. But\nonce you have group chat, mobs form naturally.\nAnother contributing factor in this second wave of political\ncorrectness was the dramatic increase in the polarization of\nthe press. In the print era, newspapers were constrained to\nbe, or at least seem, politically neutral. The department\nstores that ran ads in the New York Times wanted to reach\neveryone in the region, both liberal and conservative, so\nthe Times had to serve both. But the Times didn't regard\nthis neutrality as something forced upon them. They embraced\nit as their duty as a\npaper of record\n\u2014 as one of the big\nnewspapers that aimed to be chronicles of their times,\nreporting every sufficiently important story from a neutral\npoint of view.\nWhen I grew up the papers of record seemed timeless, almost\nsacred institutions. Papers like the New York Times and\nWashington Post had immense prestige, partly because other\nsources of news were limited, but also because they did make\nsome effort to be neutral.\nUnfortunately it turned out that the paper of record was\nmostly an artifact of the constraints imposed by print.\n[\n8\n]\nWhen your market was determined by geography, you had\nto be neutral. But publishing online enabled \u2014 in fact\nprobably forced \u2014 newspapers to switch to serving markets\ndefined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained\nin business fell in the direction they'd already been\nleaning: left. On October 11, 2020 the New York Times\nannounced that \"The paper is in the midst of an evolution\nfrom the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of\ngreat narratives.\"\n[\n9\n]\nMeanwhile journalists, of a sort,\nhad arisen to serve the right as well. And so journalism,\nwhich in the previous era had been one of the great\ncentralizing forces, now became one of the great polarizing\nones.\nThe rise of social media and the increasing polarization of\njournalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new\nvariety of journalism involving a loop through social media.\nSomeone would say something controversial on social media.\nWithin hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers\nwould then post links to the story on social media, driving\nfurther arguments online. It was the cheapest source of\nclicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news\nbureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to\ndo was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost\nthem on your site, with some additional comments to inflame\nreaders further.\nFor the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren't\nthe only ones. That was one of the biggest differences\nbetween the two waves of political correctness: the first\nwas driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was\noften driven by professionals. For some it was their whole\njob. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose\njob was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role\nsimilar to that of the political commissars who got attached\nto military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they\nweren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but\nwatched from the side to ensure that nothing improper\nhappened in the doing of it. These new administrators could\noften be recognized by the word \"inclusion\" in their titles.\nWithin institutions this was the preferred euphemism for\nwokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would\nusually be called an \"inclusive language guide.\"\n[\n10\n]\nThis new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if\ntheir jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire\npeople to keep watch for a particular type of problem,\nthey're going to find it, because otherwise there's no\njustification for their existence.\n[\n11\n]\nBut these\nbureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even\ngreater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when\npossible they tried to ensure their employers hired only\npeople who shared their political beliefs. The most\negregious cases were the new \"DEI statements\" that some\nuniversities started to require from faculty candidates,\nproving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used\nthese statements as the initial filter and only even\nconsidered candidates who scored high enough on them. You're\nnot hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.\nAnother factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives\nMatter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was\nacquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida. But\nthis didn't launch wokeness; it was well underway by 2013.\nSimilarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017\nafter the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's\nhistory of raping women. It accelerated wokeness, but didn't\nplay the same role in launching it that the 80s version did\nin launching political correctness.\nThe election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated\nwokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant\ntraffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money:\nheadlines during his first administration mentioned his name\nat about four times the rate of previous presidents.\nIn 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white\npolice officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this\npoint the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent\nprotests broke out across America. But in retrospect this\nturned out to be peak woke, or close to it. By every measure\nI've seen, wokeness peaked in 2020 or 2021.\nWokeness is sometimes described as a mind-virus. What makes\nit viral is that it defines new types of impropriety. Most\npeople are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure\nwhat the social rules are or which ones they might be\nbreaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since\nmost people already worry that they might be breaking rules\nthey don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a\nrule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially\nif multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for\nexponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to\navoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots,\neager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are\nenough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by\na much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying\nto signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in\ntrouble. At this point the new impropriety is now firmly\nestablished. Plus its success has increased the rate of\nchange in social rules, which, remember, is one of the\nreasons people are nervous about which rules they might be\nbreaking. So the cycle accelerates.\n[\n12\n]\nWhat's true of individuals is even more true of\norganizations. Especially organizations without a powerful\nleader. Such organizations do everything based on \"best\npractices.\" There's no higher authority; if some new \"best\npractice\" achieves critical mass, they\nmust\nadopt it. And\nin this case the organization can't do what it usually does\nwhen it's uncertain: delay. It might be committing\nimproprieties right now! So it's surprisingly easy for a\nsmall group of zealots to capture this type of organization\nby describing new improprieties it might be guilty of.\n[\n13\n]\nHow does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to\ndisaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The\nexcesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that.\nSince then wokeness has been in gradual but continual\nretreat. Corporate CEOs, starting with Brian Armstrong, have\nopenly rejected it. Universities, led by the University of\nChicago and MIT, have explicitly confirmed their commitment\nto free speech. Twitter, which was arguably the hub of\nwokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it,\nand he seems to have succeeded \u2014 and not, incidentally, by\ncensoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor\nright-wing ones, but without censoring either.\n[\n14\n]\nConsumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured\ntoo far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been\npermanently damaged by it. I'm not going to claim Trump's\nsecond victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think\nhe won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was\nmore\ncharismatic\n; but voters' \ndisgust with wokeness must have helped.\nSo what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat.\nObviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do\nthat? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third\noutbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came\nback worse than ever.\nIn fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way\nto prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative\nmoralism in the future \u2014 not just a third outbreak of\npolitical correctness, but the next thing like it? Because\nthere will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They\nneed rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut\noff their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly\nhungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them\nhalfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll\nsee the same phenomenon again.\nLet's start with the easier problem. Is there a simple,\nprincipled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to\nuse the customs we already have for dealing with religion.\nWokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced\nby protected classes. It's not even the first religion of\nthis kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by\nthe masses.\n[\n15\n]\nAnd we already have well-established\ncustoms for dealing with religion within organizations. You\ncan express your own religious identity and explain your\nbeliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they\ndisagree, or try to ban them from saying things that\ncontradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization\nadopt yours as its official religion.\nIf we're not sure what to do about any particular\nmanifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some\nother religion, like Christianity. Should we have people\nwithin organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke\northodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs\nwere to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor\nwriters\nor\nscientists\nwhose work contradicts woke doctrines?\nNo, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work\ncontradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be\nrequired to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an\nemployer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should\nstudents and employees have to participate in woke\nindoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer\nquestions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No,\nbecause we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way\nabout their religion.\n[\n16\n]\nOne shouldn't feel bad about not wanting to watch woke\nmovies any more than one would feel bad about not wanting to\nlisten to Christian rock. In my twenties I drove across\nAmerica several times, listening to local radio stations.\nOccasionally I'd turn the dial and hear some new song. But\nthe moment anyone mentioned Jesus I'd turn the dial again.\nEven the tiniest bit of being preached to was enough to make\nme lose interest.\nBut by the same token we should not automatically reject\neverything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can\nsee that many Christian principles are good ones. It would\nbe a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't\nshare the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort\nof thing a religious zealot would do.\nIf we have genuine pluralism, I think we'll be safe from\nfuture outbreaks of woke intolerance. Wokeness itself won't\ngo away. There will for the foreseeable future continue to\nbe pockets of woke zealots inventing new moral fashions. The\nkey is not to let them treat their fashions as normative.\nThey can change what their coreligionists are allowed to say\nevery few months if they like, but they mustn't be allowed\nto change what we're allowed to say.\n[\n17\n]\nThe more general problem \u2014 how to prevent similar outbreaks\nof aggressively performative moralism \u2014 is of course\nharder. Here we're up against human nature. There will\nalways be prigs. And in particular there will always be the\nenforcers among them, the\naggressively conventional-minded\n.\nThese people are born that way. Every society has them. So\nthe best we can do is to keep them bottled up.\nThe aggressively conventional-minded aren't always on the\nrampage. Usually they just enforce whatever random rules are\nnearest to hand. They only become dangerous when some new\nideology gets a lot of them pointed in the same direction at\nonce. That's what happened during the Cultural Revolution,\nand to a lesser extent (thank God) in the two waves of\npolitical correctness we've experienced.\nWe can't get rid of the aggressively conventional-minded.\n[\n18\n]\nAnd we couldn't prevent people from creating new\nideologies that appealed to them even if we wanted to. So if\nwe want to keep them bottled up, we have to do it one step\ndownstream. Fortunately when the aggressively\nconventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one\nthing that gives them away: they define new\nheresies\nto\npunish people for. So the best way to protect ourselves from\nfuture outbreaks of things like wokeness is to have powerful\nantibodies against the concept of heresy.\nWe should have a conscious bias against defining new forms\nof heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something\nthat we'd previously been able to say, our initial\nassumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial\nassumption of course. If they can prove we should stop\nsaying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on\nthem. In liberal democracies, people trying to prevent\nsomething from being said will usually claim they're not\nmerely engaging in censorship, but trying to prevent some\nform of \"harm\". And maybe they're right. But once again, the\nburden of proof is on them. It's not enough to claim harm;\nthey have to prove it.\nAs long as the aggressively conventional-minded continue to\ngive themselves away by banning heresies, we'll always be\nable to notice when they become aligned behind some new\nideology. And if we always fight back at that point, with\nany luck we can stop them in their tracks.\nThe number of true things we\ncan't say\nshould not increase. If it does, something is wrong.\nNotes\n[\n0\n]\nThis was not the original meaning of \"woke,\" but it's rarely\nused in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is\nthe dominant one.\n[\n1\n]\nWhy did 1960s radicals focus on the causes they did?\nOne of the people who reviewed drafts of this essay\nexplained this so well that I asked if I could quote him:\nThe middle-class student protestors of the New Left\n  rejected the socialist/Marxist left as unhip. They were\n  interested in sexier forms of oppression uncovered by\n  cultural analysis (Marcuse) and abstruse \"Theory\". Labor\n  politics became stodgy and old-fashioned. This took a\n  couple generations to work through. The woke ideology's\n  conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the\n  tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old\n  left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class\n  shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and\n  wokeness are cousins.\nThe middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way\n  through the institutions because it had no interest in\n  \"seizing the means of production\" (how quaint such phrases\n  seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard\n  state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only\n  expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex,\n  etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us\n  power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we\n  control \u2014 moral rectitude \u2014 upon you. As an ideological\n  stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and\n  institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious\n  revolutionary program would not have.\n[\n2\n]\nIt helped that the humanities and social sciences also\nincluded some of the biggest and easiest undergrad majors.\nIf a political movement had to start with physics students,\nit could never get off the ground; there would be too few of\nthem, and they wouldn't have the time to spare.\nAt the top universities these majors are not as big as they\nused to be, though. A\n2022 survey\nfound that only 7% of\nHarvard undergrads plan to major in the humanities, vs\nnearly 30% during the 1970s. I expect wokeness is at least\npart of the reason; when undergrads consider majoring in\nEnglish, it's presumably because they love the written word\nand not because they want to listen to lectures about\nracism.\n[\n3\n]\nThe puppet-master-and-puppet character of political\ncorrectness became clearly visible when a bakery near\nOberlin College was falsely accused of race discrimination\nin 2016. In the subsequent civil trial, lawyers for the\nbakery produced a text message from Oberlin Dean of Students\nMeredith Raimondo that read \"I'd say unleash the students if\nI wasn't convinced this needs to be put behind us.\"\n[\n4\n]\nThe woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply\ntreating people with respect. But if it were, that would be\nthe only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically\nfar from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate\nvoices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to\nexplain which accents it was currently safe to imitate\npublicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I\nstill hadn't covered all the cases.\n[\n5\n]\nIn 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a\nhostile work environment could constitute sex\ndiscrimination, which in turn affected universities via\nTitle IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile\nenvironment was whether it would bother a reasonable person,\nbut since for a professor merely being the subject of a\nsexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the\ncomplainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or\nremark remotely connected with sex was now effectively\nforbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to\nVictorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of\nthings that might not be said \"with ladies present.\"\n[\n6\n]\nMuch as they tried to pretend there was no conflict\nbetween diversity and quality. But you can't simultaneously\noptimize for two things that aren't identical. What\ndiversity actually means, judging from the way the term is\nused, is proportional representation, and unless you're\nselecting a group whose purpose is to be representative,\nlike poll respondents, optimizing for proportional\nrepresentation has to come at the expense of quality. This\nis not because of anything about representation; it's the\nnature of optimization; optimizing for x has to come at the\nexpense of y unless x and y are identical.\n[\n7\n]\nMaybe societies will eventually develop antibodies to\nviral outrage. Maybe we were just the first to be exposed to\nit, so it tore through us like an epidemic through a\npreviously isolated population. I'm fairly confident that it\nwould be possible to create new social media apps that were\nless driven by outrage, and an app of this type would have a\ngood chance of stealing users from existing ones, because\nthe smartest people would tend to migrate to it.\n[\n8\n]\nI say \"mostly\" because I have hopes that journalistic\nneutrality will return in some form. There is some market\nfor unbiased news, and while it may be small, it's valuable.\nThe rich and powerful want to know what's really going on;\nthat's how they became rich and powerful.\n[\n9\n]\nThe Times made this momentous announcement very\ninformally, in passing in the middle of an\narticle\nabout a\nTimes reporter who'd been criticized for inaccuracy. It's\nquite possible no senior editor even approved it. But it's\nsomehow appropriate that this particular universe ended with\na whimper rather than a bang.\n[\n10\n]\nAs the acronym DEI goes out of fashion, many of these\nbureaucrats will try to go underground by changing their\ntitles. It looks like \"belonging\" will be a popular option.\n[\n11\n]\nIf you've ever wondered why our legal system includes\nprotections like the separation of prosecutor, judge, and\njury, the right to examine evidence and cross-examine\nwitnesses, and the right to be represented by legal counsel,\nthe de facto\nparallel legal system\nestablished by Title IX\nmakes that all too clear.\n[\n12\n]\nThe invention of new improprieties is most visible in\nthe rapid evolution of woke nomenclature. This is\nparticularly annoying to me as a writer, because the new\nnames are always worse. Any religious observance has to be\ninconvenient and slightly absurd; otherwise gentiles would\ndo it too. So \"slaves\" becomes \"enslaved individuals.\" But\nweb search can show us the leading edge of moral growth in\nreal time: if you search for \"individuals experiencing\nslavery\" you will as of this writing find five legit\nattempts to use the phrase, and you'll even find two for\n\"individuals experiencing enslavement.\"\n[\n13\n]\nOrganizations that do dubious things are particularly\nconcerned with propriety, which is how you end up with\nabsurdities like tobacco and oil companies having higher ESG\nratings than Tesla.\n[\n14\n]\nElon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward\nthough: he gave more visibility to paying users. Paying\nusers lean right on average, because people on the far left\ndislike Elon and don't want to give him money. Elon\npresumably knew this would happen. On the other hand, the\npeople on the far left have only themselves to blame; they\ncould tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted\nto.\n[\n15\n]\nIt even, as James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian\npointed out, has a concept of original sin: privilege. Which\nmeans unlike Christianity's egalitarian version, people have varying\ndegrees of it. An able-bodied straight white\nAmerican male is born with such a load of sin that only by\nthe most abject repentance can he be saved.\nWokeness also shares something rather funny with many actual\nversions of Christianity: like God, the people for whose\nsake wokeness purports to act are often revolted by the\nthings done in their name.\n[\n16\n]\nThere is one exception to most of these rules: actual\nreligious organizations. It's reasonable for them to insist\non orthodoxy. But they in turn should declare that they're\nreligious organizations. It's rightly considered shady\nwhen something that appears to be an ordinary business or\npublication turns out to be a religious organization.\n[\n17\n]\nI don't want to give the impression that it will be\nsimple to roll back wokeness. There will be places where the\nfight inevitably gets messy \u2014 particularly within\nuniversities, which everyone has to share, yet which are\ncurrently the most pervaded by wokeness of any institutions.\n[\n18\n]\nYou can however get rid of aggressively\nconventional-minded people within an organization, and in\nmany if not most organizations this would be an excellent\nidea. Even a handful of them can do a lot of damage. I bet\nyou'd feel a noticeable improvement going from a handful to\nnone.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, \nBen Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica\nLivingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim\nUrban for reading drafts of this."}
{"text": "@iamsternlicht @stucchio I'm in favor of reining in TikTok, but he can't have been sending them that much data if it was in spreadsheets.\n\n@Itsjoeco One day you should go into politics. But not yet!\n\n@AaronBergman18 Not only is this true, but I can tell you precisely when: when they're the only words that will express exactly what you want to say.\n\n@arlogilbert @Sugabush504 @msuster @upfrontvc Then why are you following me?\n\nI hope this \"and\" was meant to be an \"or\".\n\n@pitdesi Nothing for crypto?\n\n@ahistoryinart He was good in a lot of different ways. I keep being pleasantly surprised by paintings of his that don't look at all like one another.\n\n@Itsjoeco Depends on the criminal. Some are much more likely to reoffend than others, and if you make an effort you can predict predict this to some degree.\n\n@michael_nielsen I visited Stonehenge in 1986. There were no crowds then. I suspect it's very different now.\n\nBurgos is a great town.\n\n@PaiMeiBTC @TarasBob @Scholars_Stage That was a different guy. And he merely said he'd sold most of his."}
{"text": "@ShriramKMurthi I miss this. Providence was the capital of random cleverness.\n\n@diogomartf Not recently, no.\n\n@RebeccaSear What if a writer becomes very famous, and the original manuscripts of her books become worth more than that? Does she then have to hand them over to the government?\n\nWhen I was painting, my m.o. was pretty much the same as it is when writing essays. I'd start with a blurry picture, and then just keep looking. Probably works better with prose though. https://t.co/0qJF0Er8oD\n\nOne of Jessica's most endearing quirks is her vulnerability to incapacitating fits of laughter. One of the oldest pictures on my phone is a picture of one of them. https://t.co/v57sLqJmQp\n\n@pitdesi I just *bought* an encyclopedia. (The 11th edition of the Britannica.)\n\n@balajis Reminds me a bit of this famous video: https://t.co/YiOXBFt27A\n\n@BayouPhilosophy No one who maltreats animals is good, but there are some evil people who are kind to animals.\n\n@sarah_cone This only works below a certain number of books.\n\n@adamyormark Only in pictures. I've never encountered this horror in real life."}
{"text": "@still_boneless What grade are you if some of your ancestors were there before 1607?\n\n@daltonc For smart people. Dumb people prefer lies.\n\nI've met two YC startups this summer that have cancer cures ready for clinical trials, and I've heard of several others that do. It feels like something is going to happen. The world may be very different in 10 years.\n\n@netanyahu A \"tragic mishap\" is a missile strike that enough people start talking about.\n\n@samiramanabi @imraj4_u The way I originally wrote it. https://t.co/m5u685pnP5\n\n@ahistoryinart I keep thinking about whether you could get this look with oil paint. I bet you could, once you've seen it.\n\n@orvn @BillCrosby I bet you're right. I'm going to delete my reply and block that account.\n\n@ahistoryinart Did he varnish them? If not they'd be as fragile as pastels. And if so can a restorer even take the varnish off when it yellows?\n\nMy God. Each pair of shoes is a child's life.\n\n@imraj4_u I knew from the awkwardness of the first sentence that I didn't write that, and sure enough, I didn't."}
{"text": "@samdaceo They'll go to the same place as the millions who lost their livelihoods in all the previous major innovations: to new jobs created thereby.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil The area under the yellow line is smaller though, which implies legalizing sports betting is good in this respect. (I know it's bad in others.)\n\n@DudespostingWs Men have higher collagen density than women.\n\n@omuinetimi Usually I would ignore such a reflexive comment, but this is false in an interesting way. Early adopters tend to be the opposite of privileged \u2014 grad students rather than corporations. I often have to encourage startups to court them, even though there's little money there.\n\n@Austen It's just like microprocessors and the web were.\n\n@theynahlikeus I don't think so.\n\nThe early adopters: They can't imagine life without things you haven't even tried yet.\n\nThe interesting thing is, they're generally right. Unless you're very eccentric, something you can't imagine life without will eventually become something a lot of people want.\n\nIt's pretty wild to be tracking a Boom test flight in real time.\n\n@fermatslibrary You don't have to bend over backwards to estimate 45 degrees. It's pretty intuitive for anyone who has thrown any number of projectiles.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil Is there a way of estimating the extent to which it was due to an undeclared semi-strike by police?"}
{"text": "@Scaramucci Not just look.\n\n@DrFloSteiner Yes, it's as if something catastrophically bad happened in the last 6 months.\n\n@DudespostingWs When our boys were little they used to have wrestling matches at bedtime (probably a bad idea but they loved it), and to equalize things we used to make the older one wear a blindfold.\n\nAt an intersection in SF I saw a car approaching on a cross street. I noticed it was a Waymo and thought \"I don't have to worry about him running the stop sign,\" and I realized that for over 40 years I've been subconsciously watching out for this at every intersection.\n\n@minilek I'm not advising founders to start their companies outside the US. I say explicitly *in the tweet* that this would be an extreme move. I'm merely pointing out that if you did it, you'd have an advantage in recruiting.\n\n@Brazilian_VC This is a very reasonable question right now.\n\n@too_locked_out It's the same tradeoff, yes.\n\n@peng_t_ong This is very funny.\n\n@mattyglesias Do you think this is a strategy, or do you think it's due to random individual law enforcement officers feeling like now they can get away with arbitrary behavior?\n\n@russell_m It's a problem, but much exaggerated by social media, and way, way less of a threat to the kind of people a startup would want to recruit than what the US is doing now."}
{"text": "Lisp for Web-Based Applications\nAfter a link to\nBeating the Averages\nwas posted on slashdot, \nsome readers wanted to hear in more detail \nabout the specific technical advantages we got from using\nLisp in Viaweb.  For those who are interested,\nhere are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at\nBBN Labs in Cambridge, MA.\nBBN Talk Excerpts (ASCII)"}
{"text": "@growing_daniel A company in the design business could pull off this retro Gilded Age look, just barely. But a VC firm not so much.\n\nI saw something recently mocking endnotes. But endnotes are a byproduct of the fact that ideas are tree-shaped and essays are linear. You can't always cram all the former into the latter. So frankly it's a bad sign not to have endnotes. It means you don't have enough ideas.\n\n@growing_daniel Transformative can be good or bad. This is the bad kind, also known as decay, or collapse.\n\n@Putin_Will_Fall @ravroberts That is the problem right there.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil This is great, but it's revealing that one of the biggest policy victories of the administration so far is something so small.\n\n@ravroberts That's not true. I think a minority supported Trump, and that minority is probably smaller now.\n\nThis kind of casual violation of due process is the hallmark of banana republics. Fuck, we're there.\n\nIf the administration can do this to a former high level federal official, imagine what they can do to you. https://t.co/SYxIvoT23F\n\n@ahistoryinart Careful observation maybe, but \"precise mathematical measurements\" seems a bit much. If anything this is more Cezanne-style observation: clumsily earnest local observation, combined together in a patchy way. https://t.co/5r6Ye9Cup5\n\n@PeterGazdik @Waymo @ToyotaMotorCorp I mean it's a barbaric practice."}
{"text": "@NathanaelKhodl Growth in GDP per capita is the best predictor of other measures of well-being. That's why historically even communists have focused on it.\n\nhttps://t.co/3vhqjIg8R7\n\n@liveatspotlight Making money depends on doing something other people want. If you can't find something other people want that you like to do, then you just have to do something you don't like.\n\n\"Have you tried talking to women?\" \u2248 \"Have you tried learning to code?\"\n\nSocialists are economic incels. They cherish the idea that the game is rigged so much that they'd rather talk about that than about how to improve their situation.\n\n@robertirv1 Possibly not. I think at best they could be copywriters in ad agencies or something like that.\n\nJustin Kan and Adam Bouhenguel at YC in 2007 when what later became Twitch was called Justin TV and consisted of Justin walking around with a camera on his head. The backpack was full of custom hardware cooked up by Kyle Vogt, who'd just dropped out of MIT. https://t.co/OO3XoIHBxl\n\n@eerac It's incredibly rare for the population as a whole, but it's not incredibly rare for good founders.\n\n@rSanti97 We will again.\n\n@FoolGreatest No, what these politicians would claim is that they're going to bring more people into the middle class by enriching them, not by impoverishing them.\n\nAll other things being equal, don't choose a startup idea that only reaches customers through another company. E.g. something clothing brands can offer to their customers. Even if it's good for the other companies, their slowness will kill you."}
{"text": "@David_AugustVC Damn, you're right. I'll delete and repost.\n\nWhy I like Lisp macros.\n\n@themiddlerage42 @Austen Only if the founder is willing to let that happen.\n\n@liorb_d @Austen I talked to a founder ten days ago who had an idea for a plausible competitor. Obviously I can't say what it was. And if I did, most people would write it off. In fact being writeable-off is an almost necessary quality of any sufficiently good idea.\n\n@KTmBoyle I despise this guy too, but Hanlon's razor applies here. You don't have to assume that an EU bureaucrat would write badly in order to deceive people. Writing badly is the default.\n\n@Austen This is potential energy that will one day drive a competitor. It won't be easy to create a competitor, but it will happen eventually, and when it does...\n\n@Austen I don't mean a UI in the narrow sense. I mean instead of dealing directly with them, you deal with them through an agent who acts on your behalf, and is both tireless and an expert in their idiosyncrasies.\n\n@Austen I wonder if there is a way to turn that brokenness into a startup? Perhaps for example by wrapping a new UI around them?\n\n@AutismCapital It's worse written but harder for people with a chip on their shoulder to misinterpret.\n\n@Richard_Florida @Noahpinion They didn't. Current tech CEOs are if anything better people than those of past generations. I suspect you're being led astray by a handful of current ones you dislike."}
{"text": "@DKThomp @cremieuxrecueil Yes, judging from @TheFIREorg's database of campus cancellation attempts, 2016 was a particularly bad year. But 2015 had also been the worst year up to that point.\n\n(The really big spike is 2020, after George Floyd was killed.) https://t.co/3yhZSUDacE\n\n@DKThomp @cremieuxrecueil I don't think Trump was the origin of wokeness. In the Bay Area, at least, it was very well established several years before he took office.\n\nWow: When Tolkien started writing the Lord of the Rings, it wasn't even about the ring. The sniffing rider was Gandalf!\n\n@MajesticJCD @cremieuxrecueil They're not as powerful. All the evidence suggests that wokeness peaked in 2020.\n\n@historyinmemes A friend of mine who was an officer in one of these regiments said it's always a really bad hangover when this happens, not heatstroke or whatever excuse they give publicly.\n\n@cremieuxrecueil Can't deny he's right about that. It was one of the worst qualities of woke mobs, the way they became even more vicious if the victim showed any sign of weakness. It was proof that they were mobs in the truest sense.\n\n@YasminThinks @historyinmemes Ha, you're right.\n\n\"Can I have a made-up About the Author section at the end, where it says I fought for Alexander the Great and invented both Coke and Pepsi?\"\n\n\u2014 12 yo on a book he's writing\n\n@cremieuxrecueil We should thank China for showing their hand early.\n\n@deedydas This has not been my experience."}
{"text": "@ddayen There's an intellectually dishonest phrase for you, \"fresh from facing scrutiny about...\"\n\n@kpooya He's already taller than me. But it's never enough.\n\n15 yo (right)'s technique for looking tall in group photos. https://t.co/3AwB1Pgs1S\n\n@HistoryEJ In the west of England. Near Wales, but not in Wales.\n\n\"Grand New Estate\" offered for $30 million in Palo Alto.\n\nHow many acres is this estate? \n\n.29\n\n@ChristianDoesAI If you think I sat idly by you have not been paying attention.\n\nis just a couple percent of Hunters in the Snow. https://t.co/8EygWpYObN\n\nA data point about Impressionism. This nice little painting https://t.co/4rf0fa8EPF\n\n@c0n5tantinople @pharmabroo The reason it makes sense is that the majority of finance is just about making money, so it attracts people who are mainly interested in that.\n\n@danieldohh The latter."}
{"text": "The Word \"Hacker\"\nApril 2004\nTo the popular press, \"hacker\" means someone who breaks\ninto computers.  Among programmers it means a good programmer.\nBut the two meanings are connected.  To programmers,\n\"hacker\" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone\nwho can make a computer do what he wants\u2014whether the computer\nwants to or not.\nTo add to the confusion, the noun \"hack\" also has two senses.  It can\nbe either a compliment or an insult.  It's called a hack when\nyou do something in an ugly way.  But when you do something\nso clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also\ncalled a hack.  The word is used more often in the former than\nthe latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more\ncommon than brilliant ones.\nBelieve it or not, the two senses of \"hack\" are also\nconnected.  Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in\ncommon: they both break the rules.  And there is a gradual\ncontinuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly (using\nduct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking\nthat is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).\nHacking predates computers.  When he\nwas working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to\namuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents.\nThis tradition continues today.\nWhen we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much\ntime around MIT had\nhis own lock picking kit.\n(He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)\nIt is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would\nwant to do such things.\nAnother friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for\nbreaking into computers.  This had only recently been declared\na crime, and the FBI found that their usual investigative\ntechnique didn't work.  Police investigation apparently begins with\na motive.  The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex,\nrevenge.  Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on\nthe FBI's list.  Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to\nthem.\nThose in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers'\ngeneral attitude of disobedience.  But that disobedience is\na byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.\nThey may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate\nnewspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them\na certain problem can't be solved.\nSuppress one, and you suppress the other.\nThis attitude is sometimes affected.  Sometimes young programmers\nnotice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to\nadopt some of their own in order to seem smarter.\nThe fake version is not merely\nannoying; the prickly attitude of these posers\ncan actually slow the process of innovation.\nBut even factoring in their annoying eccentricities,\nthe disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win.  I wish its\nadvantages were better understood.\nFor example, I suspect people in Hollywood are\nsimply mystified by\nhackers' attitudes toward copyrights.  They are a perennial\ntopic of heated discussion on Slashdot.\nBut why should people who program computers\nbe so concerned about copyrights, of all things?\nPartly because some companies use\nmechanisms\nto prevent\ncopying.  Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is\nhow to pick it.  But there is a deeper reason that\nhackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents.\nThey see increasingly aggressive measures to protect\n\"intellectual property\"\nas a threat to the intellectual\nfreedom they need to do their job.\nAnd they are right.\nIt is by poking about inside current technology that\nhackers get ideas for the next generation.  No thanks,\nintellectual homeowners may say, we don't need any\noutside help.  But they're wrong.\nThe next generation of computer technology has\noften\u2014perhaps more often than not\u2014been developed by outsiders.\nIn 1977 there was no doubt some group within IBM developing\nwhat they expected to be\nthe next generation of business computer.  They were mistaken.\nThe next generation of business computer was\nbeing developed on entirely different lines by two long-haired\nguys called Steve in a\ngarage\nin Los Altos.  At about the\nsame time, the powers that be\nwere cooperating to develop the\nofficial next generation operating system, Multics.\nBut two guys who thought Multics excessively complex went off\nand wrote their own.  They gave it a name that\nwas a joking reference to Multics: Unix.\nThe latest intellectual property laws impose\nunprecedented restrictions on the sort of poking around that\nleads to new ideas. In the past, a competitor might use patents\nto prevent you from selling a copy of something they\nmade, but they couldn't prevent you from\ntaking one apart to see how it worked.   The latest\nlaws make this a crime.  How are we\nto develop new technology if we can't study current\ntechnology to figure out how to improve it?\nIronically, hackers have brought this on themselves.\nComputers are responsible for the problem.  The control systems\ninside machines used to be physical: gears and levers and cams.\nIncreasingly, the brains (and thus the value) of products is\nin software. And by this I mean software in the general sense:\ni.e. data.  A song on an LP is physically stamped into the\nplastic.  A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it.\nData is by definition easy to copy.  And the Internet\nmakes copies easy to distribute.  So it is no wonder\ncompanies are afraid.  But, as so often happens, fear has\nclouded their judgement.  The government has responded\nwith draconian laws to protect intellectual property.\nThey probably mean well. But\nthey may not realize that such laws will do more harm\nthan good.\nWhy are programmers so violently opposed to these laws?\nIf I were a legislator, I'd be interested in this\nmystery\u2014for the same reason that, if I were a farmer and suddenly\nheard a lot of squawking coming from my hen house one night,\nI'd want to go out and investigate.  Hackers are not stupid,\nand unanimity is very rare in this world.\nSo if they're all squawking,   \nperhaps there is something amiss.\nCould it be that such laws, though intended to protect America,\nwill actually harm it?  Think about it.  There is something\nvery\nAmerican\nabout Feynman breaking into safes during\nthe Manhattan Project.  It's hard to imagine the authorities\nhaving a sense of humor about such things over\nin Germany at that time.  Maybe it's not a coincidence.\nHackers are unruly.  That is the essence of hacking.  And it\nis also the essence of Americanness.  It is no accident\nthat Silicon Valley\nis in America, and not France, or Germany,\nor England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside\nthe lines.\nI lived for a while in Florence.  But after I'd been there\na few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping\nto find there was back in the place I'd just left.\nThe reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York.\nIn 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious\npeople you find now in America.  (So I went back to America.)\nIt is greatly to America's advantage that it is\na congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness\u2014that\nit is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks.\nAnd hackers are invariably smart-alecks.  If we had a national\nholiday, it would be April 1st.  It says a great deal about\nour work that we use the same word for a brilliant or a\nhorribly cheesy solution.   When we cook one up we're not\nalways 100% sure which kind it is.  But as long as it has\nthe right sort of wrongness, that's a promising sign.\nIt's odd that people\nthink of programming as precise and methodical.\nComputers\nare precise and methodical.  Hacking is something you do\nwith a gleeful laugh.\nIn our world some of the most characteristic solutions\nare not far removed from practical\njokes.  IBM was no doubt rather surprised by the consequences\nof the licensing deal for DOS, just as the hypothetical\n\"adversary\" must be when Michael Rabin solves a problem by\nredefining it as one that's easier to solve.\nSmart-alecks have to develop a keen sense of how much they\ncan\nget away\nwith.  And lately hackers \nhave sensed a change\nin the atmosphere.\nLately hackerliness seems rather frowned upon.\nTo hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems\nespecially ominous.  That must also mystify outsiders. \nWhy should we care especially about civil\nliberties?  Why programmers, more than\ndentists or salesmen or landscapers?\nLet me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate.\nCivil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint\nAmerican tradition.  Civil liberties make countries rich.\nIf you made a graph of\nGNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite\ntrend.  Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather\nthan just an effect?  I think so.  I think a society in which\npeople can do and say what they want will also tend to\nbe one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than\nthose sponsored by the most influential people.\nAuthoritarian countries become corrupt;\ncorrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak. \nIt seems to me there is\na Laffer curve for government power, just as for\ntax revenues.  At least, it seems likely enough that it\nwould be stupid to try the experiment and find out.  Unlike\nhigh tax rates, you can't repeal totalitarianism if it\nturns out to be a mistake.\nThis is why hackers worry.  The government spying on people doesn't\nliterally make programmers write worse code.  It just leads\neventually to a world in which bad ideas win.  And because\nthis is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive\nto it.  They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a\ndistance, as animals can sense an approaching  \nthunderstorm.\nIt would be ironic if, as hackers fear, recent measures\nintended to protect national security and intellectual property\nturned out to be a missile aimed right at what makes   \nAmerica successful.  But it would not be the first time that\nmeasures taken in an atmosphere of panic had\nthe opposite of the intended effect.\nThere is such a thing as Americanness.\nThere's nothing like living abroad to teach you that.   \nAnd if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash\nthis quality, it would be hard to find a better focus\ngroup than hackers, because they come closest of any group\nI know to embodying it.  Closer, probably,  than\nthe men running our government,\nwho for all their talk of patriotism\nremind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin\nthan Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.\nWhen you read what the founding fathers had to say for\nthemselves, they sound more like hackers.\n\"The spirit of resistance to government,\"\nJefferson wrote, \"is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish\nit always to be kept alive.\"\nImagine an American president saying that today.\nLike the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of\nthe founding fathers have embarrassed generations of\ntheir less confident successors.  They remind us where we come from.\nThey remind us that it is the people who break rules that are\nthe source of America's wealth and power.\nThose in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be\nobeyed.  But be careful what you ask for. You might get it.\nThanks\nto Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin, \nSarah Harlin,  Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Matz, \nJackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum,\nDavid Weinberger, and\nSteven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay.\n(The\nimage\nshows Steves Jobs and Wozniak \nwith a \"blue box.\"\nPhoto by Margret Wozniak. Reproduced by permission of Steve\nWozniak.)\nPortuguese Translation\nHebrew Translation\nRomanian Translation\nYou'll find this essay and 14 others in\nHackers & Painters\n."}
{"text": "@Tyler_The_Wise This is so false that it's false in an interesting way. Wokeness/political correctness is a *very* specific phenomenon.\n\n@barrygoldman1 @lefineder It's implicit when talking about any era except the most recent that you're talking about a limited geographical region. Otherwise you can't use any label for a period.\n\n\"It is true. Glad it's a footnote though!\"\n\n\u2014 Jessica on a controversial point in the new essay I'm writing\n\n@MHastingz But it's *true* that it's a mistake to dismiss everyone who cares about certain problems as woke. Wokeness is a much more specific phenomenon that merely caring about certain problems. It's more about seeming to care than actually caring. That's what makes it bad.\n\n@JayHuber16 I'm writing one right now.\n\n@MHastingz You clearly have not been paying attention.\n\nAnd the companies that don't roll back woke policies are in turn going to find themselves in an awkward position, because they'll get all the people who leave. In the limit case you get a few companies that are 100% militant woke, and I doubt they'd be productive.\n\nAs companies roll back woke policies, they're all going to learn what Brian Armstrong did: that the people who leave when you do this are, on average, exactly the people you'd want to leave.\n\n@lefineder You don't have to put Dark Ages in quotes. This was smack in the middle of them.\n\n@ZvonimirFras Yes, exactly."}
{"text": "Fierce Nerds\nMay 2021\nMost people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary\nsocial situations they are \u2014 as quiet and diffident as the star\nquarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics\nsymposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water.\nBut the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the fact\nthat when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social\nsituations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce.\nThe fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as a\nrule extremely competitive \u2014 more competitive, I'd say, than highly\ncompetitive non-nerds. Competition is more personal for them. Partly\nperhaps because they're not emotionally mature enough to distance\nthemselves from it, but also because there's less randomness in the\nkinds of competition they engage in, and they are thus more justified\nin taking the results personally.\nFierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially\nwhen young. It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to be\nmistaken about one's abilities, but empirically it isn't. Up to a\npoint, confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy.\nAnother quality you find in most fierce nerds is intelligence. Not\nall nerds are smart, but the fierce ones are always at least\nmoderately so. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the confidence\nto be fierce.\n[\n1\n]\nThere's also a natural connection between nerdiness and\nindependent-mindedness\n. It's hard to be \nindependent-minded without\nbeing somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are\nso often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both\nindependent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it\ntakes to fit in. And the independent-mindedness of the fierce nerds\nwill obviously be of the\naggressive\nrather than the passive type:\nthey'll be annoyed by rules, rather than dreamily unaware of them.\nI'm less sure why fierce nerds are impatient, but most seem to be.\nYou notice it first in conversation, where they tend to interrupt\nyou. This is merely annoying, but in the more promising fierce nerds\nit's connected to a deeper impatience about solving problems. Perhaps\nthe competitiveness and impatience of fierce nerds are not separate \nqualities, but two manifestations of a single underlying drivenness.\nWhen you combine all these qualities in sufficient quantities, the\nresult is quite formidable. The most vivid example of fierce nerds\nin action may be James Watson's\nThe Double Helix\n. The first sentence\nof the book is \"I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,\"\nand the portrait he goes on to paint of Crick is the quintessential\nfierce nerd: brilliant, socially awkward, competitive, independent-minded,\noverconfident. But so is the implicit portrait he paints of himself.\nIndeed, his lack of social awareness makes both portraits that much\nmore realistic, because he baldly states all sorts of opinions and\nmotivations that a smoother person would conceal. And moreover it's\nclear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was\nintegral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused them\nto consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence\nallowed them to work on problems they only half understood (they\nwere literally described as \"clowns\" by one eminent insider), and\ntheir impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer ahead\nof two other groups that would otherwise have found it within the\nnext year, if not the next several months.\n[\n2\n]\nThe idea that there could be fierce nerds is an unfamiliar one not\njust to many normal people but even to some young nerds. Especially\nearly on, nerds spend so much of their time in ordinary social\nsituations and so little doing real work that they get a lot more\nevidence of their awkwardness than their power. So there will be\nsome who read this description of the fierce nerd and realize \"Hmm,\nthat's me.\" And it is to you, young fierce nerd, that I now turn.\nI have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that\nyour fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems.\nAnd not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that\nnerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number\nof things you can win at by getting the right answer increases.\nRecently\ngetting rich\nbecame \none of them: 7 of the 8 richest people\nin America are now fierce nerds.\nIndeed, being a fierce nerd is probably even more helpful in business\nthan in nerds' original territory of scholarship. Fierceness seems\noptional there. Darwin for example doesn't seem to have been\nespecially fierce. Whereas it's impossible to be the CEO of a company\nover a certain size without being fierce, so now that nerds can win\nat business, fierce nerds will increasingly monopolize the really\nbig successes.\nThe bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will\nturn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground\nbully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the\nhater\n, the shooter\ndown of\nnew ideas\n.\nHow do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects. If you\nsucceed, it will bring you a kind of satisfaction that neutralizes\nbitterness. But you don't need to have succeeded to feel this;\nmerely working on hard projects gives most fierce nerds some\nfeeling of satisfaction. And those it doesn't, it at least keeps\nbusy.\n[\n3\n]\nAnother solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by\ndevoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like\nthat. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea.\nBut it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a\nsharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge\nto avoid cutting yourself.\nIf you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind\nyou. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past\ncentury we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers\nto technicians \u2014 from the charismatic to the competent \u2014 and I\ndon't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not\ntill the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nTo be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two\ndistinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone\nelse, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerds\nare the latter type.\n[\n2\n]\nThe same qualities that make fierce nerds so effective can\nalso make them very annoying. Fierce nerds would do well to remember\nthis, and (a) try to keep a lid on it, and (b) seek out organizations\nand types of work where getting the right answer matters more than\npreserving social harmony. In practice that means small groups\nworking on hard problems. Which fortunately is the most fun kind\nof environment anyway.\n[\n3\n]\nIf success neutralizes bitterness, why are there some people\nwho are at least moderately successful and yet still quite bitter?\nBecause people's potential bitterness varies depending on how\nnaturally bitter their personality is, and how ambitious they are:\nsomeone who's naturally very bitter will still have a lot left after\nsuccess neutralizes some of it, and someone who's very ambitious\nwill need proportionally more success to satisfy that ambition.\nSo the worst-case scenario is someone who's both naturally bitter\nand extremely ambitious, and yet only moderately successful.\nThanks\nto Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison, Jessica\nLivingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.\nChinese Translation"}
{"text": "The motives of crazy shooters don't matter. They're crazy! The only reason people even talk about their motives is when it suits some axe they have to grind.\n\n@soundboy Come on, that's not true. Investors who invest in YC startups from the UK don't think \"they couldn't persuade anyone in the UK to invest in them.\" It seems so obvious to them that SV is a better place to raise money that they don't even consider whether the startup tried at home.\n\nWhen drones take over, people will be amazed that Navy pilots were able to land on carriers. https://t.co/B2I8KXtCqL\n\nThe Fort Apache of academic freedom.  \n\n(In the 1970s \"Fort Apache\" was the nickname of a police station in a part of New York so lawless that it felt like a frontier outpost.) https://t.co/Jb7MUdr7Ia\n\nYet more bad behavior by Carta. This is now a clear pattern.\n\nWe can't assume that if we had a single world government, the world would look like Europe and grow like America. More likely it would look like America and grow like Europe.\n\n@ahistoryinart Also near-obsessive composition.\n\n@TheFIREorg My 12 yo son banned me from saying a couple of these.\n\n@dsiroker @davidu Hard to beat Ronco in this department.\n\n@PalmerLuckey When I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1985, the project I proposed to work on was an AI as an entertaining fictional character. The committee interviewing me included an English professor. She did not like this idea At All."}
{"text": "@martyamark I never talked to him, but I used to see him around because he lived near us.\n\n@TeamBlind I'm sure I've done YC interviews barefoot and unshowered.\n\n@GregMoranX I *hope* not but the current administration is giving them a run for their money.\n\nPeople sometimes speculate about whether YC would have funded Apple. We would have if Steve Jobs wanted us to, because Steve Jobs got what he wanted.\n\n@ir605 @JonErlichman You mean for helping larval forms of things other than companies? Possibly, but a lot would have to change.\n\n@LifeMathMoney Well that's not true. Caring about impressing random people is a mistake, but caring about impressing people whose opinions you respect is an enormously powerful force.\n\n@billclerico TIL there was such a thing.\n\n@shawnchauhan1 No, not that either. Being better prepared helps, but it's not the most important factor of all.\n\n@AaronAnandji That seems about right.\n\n@siraustin @paradoxes_ai You can construct it for yourself by walking down the Nasdaq. You don't have to walk far for it to stabilize, because there's a power-law distribution of market caps."}
{"text": "\"It's easier to win an argument with a genius than an idiot.\"  \n\n\u2014 Gurwinder Bhogal\n\nJoe Rogan on ICE:\n\n\"You don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be US citizens that just don't have their papers on them. Are we really going to be the Gestapo? ...Is that what we've come to?\"\n\nI bet few people there know it, but YC wouldn't exist without UIUC. My father went there from England on a Fullbright, and came back determined to move to America.\n\nHow does Fra Angelico get such amazing variation in tone with tempera? Zoom in and you'll see: extraordinarily fine hatching. He painted these big altarpieces with a brush with about 10 hairs. https://t.co/BfeBscPcWi\n\nA 1930s drone.\n\nThe stuff about Trump in the Epstein files must be really bad.\n\nI met today with the founder of Starcloud and I realized this is going to be one of the biggest engineering projects of our era. When you look at the tradeoffs, it seems inevitable that all the GPUs are going to live in space.\n\nOne of the weird things about haters is that between their episodes of hating, you forget they exist. They're usually not prominent enough that you'd hear about them otherwise. Then they have a new outburst and you think \"Oh yeah, this guy is obsessed with me. Ugh. How creepy.\"\n\nI did office hours with a startup yesterday that I ended up advising to (a) decrease their growth rate and (b) spend the money they've raised faster by hiring more people and paying them high salaries. Possibly the first time I've ever told a startup this.\n\nIn this case, decrease their growth rate meant decrease it from 30% a month (23x a year) to 20% a month (9x a year). That's how well this startup is doing."}
{"text": "Java's Cover\nApril 2001\nThis essay developed out of conversations I've had with\nseveral other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious.  It's not\na critique of Java!  It is a case study of hacker's radar.\nOver time, hackers develop a nose for good (and bad) technology.\nI thought it might be interesting to try and write down what\nmade Java seem suspect to me.\nSome people who've read this think it's an interesting attempt to write about\nsomething that hasn't been written about before.  Others say I\nwill get in trouble for appearing to be writing about\nthings I don't understand.  So, just in\ncase it does any good, let me clarify that I'm not writing here\nabout Java (which I have never used) but about hacker's radar\n(which I have thought about a lot).\nThe aphorism \"you can't tell a book by its cover\" originated in\nthe times when books were sold in plain cardboard covers, to be\nbound by each purchaser according to his own taste.  In those days,\nyou couldn't tell a book by its cover.  But publishing has advanced\nsince then: present-day publishers work hard to make the cover\nsomething you can tell a book by.\nI spend a lot of time in bookshops and I feel as if I have by now\nlearned to understand everything publishers mean to tell me about\na book, and perhaps a bit more.  The time I haven't spent in\nbookshops I've spent mostly in front of computers, and I feel as\nif I've learned, to some degree, to judge technology by its cover\nas well.  It may be just luck, but I've saved myself from a few\ntechnologies that turned out to be real stinkers.\nSo far, Java seems like a stinker to me.  I've never written a Java\nprogram, never more than glanced over reference books about it,\nbut I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language.\nI may turn out to be mistaken; making predictions about technology\nis a dangerous business.  But for what it's worth, as a sort of\ntime capsule, here's why I don't like the look of Java:\n1. It has been so energetically hyped.  Real standards don't have\nto be promoted.  No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML.  A real\nstandard tends to be already established by the time most people\nhear about it.  On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java,\nor bigger, just on the strength of its own merits.\n2. It's aimed low.  In the original Java white paper, Gosling\nexplicitly says Java was designed not to be too difficult for\nprogrammers used to C.  It was designed to be another C++: C plus\na few ideas taken from more advanced languages.  Like the creators\nof sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were\nconsciously designing a product for people not as smart as them.\nHistorically, languages designed for other people to use have been\nbad:  Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++.  The good languages have been\nthose that were designed for their own creators:  C, Perl, Smalltalk,\nLisp.\n3. It has ulterior motives.  Someone once said that the world would\nbe a better place if people only wrote books because they had\nsomething to say, rather than because they wanted to write a book.\nLikewise, the reason we hear about Java all the time is not because\nit has something to say about programming languages.  We hear about\nJava as part of a plan by Sun to undermine Microsoft.\n4. No one loves it.  C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers\nlove their languages.  I've never heard anyone say that they loved\nJava.\n5. People are forced to use it.  A lot of the people I know using\nJava are using it because they feel they have to.  Either it's\nsomething they felt they had to do to get funded, or something they\nthought customers would want, or something they were told to do by\nmanagement.  These are smart people; if the technology was good,\nthey'd have used it voluntarily.\n6. It has too many cooks.  The best programming languages have been\ndeveloped by small groups.  Java seems to be run by a committee.\nIf it turns out to be a good language, it will be the first time\nin history that a committee has designed a good language.\n7. It's bureaucratic.  From what little I know about Java, there\nseem to be a lot of protocols for doing things.  Really good\nlanguages aren't like that.  They let you do what you want and get\nout of the way.\n8. It's pseudo-hip.  Sun now pretends that Java is a grassroots,\nopen-source language effort like Perl or Python.  This one just\nhappens to be controlled by a giant company.  So the language is\nlikely to have the same drab clunkiness as anything else that comes\nout of a big company.\n9. It's designed for large organizations.  Large organizations have\ndifferent aims from hackers. They want languages that are (believed\nto be) suitable for use by large teams of mediocre programmers--\nlanguages with features that, like the speed limiters in U-Haul\ntrucks, prevent fools from doing too much damage.  Hackers don't\nlike a language that talks down to them.  Hackers just want power.\nHistorically, languages designed for large organizations (PL/I,\nAda) have lost, while hacker languages (C, Perl) have won.  The\nreason: today's teenage hacker is tomorrow's CTO.\n10. The wrong people like it.  The programmers I admire most are\nnot, on the whole, captivated by Java.  Who does like Java?  Suits,\nwho don't know one language from another, but know that they keep\nhearing about Java in the press; programmers at big companies, who\nare amazed to find that there is something even better than C++;\nand plug-and-chug undergrads, who are ready to like anything that\nmight get them a job (will this be on the test?).  These people's\nopinions change with every wind.\n11. Its daddy is in a pinch.  Sun's business model is being undermined\non two fronts.  Cheap Intel processors, of the same type used in\ndesktop machines, are now more than fast enough for servers.  And\nFreeBSD seems to be at least as good an OS for servers as Solaris.\nSun's advertising implies that you need Sun servers for industrial\nstrength applications.  If this were true, Yahoo would be first in\nline to buy Suns;  but when I worked there, the servers were all\nIntel boxes running FreeBSD.  This bodes ill for Sun's future.  If\nSun runs into trouble, they could drag Java down with them.\n12. The DoD likes it.  The Defense Department is encouraging\ndevelopers to use Java. This seems to me the most damning sign of\nall.  The Defense Department does a fine (though expensive) job of\ndefending the country, but they love plans and procedures and\nprotocols.  Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture; on\nquestions of software they will tend to bet wrong.  The last time\nthe DoD really liked a programming language, it was Ada.\nBear in mind, this is not a critique of Java, but a critique of\nits cover.  I don't know Java well enough to like it or dislike\nit.  This is just an explanation of why I don't find that I'm eager\nto learn it.\nIt may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried\nwriting programs in it.  But this is something all programmers have\nto do.  There are too many technologies out there to learn them\nall.  You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be\nworth your time.  I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada,\nVisual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS,\nNovell Netware, and CORBA, among others.  They just smelled wrong.\nIt could be that in Java's case I'm mistaken.  It could be that a\nlanguage promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed\nby a committee for a \"mainstream\" audience, hyped to the skies,\nand beloved of the DoD, happens nonetheless to be a clean, beautiful,\npowerful language that I would love programming in.  It could be,\nbut it seems very unlikely.\nTrevor Re: Java's Cover\nBerners-Lee Re: Java\nBeing Popular\nSun Internal Memo\n2005: BusinessWeek Agrees\nJapanese Translation"}
{"text": "Founder Control\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nDecember 2010\nSomeone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common\nit was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after\na series A round.  He said VCs told him this almost never happened.\nTen years ago that was true.  In the past, founders rarely kept\ncontrol of the board through a series A.  The traditional series A\nboard consisted of two founders, two VCs, and one independent member.\nMore recently the recipe is often one founder, one VC, and one\nindependent.  In either case the founders lose their majority.\nBut not always.  Mark Zuckerberg kept control of Facebook's board\nthrough the series A and still has it today.  Mark Pincus has kept\ncontrol of Zynga's too.  But are these just outliers?  How common\nis it for founders to keep control after an A round?  I'd heard of\nseveral cases among the companies we've funded, but I wasn't sure\nhow many there were, so I emailed the ycfounders list.\nThe replies surprised me.  In a dozen companies we've funded, the\nfounders still had a majority of the board seats after the series\nA round.\nI feel like we're at a tipping point here.  A lot of VCs still act\nas if founders retaining board control after a series A is unheard-of.\nA lot of them try to make you feel bad if you even ask \u2014 as if\nyou're a noob or a control freak for wanting such a thing.  But the\nfounders I heard from aren't noobs or control freaks.  Or if they\nare, they are, like Mark Zuckerberg, the kind of noobs and control\nfreaks VCs should be trying to fund more of.\nFounders retaining control after a series A is clearly heard-of.\nAnd barring financial catastrophe, I think in the coming year it\nwill become the norm.\nControl of a company is a more complicated matter than simply\noutvoting other parties in board meetings.  Investors usually get\nvetos over certain big decisions, like selling the company, regardless\nof how many board seats they have.  And board votes are rarely\nsplit.  Matters are decided in the discussion preceding the vote,\nnot in the vote itself, which is usually unanimous.  But if opinion\nis divided in such discussions, the side that knows it would lose\nin a vote will tend to be less insistent.  That's what board control\nmeans in practice.  You don't simply get to do whatever you want;\nthe board still has to act in the interest of the shareholders; but\nif you have a majority of board seats, then your opinion about\nwhat's in the interest of the shareholders will tend to prevail.\nSo while board control is not total control, it's not imaginary\neither.  There's inevitably a difference in how things feel within\nthe company.  Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to\nretain board control after a series A, that will change the way\nthings feel in the whole startup world.\nThe switch to the new norm may be surprisingly fast, because the\nstartups that can retain control tend to be the best ones.  They're\nthe ones that set the trends, both for other startups and for VCs.\nA lot of the reason VCs are harsh when negotiating with startups\nis that they're embarrassed to go back to their partners looking\nlike they got beaten.  When they sign a termsheet, they want to be\nable to brag about the good terms they got.  A lot of them don't\ncare that much personally about whether founders keep board control.\nThey just don't want to seem like they had to make concessions.\nWhich means if letting the founders keep control stops being perceived\nas a concession, it will rapidly become much more common.\nLike a lot of changes that have been forced on VCs, this change\nwon't turn out to be as big a problem as they might think. VCs will\nstill be able to convince; they just won't be able to compel.  And\nthe startups where they have to resort to compulsion are not the\nones that matter anyway.  VCs make most of their money from a few\nbig hits, and those aren't them.\nKnowing that founders will keep control of the board may even help\nVCs pick better.  If they know they can't fire the founders, they'll\nhave to choose founders they can trust.  And that's who they should\nhave been choosing all along.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, Paul\nBuchheit, Brian Chesky, Bill Clerico, Patrick Collison, Adam\nGoldstein, James Lindenbaum, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson\nfor reading drafts of this."}
{"text": "The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty\nApril 2021\nWhen intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about\nthings like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's\nlife, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether\nmore death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in\npractice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether\nit's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill\ninnocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are\ninnocent\n.\nWhen I was a kid I imagined that it was unusual for people to be\nconvicted of crimes they hadn't committed, and that in murder cases\nespecially this must be very rare. Far from it. Now, thanks to\norganizations like the\nInnocence Project\n,\nwe see a constant stream\nof stories about murder convictions being overturned after new\nevidence emerges. Sometimes the police and prosecutors were just\nvery sloppy. Sometimes they were crooked, and knew full well they\nwere convicting an innocent person.\nKenneth Adams and three other men spent 18 years in prison on a\nmurder conviction. They were exonerated after DNA testing implicated\nthree different men, two of whom later confessed. The police had\nbeen told about the other men early in the investigation, but never\nfollowed up the lead.\nKeith Harward spent 33 years in prison on a murder conviction. He\nwas convicted because \"experts\" said his teeth matched photos of\nbite marks on one victim. He was exonerated after DNA testing showed\nthe murder had been committed by another man, Jerry Crotty.\nRicky Jackson and two other men spent 39 years in prison after being\nconvicted of murder on the testimony of a 12 year old boy, who later\nrecanted and said he'd been coerced by police. Multiple people have\nconfirmed the boy was elsewhere at the time. The three men were\nexonerated after the county prosecutor dropped the charges, saying\n\"The state is conceding the obvious.\"\nAlfred Brown spent 12 years in prison on a murder conviction,\nincluding 10 years on death row. He was exonerated after it was\ndiscovered that the assistant district attorney had concealed phone\nrecords proving he could not have committed the crimes.\nGlenn Ford spent 29 years on death row after having been convicted\nof murder. He was exonerated after new evidence proved he was not\neven at the scene when the murder occurred. The attorneys assigned\nto represent him had never tried a jury case before.\nCameron Willingham was actually executed in 2004 by lethal injection.\nThe \"expert\" who testified that he deliberately set fire to his\nhouse has since been discredited. A re-examination of the case\nordered by the state of Texas in 2009 concluded that \"a finding of\narson could not be sustained.\"\nRich Glossip\nhas spent 20 years on death row after being convicted\nof murder on the testimony of the actual killer, who escaped with\na life sentence in return for implicating him. In 2015 he came\nwithin minutes of execution before it emerged that Oklahoma had\nbeen planning to kill him with an illegal combination of drugs.\nThey still plan to go ahead with the execution, perhaps as soon as\nthis summer, despite\nnew \nevidence\nexonerating him.\nI could go on. There are hundreds of similar cases. In Florida\nalone, 29 death row prisoners have been exonerated so far.\nFar from being rare, wrongful murder convictions are\nvery common\n.\nPolice are under pressure to solve a crime that has gotten a lot\nof attention. When they find a suspect, they want to believe he's\nguilty, and ignore or even destroy evidence suggesting otherwise.\nDistrict attorneys want to be seen as effective and tough on crime,\nand in order to win convictions are willing to manipulate witnesses\nand withhold evidence. Court-appointed defense attorneys are\noverworked and often incompetent. There's a ready supply of criminals\nwilling to give false testimony in return for a lighter sentence,\nsuggestible witnesses who can be made to say whatever police want,\nand bogus \"experts\" eager to claim that science proves the defendant\nis guilty. And juries want to believe them, since otherwise some\nterrible crime remains unsolved.\nThis circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with\nthe death penalty. We don't even reach the point where theoretical\nquestions about the moral justification or effectiveness of capital\npunishment start to matter, because so many of the people sentenced\nto death are actually innocent. Whatever it means in theory, in\npractice capital punishment means killing innocent people.\nThanks\nto Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Don Knight for\nreading drafts of this.\nRelated:\nWill Florida Kill an Innocent Man?\nWas Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?\nDid Texas execute an innocent man?"}
{"text": "Write Simply\nMarch 2021\nI try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.\nThat kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something\nis to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less\nenergy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for\nyour ideas.\nAnd the further they'll read. Most readers' energy tends to flag\npart way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading\nis low enough, more keep going till the end.\nThere's an Italian dish called\nsaltimbocca\n, which means \"leap\ninto the mouth.\" My goal when writing might be called\nsaltintesta\n:\nthe ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that\ngot them there.\nIt's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You\nmight not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the\ntime, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and\npure ideas is not filled with poetry.\nPlus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a\nfancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just\nso you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you\nthat readers have to carry.\nAnd remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your\nreaders won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of\nideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you\ncan't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can\nuse difficult words.\nOf course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also\nconceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way,\nto conceal the fact that they have\nnothing to say. Whereas writing\nsimply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be\nobvious to everyone, including you.\nSimple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the\nfuture will be in much the same position as people from other\ncountries reading it today. The culture and the language will have\nchanged. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain\nfor a woodworker to build a chair to last.\nIndeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or\nwriting. It's a sign you did a good job.\nBut although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none\nof them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it\noffends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated,\nor that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy\nto me. It seems clumsy.\nThere are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence\nor fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident.\nThe other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do\nit. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying\nto get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and\nthat makes simple writing even simpler."}
{"text": "@haroonahmadmd I've largely replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up, but it hasn't changed anything about what I write.\n\n@SpencerHakimian What? This is no longer a tariff...\n\n@jmhorp It's not just the aesthetic value. People can walk across that space, which you can't do across a road full of traffic.\n\nAll the while, builders are building.\n\n@sfmcguire79 \"Belonging\" seems to be the default new euphemism.\n\n@SurendranNisha You learn not to do this when they're 1.\n\n@rashlabs You just write a good essay. But your teachers may freak out if you do.\n\nAt least 13 yo won't spend years puzzling over how the \"conclusion\" is supposed to be different from the \"introduction\" even though they're saying the same things. I told him upfront it's just an artifact of this fake format.\n\nI don't mind if my kids have to learn math that's not real math or writing that's not real writing or science that's just words, but at the same time as I teach them these things I always try to give them an idea of how they're fake, and what the real version is like.\n\n13 yo asked me to teach him how to write essays. I asked if he wanted to learn how to write real essays, or the kind you have to write in school. He said the school kind, because he's writing one for school."}
{"text": "@dbasch @ThijsVerreck I have very high standards for books. That's what makes it hard.\n\n@ThijsVerreck Publishing a paper book takes a lot of time, and at any given time I'd rather be writing more essays.\n\n@JoshhuaSays Out, or just over?\n\nGood game to play with small kids: push them on the swings, but pretend to push them very clumsily. https://t.co/sjX2xhwEg7\n\n@ilyasu I'm not accusing you of not understanding anything. I'm just talking about the shape of the problem.\n\n@ilyasu Ah, so you only want the founders who are set on taking over the world. But that's a real problem, because it can take them several years to make up their minds about that.\n\n@ilyasu Why? Because startups need less money?\n\nIdea: Maybe if every time we put the link in a reply we talk about how lame it is that we have to do this, Elon will realize that it is, in fact, lame.\n\nIt's so fucking lame that I have to put the link to the source in a reply in order to avoid being penalized by Twitter's algorithm, but here it is: https://t.co/IVRrreJ7mB\n\nAI needs a lot of power right now. But permitting has made connecting new power sources to the grid prohibitively slow (5 years!). The solution: off-grid solar. https://t.co/nU1VX4ZGHH"}
{"text": "A Word to the Resourceful\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nJanuary 2012\nA year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups\nwe'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to.  It felt as if there\nwas some kind of wall between us.  I could never quite tell if they\nunderstood what I was saying.\nThis caught my attention because earlier we'd noticed a pattern\namong the most successful startups, and it seemed to hinge on a\ndifferent quality.  We found the startups that did best were the\nones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say \"they can take\ncare of themselves.\"  The startups that do best are fire-and-forget\nin the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll\nclose it, whatever type of lead it is.  When they're raising money,\nfor example, you can do the initial intros knowing that if you\nwanted to you could stop thinking about it at that point.  You won't\nhave to babysit the round to make sure it happens.  That type of\nfounder is going to come back with the money; the only question is\nhow much on what terms.\nIt seemed odd that the outliers at the two ends of the spectrum\ncould be detected by what appeared to be unrelated tests.  You'd\nexpect that if the founders at one end were distinguished by the\npresence of quality x, at the other end they'd be distinguished by\nlack of x.  Was there some kind of inverse relation between\nresourcefulness\nand being hard to talk to?\nIt turns out there is, and the key to the mystery is the old adage\n\"a word to the wise is sufficient.\"   Because this phrase is not\nonly overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the\nsubject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know\nwhat it means.  What it means is that if someone is wise, all you\nhave to do is say one word to them, and they'll understand immediately.\nYou don't have to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the\nimplications.\nIn much the same way that all you have to do is give the right sort\nof founder a one line intro to a VC, and he'll chase down the money.\nThat's the connection.  Understanding all the implications \u2014 even the\ninconvenient implications \u2014 of what someone tells you is a subset of\nresourcefulness.  It's conversational resourcefulness.\nLike real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness\noften means doing things you don't want to.  Chasing down all the\nimplications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable\nconclusions.  The best word to describe the failure to do so is\nprobably \"denial,\" though that seems a bit too narrow.  A better\nway to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful\nfounders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness.\nThey traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person\ntraverses the physical world.\n[\n1\n]\nThe unsuccessful founders weren't stupid.  Intellectually they\nwere as capable as\nthe successful founders of following all the implications of what\none said to them.  They just weren't eager to.\nSo being hard to talk to was not what was killing the\nunsuccessful startups.  It\nwas a sign of an underlying lack of resourcefulness.  That's what\nwas killing them.  As well as\nfailing to chase down the implications of what was said to them,\nthe unsuccessful founders would also fail to chase down funding,\nand users, and sources of new ideas.  But the most immediate evidence\nI had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nA YC partner wrote:\nMy feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours,\nthey've already decided what they're going to do and everything I\nsay is being put through an internal process in their heads, which\neither desperately tries to munge what I've said into something\nthat conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and\ncreates a rationalization for doing so. They may not even be conscious\nof this process but that's what I think is happening when you say\nsomething to bad groups and they have that glazed over look. I don't\nthink it's confusion or lack of understanding per se, it's this\ninternal process at work.\nWith the good groups, you can tell that everything you say is being\nlooked at with fresh eyes and even if it's dismissed, it's because\nof some logical reason e.g. \"we already tried that\" or \"from speaking\nto our users that isn't what they'd like,\" etc. Those groups never\nhave that glazed over look.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston,\nRobert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of\nthis."}
{"text": "@chandanaveli @eleanoir You're right!\n\nhttps://t.co/6M6wVYBF8J\n\nIt shows you how desperate people are for a new TikTok if they're driven to signing up for an app that cancels your account if you post a picture of Winnie the Pooh.\n\n@LandsknechtPike Incidentally, this was a question you definitely couldn't have asked on Twitter in 2020. It would have provoked a firestorm of attacks. Or in the language of the time, you would have been called out for your problematic tweet.\n\n@LandsknechtPike I wonder how well you could predict people's sex from their affinity for cutaway drawings of ships, castles, and aircraft.\n\nWhen you learn new things that seem like type errors, you know real change is happening.\n\n(A type error is CS lingo for sending code the wrong type of data. E.g. calling a numeric function on text. Unless you're using Perl, in which case this is just business as usual.)\n\nI talked to the CEO of a moderately big tech co who said they'd replaced Figma with Replit. This surprised me because I don't even think of them as being in the same business. But he said Replit is so good at generating apps that they just to straight to prototype now.\n\n@charlesarthur @mrianleslie This is a landmark thread. In fact I quote her on the quotes page of my site. But she's not the editor of Nature, just of Nature Human Behavior.\n\nI'm slightly tempted to write something about the general phenomenon of mistakenness. But only slightly. It would be too depressing, like writing about slavery or the bubonic plague.\n\nTwitter offers an unprecedentedly rich opportunity for studying mistakenness. Before this the best we could do were polls about e.g. what percent of people believe the world is flat, or that the theory of evolution is false. Now we can see mistakenness in detail.\n\nThis thread is a perfect sample of Twitter behavior. It's packed with people offering spontaneous, mistaken, often moralizing explanations for why his nose looked that way, when there are already replies in the thread from dermatologists, explaining the real reason."}
{"text": "@iamtomiwa @brianfidler @onyinye_nnenna @Antholeee @elnathan_john No, it isn't.\n\n@daramatoye @Antholeee @elnathan_john No, using formal language in essays and emails is usually a mistake. It just gets in the way.\n\nhttps://t.co/K1ZWs2v6RF\n\n@MojiDelanoBlog The \"repertoire of\" is redundant. Your sentence has the same meaning if you take it out.\n\nI assume you didn't intend this as an example of the problem I'm talking about, but it's a pretty good one.\n\n@brianfidler @onyinye_nnenna @Antholeee @elnathan_john Who would presume that? It's just one piece of evidence.\n\n@Antholeee @elnathan_john That's exactly the problem with it. When you're writing an email or an essay, you shouldn't use the sort of language that people would use when addressing a formal gathering.\n\n@onyinye_nnenna @Antholeee @elnathan_john It's a basic word in the US and UK too, in the sense that everyone knows it.\n\n@divineakporaye Actually writing simply would be a decent one to die on, as hills go. You could be fairly sure that it was an important one, and that you were right.\n\n@Antholeee @elnathan_john Not simply because they're complicated. It depends on the words. Apparently ChatGPT specifically likes the word \"delve,\" which is how this conversation started.\n\n@Austen Revenue is a trailing indicator.\n\n@BeeTheLight_ There are many uses of AI. Not all of them are good."}
{"text": "@mattyglesias One wonders if he's stupid enough to believe what he's saying, or just doing his duty as a proxy appealing to the lunatic fringe. What do you think, Matty?\n\nThis screenshot is from the National Library of Scotland's new historic parks viewer: https://t.co/PkW2a2Mbkb\n\nYou can see how even the distribution of country houses is in England from this map of parks that existed in 1890-1900. (A park in this sense is an area of grazing land dotted with trees. Originally most were for deer. Most country houses had one.) https://t.co/WhExtZpnwb\n\n@jwcreighton3 It's strange to think that I can't tell now if you mean Trump or Biden, and yet to know that I'll be able to tell instantly if I click on your profile.\n\n@RyanNewYork Ah, the faint echo of bygone days. It seems quaint now, but it didn't at the time.\n\n@vitarktark Some otherwise reasonable and upstanding people have done that. Such is the power of tribalism.\n\n@mattschaar YC wouldn't do that. If you're a good founder, they want you.\n\n@michael_nielsen Evolved in multiple locations? What are they saying? That homo sapiens is a hybrid of multiple prior species? Or just that the species had a large range?\n\n@Conanbatt Actually it started with someone else, and she was gone from Reddit by then. But she probably did work the hardest to get attention from it.\n\n@eliasstravik Be careful. You can't get those early years back."}
{"text": "@hari0710 Go to Hay on Wye for three days.\n\n@naval Also the millions of dollars it sucks away from better causes.\n\n@MikeBenzCyber If only the super-rich can buy houses in California, who is buying the median house?\n\nI can't tell if you're merely stupid or deliberately dishonest, but either way it's clearly a waste of time to engage with you, so goodbye.\n\nOne the whole I prefer the new right-wing trolls. They're easier to ignore. Being attacked (or as they used to put it, called out) by the left-wing ones occasionally stung a little. Some seemed smart, so I cared a little what they thought. Not these people.\n\nThe stupidity of the new right-wing Twitter trolls turns out to be an effective substitute for the intellectual dishonesty of the old left-wing ones. They don't have to resort to willful misinterpretation. They can get enough juice from mere incomprehension.\n\n@MikeBenzCyber If people pay a lot for something when they have other alternatives, it means they want it a lot. Do you really not get that?\n\n@MikeBenzCyber The higher cost of living in California supports my point. Houses in California are more than 2x as expensive as houses in Florida, and houses being more than 2x as expensive = people want to live there more than 2x as much.\n\n@kevinsekniqi You might not realize it, but that's what made you move.\n\n@tunguz The higher price of houses in California proves my point. House prices are higher than in Florida because people want to live in California more than Florida. They're willing to pay more than twice as much to do it.\n\n@piv4law Genius is not a plural. The possessive is genius's."}
{"text": "The Top Idea in Your Mind\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nJuly 2010\nI realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the\nmorning is more important than I'd thought.  I knew it was a good\ntime to have ideas.  Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to\ndo a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.\nEveryone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar\nwith the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing,\nand then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something\nelse. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to.  I'm\nincreasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful\nin solving hard problems, but necessary.  The tricky part is, you\ncan only control it indirectly.\n[\n1\n]\nI think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given\ntime.  That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're\nallowed to drift freely.  And this idea will thus tend to get all\nthe benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of\nit.  Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the\ntop one in your mind.\nWhat made this clear to me was having an idea I didn't want as the\ntop one in my mind for two long stretches.\nI'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising\nmoney, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood\nwhy.  The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with\ninvestors.  The problem is that once you start raising money, raising\nmoney becomes the top idea in your mind.  That becomes what you\nthink about when you take a shower in the morning.  And that means\nother questions aren't.\nI'd hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I'd forgotten\nwhy I hated it so much.  When we raised money for Y Combinator, I\nremembered.  Money matters are particularly likely to become the\ntop idea in your mind.  The reason is that they have to be.  It's\nhard to get money.  It's not the sort of thing that happens by\ndefault.  It's not going to happen unless you let it become the\nthing you think about in the shower.  And then you'll make little\nprogress on anything else you'd rather be working on.\n[\n2\n]\n(I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors.  Professors\nnowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a\nlittle research on the side.  It may be time to fix that.)\nThe reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of the\npreceding 10 years I'd been able to think about what I wanted.  So\nthe contrast when I couldn't was sharp.  But I don't think this\nproblem is unique to me, because just about every startup I've seen\ngrinds to a halt when they start raising money \u0097 or\ntalking\nto acquirers\n.\nYou can't directly control where your thoughts drift.  If you're\ncontrolling them, they're not drifting.  But you can control them\nindirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get\ninto.  That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let\nbecome critical to you.  Try to get yourself into situations where\nthe most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.\nYou don't have complete control, of course.  An emergency could\npush other thoughts out of your head.  But barring emergencies you\nhave a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea\nin your mind.\nI've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth\navoiding \u0097 thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push\nout more interesting ideas.  One I've already mentioned: thoughts\nabout money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention\nsink.\nThe other is disputes.  These too are engaging in the\nwrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely\ninteresting ideas, but without the substance.  So avoid disputes\nif you want to get real work done.\n[\n3\n]\nEven Newton fell into this trap.  After publishing his theory of\ncolors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years,\nfinally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:\nI see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free\n  of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally,\n  excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come\n  out after me.  For I see a man must either resolve to put out\n  nothing new or become a slave to defend it.\n[\n4\n]\nLinus and his students at Liege were among the more tenacious\ncritics.  Newton's biographer Westfall seems to feel he was\noverreacting:\nRecall that at the time he wrote, Newton's \"slavery\" consisted\n  of five replies to Liege, totalling fourteen printed pages, over\n  the course of a year.\nI'm more sympathetic to Newton. The problem was not the 14 pages,\nbut the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced\nas the top idea in a mind that wanted so eagerly to think about\nother things.\nTurning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages.\nSomeone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury\nitself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about\nit.  If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the\nsecond half.  I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about\nnasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't\ndeserve space in my head.  I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten\nthe details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking\nabout them.  My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my\nmotives are purely selfish.\nI suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their\nmind at any given time.  I'm often mistaken about it.  I tend to\nthink it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one\nthat is.  But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower.\nWhat topic do your thoughts keep returning to?  If it's not what\nyou want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nNo doubt there are already names for this type of thinking, but\nI call it \"ambient thought.\"\n[\n2\n]\nThis was made particularly clear in our case, because neither\nof the funds we raised was difficult, and yet in both cases the\nprocess dragged on for months.  Moving large amounts of money around\nis never something people treat casually.  The attention required\nincreases with the amount\u2014maybe not linearly, but definitely\nmonotonically.\n[\n3\n]\nCorollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will\nconsist of dealing with money and disputes.\n[\n4\n]\nLetter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard,\nLife of\nIsaac Newton\n, p. 107.\nThanks\nto Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston,\nand Robert Morris for reading drafts of this."}
{"text": "@lefineder Maybe this was merely a way for judges to avoid hanging someone even though the law required it.\n\n@jasroopdhingra Open source AI is the path forward.\n\nAn eloquent manifesto from Zuck:\n\nhttps://t.co/bB3joOvvxW\n\n@mattyglesias @jam3scampbell @davidmanheim Of course it can be disproven. Do you think historians are unable to separate how charismatic candidates were from whether they won?\n\nIt not only can be disproven, but actually failed in 2020, when Trump (barely) lost to Biden despite being more charismatic.\n\nIt's good to be reminded of this occasionally if you live in a bubble of rationality. A quarter of people are credulous to the point of insanity. When  you walk through a mall, this is the movie playing inside a lot of those heads.\n\n@vnv_varun I don't know where you got that, but it's not what I wrote. It's been edited. This is what I actually said: https://t.co/2Z9JqfRPz8\n\n@KTmBoyle What? Here's me saying it on June 28:\n\nhttps://t.co/3WMBpOlmW9\n\n@jonathanwilson @GoldwagNathan Yes, of course. So did the leaders of Trump's own party.\n\n@GoldwagNathan @sarcasticSyzygy You think all the historians and political analysts are so stupid that they can't separate how charismatic a candidate is from whether they won?\n\nWhat about 1968? Are you claiming that historians believe Nixon was more charismatic than Humphrey?\n\n@jeffehobbs @GoldwagNathan I wrote that essay when I was 39."}
{"text": "A New Venture Animal\nMarch 2008, rev May 2013\n(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure\nout what we do.  Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still\ntrying to understand its implications.)\nI was annoyed recently to read a description of Y Combinator that\nsaid \"Y Combinator does seed funding for startups.\"  What was\nespecially annoying about it was that I wrote it.  This doesn't\nreally convey what we do.  And the reason it's inaccurate is that,\nparadoxically, funding very early stage startups is not mainly about\nfunding.\nSaying YC does seed funding for startups is a description in terms\nof earlier models.  It's like calling a car a horseless carriage.\nWhen you scale animals you can't just keep everything in proportion.\nFor example, volume grows as the cube of linear dimension, but\nsurface area only as the square.  So as animals get bigger they\nhave trouble radiating heat.  That's why mice and rabbits are furry\nand elephants and hippos aren't.  You can't make a mouse by scaling\ndown an elephant.\nYC represents a new, smaller kind of animal\u2014so much smaller\nthat all the rules are different.\nBefore us, most companies in the startup funding business were\nventure capital funds.  VCs generally fund later stage companies\nthan we do.  And they supply so much money that, even though the\nother things they do may be very valuable, it's not that inaccurate\nto regard VCs as sources of money.  Good VCs are \"smart money,\" but\nthey're still money.\nAll good investors supply a combination of money and help.  But\nthese scale differently, just as volume and surface area do.  Late\nstage investors supply huge amounts of money and\ncomparatively little help: when a company about to go public gets\na mezzanine round of $50 million, the deal tends to be almost\nentirely about money.  As you move earlier in the venture\nfunding process, the ratio of help to money increases, because\nearlier stage companies have different needs.  Early stage companies\nneed less money because they're smaller and cheaper to run, but\nthey need more help because life is so precarious for them.  So\nwhen VCs do a series A round for, say, $2 million, they generally\nexpect to offer a significant amount of help along with the money.\nY Combinator occupies the earliest end of the spectrum.  We're at\nleast one and generally two steps before VC funding.  (Though some\nstartups go straight from YC to VC, the most common trajectory is\nto do an angel round first.)  And what happens at Y Combinator is\nas different from what happens in a series A round as a series A\nround is from a mezzanine financing.\nAt our end, money is almost a negligible factor.  The startup usually\nconsists of just the founders. Their living expenses are the\ncompany's main expense, and since most founders are under 30, their\nliving expenses are low.  But at this early stage companies need a\nlot of help.  Practically every question is still unanswered.  Some\ncompanies we've funded have been working on their software for a\nyear or more, but others haven't decided what to work on, or even\nwho the founders should be.\nWhen PR people and journalists recount the histories of startups\nafter they've become big, they always underestimate how uncertain\nthings were at first.  They're not being deliberately misleading.\nWhen you look at a company like Google, it's hard to imagine they\ncould once have been small and helpless.  Sure, at one point they\nwere a just a couple guys in a garage\u2014but even then their\ngreatness was assured, and all they had to do was roll forward along\nthe railroad tracks of destiny.\nFar from it.  A lot of startups with just as promising beginnings\nend up failing.  Google has such momentum now that it would be hard\nfor anyone to stop them.  But all it would have taken in the beginning\nwould have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong\nthings for six months, and the company could have died.\nWe know, because we've been there, just how vulnerable startups are\nin the earliest phases.  Curiously enough, that's why founders tend\nto get so rich from them.  Reward is always proportionate to risk,\nand very early stage startups are insanely risky.\nWhat we really do at Y Combinator is get startups launched straight.\nOne of many metaphors you could use for YC is a steam catapult on\nan aircraft carrier.  We get startups airborne.  Barely airborne,\nbut enough that they can accelerate fast.\nWhen you're launching planes they have to be set up properly or\nyou're just launching projectiles.  They have to be pointed straight\ndown the deck; the wings have to be trimmed properly; the engines\nhave to be at full power; the pilot has to be ready.  These are the\nkind of problems we deal with.  After we fund startups we work\nclosely with them for three months\u2014so closely in fact that\nwe insist they move to where we are.  And what we do in those three\nmonths is make sure everything is set up for launch.  If there are\ntensions between cofounders we help sort them out.  We get all the\npaperwork set up properly so there are no nasty surprises later.\nIf the founders aren't sure what to focus on first, we try to figure\nthat out.  If there is some obstacle right in front of them, we\neither try to remove it, or shift the startup sideways.  The goal\nis to get every distraction out of the way so the founders can use\nthat time to build (or finish building) something impressive.  And\nthen near the end of the three months we push the button on the\nsteam catapult in the form of Demo Day, where the current group of\nstartups present to pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley.\nLaunching companies isn't identical with launching products.  Though\nwe do spend a lot of time on launch strategies for products, there\nare some things that take too long to build for a startup to launch\nthem before raising their next round of funding.  Several of the\nmost promising startups we've funded haven't launched their products\nyet, but are definitely launched as companies.\nIn the earliest stage, startups not only have more questions to\nanswer, but they tend to be different kinds of questions.  In later\nstage startups the questions are about deals, or hiring, or\norganization.  In the earliest phase they tend to be about technology\nand design.  What do you make?  That's the first problem to solve.\nThat's why our motto is \"Make something people want.\"  This is\nalways a good thing for companies to do, but it's even more important\nearly on, because it sets the bounds for every other question.  Who\nyou hire, how much money you raise, how you market yourself\u2014they\nall depend on what you're making.\nBecause the early problems are so much about technology and design,\nyou probably need to be hackers to do what we do.  While some VCs\nhave technical backgrounds, I don't know any who still write code.\nTheir expertise is mostly in business\u2014as it should be, because\nthat's the kind of expertise you need in the phase between series\nA and (if you're lucky) IPO.\nWe're so different from VCs that we're really a different kind of\nanimal.  Can we claim founders are better off as a result of this\nnew type of venture firm?  I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, because\nYC is an improved version of what happened to our startup, and our\ncase was not atypical.  We started Viaweb with $10,000 in seed money\nfrom our friend Julian.  He was a lawyer and arranged all our\npaperwork, so we could just code.  We spent three months building\na version 1, which we then presented to investors to raise more\nmoney.  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?  But YC improves on that\nsignificantly.  Julian knew a lot about law and business, but his\nadvice ended there; he was not a startup guy.  So we made some basic\nmistakes early on.  And when we presented to investors, we presented\nto only 2, because that was all we knew.  If we'd had our later\nselves to encourage and advise us, and Demo Day to present at, we\nwould have been in much better shape.  We probably could have raised\nmoney at 3 to 5 times the valuation we did.\nIf we take 7% of a company we fund, the founders only have to do\n7.5%\nbetter in their next round of funding\nto end up net ahead.  We certainly manage that.\nSo who is our 7% coming out of?  If the founders end up net ahead\nit's not coming out of them.  So is it coming out of later stage\ninvestors?  Well, they do end up paying more.  But I think they pay\nmore because the company is actually more valuable.  And later stage\ninvestors have no problem with that.  The returns of a VC fund\ndepend on the quality of the companies they invest in, not how\ncheaply they can buy stock in them.\nIf what we do is useful, why wasn't anyone doing it before?  There\nare two answers to that.  One is that people were doing it before,\njust haphazardly on a smaller scale.  Before us, seed funding came\nprimarily from individual angel investors.  Larry and Sergey, for\nexample, got their seed funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the\nfounders of Sun.  And because he was a startup guy he probably gave\nthem useful advice.  But raising money from angel investors is a\nhit or miss thing.  It's a sideline for most of them, so they only\ndo a handful of deals a year and they don't spend a lot of time on\nthe startups they invest in.  And they're hard to reach, because\nthey don't want random startups pestering them with business plans.\nThe Google guys were lucky because they knew someone who knew\nBechtolsheim.  It generally takes a personal introduction with\nangels.\nThe other reason no one was doing quite what we do is that till\nrecently it was a lot more expensive to start a startup.  You'll\nnotice we haven't funded any biotech startups.  That's still\nexpensive.  But advancing technology has made web startups so cheap\nthat you really can get a company airborne for $15,000.  If you\nunderstand how to operate a steam catapult, at least.\nSo in effect what's happened is that a new ecological niche has\nopened up, and Y Combinator is the new kind of animal that has moved\ninto it.  We're not a replacement for venture capital funds.  We\noccupy a new, adjacent niche.  And conditions in our niche are\nreally quite different.  It's not just that the problems we face\nare different; the whole structure of the business is different.\nVCs are playing a zero-sum game.  They're all competing for a slice\nof a fixed amount of \"deal flow,\" and that explains a lot of their\nbehavior.  Whereas our m.o. is to create new deal flow, by encouraging\nhackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups\ninstead.  We compete more with employers than VCs.\nIt's not surprising something like this would happen.  Most fields\nbecome more specialized\u2014more articulated\u2014as they develop,\nand startups are certainly an area in which there has been a lot\nof development over the past couple decades.  The venture business\nin its present form is only about forty years old.  It stands to\nreason it would evolve.\nAnd it's natural that the new niche would at first be described,\neven by its inhabitants, in terms of the old one.  But really Y\nCombinator is not in the startup funding business.  Really we're\nmore of a small, furry steam catapult.\nThanks\nto Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris\nfor reading drafts of this.\nComment\non this essay."}
{"text": "RSS\nAaron Swartz created a scraped\nfeed\nof the essays page."}
{"text": "A year of smoothly exponential growth, and then suddenly it stops working. That has to be demoralizing. But the startup toughs it out, and five months later growth is back. https://t.co/tQM44KNJXY\n\n\"I didn't take any notes this time. Everything's going so well.\"\n\n\u2014 Jessica after a YC Board meeting\n\nThey get a lot done at Coinbase.\n\nThis image looks grim to us, but when Terence Cuneo painted it in 1947 it was a picture of progress. In fact it was commissioned by Ford, whose factory it portrays. https://t.co/q5Li1KnpAN\n\n\"You'd look like a wacko old man. And I'm not ready for you to look like a wacko old man.\"\n\n \u2014 Jessica on why I can't wear Birkenstocks and socks to Demo Day\n\n(I told her it's now fashionable to do this, which might be true, but she seemed skeptical.)\n\nI talked to a startup today that had been forced to take so much from investors and whose expenses were so low that they could put the money in bonds and fund their operations off the interest. I told them they should.\n\nI met with a startup in the current batch who seemed demoralized because fundraising was going badly. Later I learned they'd already raised a million dollars. Fundraising going badly is not what it used to be.\n\nDon't fear competitors who've raised a lot, unless you can say precisely how all that extra money is going to make them beat you. E.g. if ads are the only way to acquire users, and they can buy all the ads, you're in trouble. But money per se is not dangerous.\n\nNotice there's another side to this coin. If you're fundraising yourself, money per se is not dangerous translates to: money per se is not useful. Unless you can say precisely how all that extra money is going to help you beat competitors, don't raise it.\n\nA question that Google AI is never likely to answer well: \n\n\"What are the lowest quality products that buy a lot of search ads on Google? Name specific brands.\""}
{"text": "Two important principles that have a lot in common:\n\nIf you make users love you, investors will love you too.\n\nIf the people lead, the leaders will follow.\n\n@whstancil She was hurting Stephen Miller I suppose.\n\n@travelingclatt What have you invented?\n\n@FirstSquawk The uppercase and lack of source makes this sound like some kind of breaking news, but you're quoting a Verge article published 12 days ago.\n\nAre they really this clueless about how rocket development works, or do they hate SpaceX because of Elon? As so often happens, it's hard to distinguish incompetence from politics. https://t.co/aiJy0IvYXs\n\n@amasad GMail is no worse at filtering spam than it was a few years ago. Possibly better.\n\n@ThisIsFrag Obviously I mean it will be different specifically with respect to cancer vaccines and therapies.\n\n@threepercent519 YC has been funding biotech cos for over 10 years.\n\nhttps://t.co/y5tf6LOU3r\n\n@joeykatzen It has been for a long time.\n\nhttps://t.co/y5tf6LOU3r\n\nRussell's History of Western Philosophy reads like it was written for himself, which on the whole is a good thing."}
{"text": "@mattwridley Me too. To be honest all I remember seeing on the TV was static though.\n\nIncidentally, I didn't support Trump then and I don't now. But it was obviously a terrible idea to start firing people because they supported the wrong presidential candidate.\n\nStories like this show how far to the left the pendulum had swung in 2016. Now if you were asked to fire someone because they supported the Republican rather than the Democratic candidate, you'd simply refuse. But back then there were news stories about it.\n\nRemember in 2016 when a huge mob tried to pressure Y Combinator into firing Peter Thiel as a part-time partner because he supported Trump rather than Clinton? Seems unimaginable now, and yet at the time we felt very much in the minority in refusing.\n\n@acambridgediary That looks like a painting. But *what* makes it look like a painting?\n\n@peterboghossian Not really. The sort of people who run them now (not the people who started them, but the people who run them now) are among the least resistant to capture.\n\n@Jac5Connor Any candidate who's as charismatic can win. Trump is old too, remember. Not as visibly old as Biden, but a younger candidate could make him look bad.\n\n@hutchike Apparently you haven't been following the news, but the winner of the primary election is about to drop out of the race.\n\nIn 12 of the last 13 presidential elections, the more charismatic candidate has won. So that's what we should be asking about potential Democratic nominees: how charismatic are they? Are we nominating Bill Clinton, or Hillary?\n\nhttps://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8\n\nThe Democratic convention needs to be open enough for a people's choice to emerge. Otherwise we'll get a candidate who'll lose in the general election, and leave a nasty feeling in voters' minds that the process was rigged."}
{"text": "How to Work Hard\nJune 2021\nIt might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard.\nAnyone who's been to school knows what it entails, even if they\nchose not to do it. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And\nyet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I\nwas in school, the answer is definitely yes.\nOne thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll\nhave to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork\nvaried in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to\ndo well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to\ndo almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard\nwork through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question.\nThere isn't.\nThe reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low\nstandards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things\neffortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy.\nOf course, those famous adults usually had a lot of natural ability\ntoo. There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability,\npractice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to\ndo the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability\nand\nto have practiced a lot\nand\nto be trying very hard.\n[\n1\n]\nBill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business\nin his era, but he was also among the hardest working. \"I never\ntook a day off in my twenties,\" he said. \"Not one.\" It was similar\nwith Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth\ncoaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but\nhis dedication and his desire to win. P. G. Wodehouse would probably\nget my vote for best English writer of the 20th century, if I had\nto choose. Certainly no one ever made it look easier. But no one\never worked harder. At 74, he wrote\nwith each new book of mine I have, as I say, the feeling that\n  this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature. A\n  good thing, really, I suppose. Keeps one up on one's toes and\n  makes one rewrite every sentence ten times. Or in many cases\n  twenty times.\nSounds a bit extreme, you think. And yet Bill Gates sounds even\nmore extreme. Not one day off in ten years?  These two had about\nas much natural ability as anyone could have, and yet they also\nworked about as hard as anyone could work. You need both.\nThat seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard\nto grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes\npartly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and\npartly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent\nand great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare\nsquared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less\nof the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier\nyourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent\nyou have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces\nto working very hard.\nIt's straightforward to work hard if you have clearly defined,\nexternally imposed goals, as you do in school. There is some technique\nto it: you have to learn not to lie to yourself, not to procrastinate\n(which is a form of lying to yourself), not to get distracted, and\nnot to give up when things go wrong. But this level of discipline\nseems to be within the reach of quite young children, if they want\nit.\nWhat I've learned since I was a kid is how to work toward goals\nthat are neither clearly defined nor externally imposed. You'll\nprobably have to learn both if you want to do really great things.\nThe most basic level of which is simply to feel you should be working\nwithout anyone telling you to. Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm\nbells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working\nhard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it\nfeels awful.\n[\n2\n]\nThere wasn't a single point when I learned this. Like most little\nkids, I enjoyed the feeling of achievement when I learned or did\nsomething new. As I grew older, this morphed into a feeling of\ndisgust when I wasn't achieving anything. The one precisely dateable\nlandmark I have is when I stopped watching TV, at age\u00a013.\nSeveral people I've talked to remember getting serious about work\naround this age. When I asked Patrick Collison when he started to\nfind idleness distasteful, he said\nI think around age 13 or 14. I have a clear memory from around\n  then of sitting in the sitting room, staring outside, and wondering\n  why I was wasting my summer holiday.\nPerhaps something changes at adolescence. That would make sense.\nStrangely enough, the biggest obstacle to getting serious about\nwork was probably school, which made work (what they called work)\nseem boring and pointless. I had to learn what real work was before\nI could wholeheartedly desire to do it. That took a while, because\neven in college a lot of the work is pointless; there are entire\ndepartments that are pointless. But as I learned the shape of real\nwork, I found that my desire to do it slotted into it as if they'd\nbeen made for each other.\nI suspect most people have to learn what work is before they can\nlove it. Hardy wrote eloquently about this in\nA Mathematician's\nApology\n:\nI do not remember having felt, as a boy, any\npassion\nfor\n  mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of\n  a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in\n  terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other\n  boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most\n  decisively.\nHe didn't learn what math was really about till part way through\ncollege, when he read Jordan's\nCours d'analyse\n.\nI shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that\n  remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians\n  of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what\n  mathematics really meant.\nThere are two separate kinds of fakeness you need to learn to\ndiscount in order to understand what real work is. One is the kind\nHardy encountered in school. Subjects get distorted when they're\nadapted to be taught to kids \u2014 often so distorted that they're\nnothing like the work done by actual practitioners.\n[\n3\n]\nThe other\nkind of fakeness is intrinsic to certain types of work. Some types\nof work are inherently bogus, or at best mere busywork.\nThere's a kind of solidity to real work. It's not all writing the\nPrincipia\n, but it all feels necessary. That's a vague criterion,\nbut it's deliberately vague, because it has to cover a lot of\ndifferent types.\n[\n4\n]\nOnce you know the shape of real work, you have to learn how many\nhours a day to spend on it. You can't solve this problem by simply\nworking every waking hour, because in many kinds of work there's a\npoint beyond which the quality of the result will start to decline.\nThat limit varies depending on the type of work and the person.\nI've done several different kinds of work, and the limits were\ndifferent for each. My limit for the harder types of writing or\nprogramming is about five hours a day. Whereas when I was running\na startup, I could\nwork all the time. At least for the three years I did it; if I'd\nkept going much longer, I'd probably have needed to take occasional\nvacations.\n[\n5\n]\nThe only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a\nsensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll\nnotice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is\ncritical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're\nbeing lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think\nthere's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea\nout of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but\ngetting them because you're showing off \u2014 if not to other people,\nthen to yourself.\n[\n6\n]\nFinding the limit of working hard is a constant, ongoing process,\nnot something you do just once. Both the difficulty of the work and\nyour ability to do it can vary hour to hour, so you need to be\nconstantly judging both how hard you're trying and how well you're\ndoing.\nTrying hard doesn't mean constantly pushing yourself to work, though.\nThere may be some people who do, but I think my experience is fairly\ntypical, and I only have to push myself occasionally when I'm\nstarting a project or when I encounter some sort of check. That's\nwhen I'm in danger of procrastinating. But once I get rolling, I\ntend to keep going.\nWhat keeps me going depends on the type of work. When I was working\non Viaweb, I was driven by fear of failure. I barely procrastinated\nat all then, because there was always something that needed doing,\nand if I could put more distance between me and the pursuing beast\nby doing it, why wait?\n[\n7\n]\nWhereas what drives me now, writing\nessays, is the flaws in them. Between essays I fuss for a few days,\nlike a dog circling while it decides exactly where to lie down. But\nonce I get started on one, I don't have to push myself to work,\nbecause there's always some error or omission already pushing me.\nI do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many\nproblems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff\nat the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the\nextent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll\nonly be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should\nalways be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling.\nThe bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these\nproblems with a hard core. There are important problems at the\ncenter, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at\nthe edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in\nworking on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make\nbig, lifetime-scale adjustments about which type of work to do.\nAnd the rule is the same: working hard means aiming toward the\ncenter \u2014 toward the most ambitious problems.\nBy center, though, I mean the actual center, not merely the current\nconsensus about the center. The consensus about which problems are\nmost important is often mistaken, both in general and within specific\nfields. If you disagree with it, and you're right, that could\nrepresent a valuable opportunity to do something new.\nThe more ambitious types of work will usually be harder, but although\nyou should not be in denial about this, neither should you treat\ndifficulty as an infallible guide in deciding what to do. If you\ndiscover some ambitious type of work that's a bargain in the sense\nof being easier for you than other people, either because of the\nabilities you happen to have, or because of some new way you've\nfound to approach it, or simply because you're more excited about\nit, by all means work on that. Some of the best work is done by\npeople who find an easy way to do something hard.\nAs well as learning the shape of real work, you need to figure out\nwhich kind you're suited for. And that doesn't just mean figuring\nout which kind your natural abilities match the best; it doesn't\nmean that if you're 7 feet tall, you have to play basketball. What\nyou're suited for depends not just on your talents but perhaps even\nmore on your interests. A\ndeep interest\nin a topic makes people\nwork harder than any amount of discipline can.\nIt can be harder to discover your interests than your talents.\nThere are fewer types of talent than interest, and they start to\nbe judged early in childhood, whereas interest in a topic is a\nsubtle thing that may not mature till your twenties, or even later.\nThe topic may not even exist earlier. Plus there are some powerful\nsources of error you need to learn to discount. Are you really\ninterested in x, or do you want to work on it because you'll make\na lot of money, or because other people will be impressed with you,\nor because your parents want you to?\n[\n8\n]\nThe difficulty of figuring out what to work on varies enormously\nfrom one person to another. That's one of the most important things\nI've learned about work since I was a kid. As a kid, you get the\nimpression that everyone has a calling, and all they have to do is\nfigure out what it is. That's how it works in movies, and in the\nstreamlined biographies fed to kids. Sometimes it works that way\nin real life. Some people figure out what to do as children and\njust do it, like Mozart. But others, like Newton, turn restlessly\nfrom one kind of work to another. Maybe in retrospect we can identify\none as their calling \u2014 we can wish Newton spent more time on math\nand physics and less on alchemy and theology \u2014 but this is an\nillusion\ninduced by hindsight bias. \nThere was no voice calling to him that he could have heard.\nSo while some people's lives converge fast, there will be others\nwhose lives never converge. And for these people, figuring out what\nto work on is not so much a prelude to working hard as an ongoing\npart of it, like one of a set of simultaneous equations. For these\npeople, the process I described earlier has a third component: along\nwith measuring both how hard you're working and how well you're\ndoing, you have to think about whether you should keep working in\nthis field or switch to another. If you're working hard but not\ngetting good enough results, you should switch. It sounds simple\nexpressed that way, but in practice it's very difficult. You shouldn't\ngive up on the first day just because you work hard and don't get\nanywhere. You need to give yourself time to get going. But how much\ntime? And what should you do if work that was going well stops going\nwell? How much time do you give yourself then?\n[\n9\n]\nWhat even counts as good results? That can be really hard to decide.\nIf you're exploring an area few others have worked in, you may not\neven know what good results look like. History is full of examples\nof people who misjudged the importance of what they were working\non.\nThe best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is\nwhether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously\nsubjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're\ngoing to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better\nposition than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a\nbetter predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?\nFor this test to work, though, you have to be honest with yourself.\nIndeed, that's the most striking thing about the whole question of\nworking hard: how at each point it depends on being honest with\nyourself.\nWorking hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated,\ndynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You\nhave to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind\nyou're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you\ncan, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of\nand how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can\nwithout harming the quality of the result. This network is too\ncomplicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and\nclear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and\nyou'll be productive in a way few people are.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nIn \"The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius\" I said the three ingredients\nin great work were natural ability, determination, and interest.\nThat's the formula in the preceding stage; determination and interest\nyield practice and effort.\n[\n2\n]\nI mean this at a resolution of days, not hours. You'll often\nget somewhere while not working in the sense that the solution to\na problem comes to you while taking a\nshower\n, or even in your sleep,\nbut only because you were working hard on it the day before.\nIt's good to go on vacation occasionally, but when I go on vacation,\nI like to learn new things. I wouldn't like just sitting on a beach.\n[\n3\n]\nThe thing kids do in school that's most like the real version\nis sports. Admittedly because many sports originated as games played\nin schools. But in this one area, at least, kids are doing exactly\nwhat adults do.\nIn the average American high school, you have a choice of pretending\nto do something serious, or seriously doing something pretend.\nArguably the latter is no worse.\n[\n4\n]\nKnowing what you want to work on doesn't mean you'll be able\nto. Most people have to spend a lot of their time working on things\nthey don't want to, especially early on. But if you know what you\nwant to do, you at least know what direction to nudge your life in.\n[\n5\n]\nThe lower time limits for intense work suggest a solution to\nthe problem of having less time to work after you have kids: switch\nto harder problems. In effect I did that, though not deliberately.\n[\n6\n]\nSome cultures have a tradition of performative hard work. I\ndon't love this idea, because (a) it makes a parody of something\nimportant and (b) it causes people to wear themselves out doing\nthings that don't matter. I don't know enough to say for sure whether\nit's net good or bad, but my guess is bad.\n[\n7\n]\nOne of the reasons people work so hard on startups is that\nstartups can fail, and when they do, that failure tends to be both\ndecisive and conspicuous.\n[\n8\n]\nIt's ok to work on something to make a lot of money. You need\nto solve the money problem somehow, and there's nothing wrong with\ndoing that efficiently by trying to make a lot at once. I suppose\nit would even be ok to be interested in money for its own sake;\nwhatever floats your boat. Just so long as you're conscious of your\nmotivations. The thing to avoid is\nunconsciously\nletting the need\nfor money warp your ideas about what kind of work you find most\ninteresting.\n[\n9\n]\nMany people face this question on a smaller scale with\nindividual projects. But it's easier both to recognize and to accept\na dead end in a single project than to abandon some type of work\nentirely. The more determined you are, the harder it gets. Like a\nSpanish Flu victim, you're fighting your own immune system: Instead\nof giving up, you tell yourself, I should just try harder. And who\ncan say you're not right?\nThanks\nto Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, John Collison, Patrick Collison,\nRobert Morris, Geoff Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.\nArabic Translation"}
{"text": "Ramen Profitable\nWant to start a startup?\nGet funded by\nY Combinator\n.\nJuly 2009\nNow that the term \"ramen profitable\" has become widespread, I ought\nto explain precisely what the idea entails.\nRamen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the\nfounders' living expenses.  This is a different form of profitability\nthan startups have traditionally aimed for.  Traditional profitability\nmeans a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance\nof ramen profitability is that it buys you time.\n[\n1\n]\nIn the past, a startup would usually become profitable only\nafter raising and spending quite a lot of money.  A company making\ncomputer hardware might not become profitable for 5 years, during\nwhich they spent $50 million.  But when they did\nthey might have revenues of $50 million a year.   This kind of\nprofitability means the startup has succeeded.\nRamen profitability is the other extreme: a startup that becomes\nprofitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000\na month, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders\nwho can live on practically nothing.  Revenues of $3000 a month do\nnot mean the company has succeeded.\nBut it does share something with the one\nthat's profitable in the traditional way: they don't need to raise\nmoney to survive.\nRamen profitability is an unfamiliar idea to most people because\nit only recently became feasible.  It's still not feasible for a\nlot of startups; it would not be for most biotech startups, for\nexample; but it is for many software startups because they're now\nso cheap.  For many, the only real cost is the founders'\nliving expenses.\nThe main significance of this type of profitability is that you're\nno longer at the mercy of investors.  If you're still losing money,\nthen eventually you'll either have to raise more\nor shut down.  Once you're\nramen profitable this painful choice goes away.\nYou can still raise money, but you don't have to do it now.\n* * *\nThe most obvious advantage of not needing money is that\nyou can get better terms.  If investors know you need money, they'll\nsometimes take advantage of you.  Some may even deliberately\nstall, because they know that as you run out of money you'll become\nincreasingly pliable.\nBut there are also three less obvious advantages of ramen profitability.\nOne is that it makes you more attractive to investors.  If you're\nalready profitable, on however small a scale, it shows that (a) you\ncan get at least someone to pay you, (b) you're serious about\nbuilding things people want, and (c) you're disciplined enough to\nkeep expenses low.\nThis is reassuring to investors, because you've addressed three of\ntheir biggest worries.  It's common for them to fund companies that\nhave smart founders and a big market, and yet still fail.  When\nthese companies fail, it's usually because (a) people wouldn't pay\nfor what they made, e.g. because it was too hard to sell to them,\nor the market wasn't ready yet, (b) the founders solved the wrong\nproblem, instead of paying attention to what users needed, or (c)\nthe company spent too much and burned through their funding before\nthey started to make money.  If you're ramen profitable, you're\nalready avoiding these mistakes.\nAnother advantage of ramen profitability is that it's good for\nmorale.  A company\ntends to feel rather theoretical when you first start it.  It's\nlegally a company, but you feel like you're lying when you call it\none.  When people start to pay you significant amounts, the company\nstarts to feel real.  And your own living expenses are the milestone\nyou feel most, because at that point the future flips state.  Now\nsurvival is the default, instead of dying.\nA morale boost on that scale is very valuable in a startup, because\nthe moral weight of running a startup is what makes it hard.  Startups\nare still very rare.  Why don't more people do it?  The financial\nrisk?  Plenty of 25 year olds save nothing anyway.  The long hours?\nPlenty of people work just as long hours in regular jobs. What keeps\npeople from starting startups is the fear of having so much\nresponsibility.  And this is not an irrational fear: it really is\nhard to bear.  Anything that takes some of that weight off you will \ngreatly increase your chances of surviving.\nA startup that reaches ramen profitability may be more likely\nto succeed than not.  Which is pretty exciting, considering the\nbimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you either fail or\nmake a lot of money.\nThe fourth advantage of ramen profitability is the least obvious\nbut may be the most important.  If you don't need to raise money,\nyou don't have to interrupt working on the company to do it.\nRaising money\nis terribly distracting.  \nYou're lucky if your\nproductivity is a third of what it was before.  And it can last for\nmonths.\nI didn't understand (or rather, remember) precisely why raising\nmoney was so distracting till earlier this year.  I'd noticed that\nstartups we funded would usually grind to a halt when they switched\nto raising money, but I didn't remember exactly why till YC raised\nmoney itself.  We had a comparatively easy time of it; the first\npeople I asked said yes; but it took months to work out the\ndetails, and during that time I got hardly any real work done.  Why?\nBecause I thought about it all the time.\nAt any given time there tends to be one problem that's the most\nurgent for a startup.  This is what you think about as you fall\nasleep at night and when you take a shower in the morning.  And\nwhen you start raising money, that becomes the problem you think\nabout.  You only take one shower in the morning, and if you're\nthinking about investors during it, then you're not thinking about\nthe product.\nWhereas if you can choose when you raise money, you can pick a time\nwhen you're not in the middle of something else, and you can probably\nalso insist that the round close fast.  You may even be able to\navoid having the round occupy your thoughts, if you don't care\nwhether it closes.\n* * *\nRamen profitable means no more than the definition implies.  It\ndoes not, for example, imply that you're \"bootstrapping\" the\nstartup\u2014that you're never going to take money from investors.\nEmpirically that doesn't seem to work very well.  Few startups\nsucceed without taking investment.  Maybe as startups get cheaper\nit will become more common.  On the other hand, the money is there,\nwaiting to be invested.  If startups need it less, they'll be able\nto get it on better terms, which will make them more inclined to\ntake it.  That will tend to produce an equilibrium.\n[\n2\n]\nAnother thing ramen profitability doesn't imply is Joe Kraus's idea\nthat you should put your\nbusiness model\nin beta when you put your\nproduct in beta.  He believes you should get\npeople to pay you from the beginning.  I think that's too constraining.\nFacebook didn't, and they've done better than most startups.  Making\nmoney right away was not only unnecessary for them, but probably\nwould have been harmful.  I do think Joe's rule could be useful for\nmany startups, though.  When founders seem unfocused, I sometimes\nsuggest they try to get customers to pay them for something, in the\nhope that this constraint will prod them into action.\nThe difference between Joe's idea and ramen profitability is that\na ramen profitable company doesn't have to be making money the way\nit ultimately will.  It just has to be making money.  The most\nfamous example is Google, which initially made money by licensing\nsearch to sites like Yahoo.\nIs there a downside to ramen profitability?  Probably the biggest\ndanger is that it might turn you into a consulting firm.  Startups\nhave to be product companies, in the sense of making a single thing\nthat everyone uses.  The defining quality of startups is that they\ngrow fast, and consulting just can't scale the way a product can.\n[\n3\n]\nBut it's pretty easy to make $3000 a month consulting; in\nfact, that would be a low rate for contract programming.  So there\ncould be a temptation to slide into consulting, and telling\nyourselves you're a ramen profitable startup, when in fact\nyou're not a startup at all.\nIt's ok to do a little consulting-type work at first.  Startups\nusually have to do something weird at first.  But remember\nthat ramen profitability is not the destination.  A startup's\ndestination is to grow really big; ramen profitability is a trick\nfor\nnot dying\nen route.\nNotes\n[\n1\n]\nThe \"ramen\" in \"ramen profitable\" refers to instant ramen,\nwhich is just about the cheapest food available.\nPlease do not take the term literally.  Living on instant ramen\nwould be very unhealthy.  Rice and beans are a better source of\nfood.  Start by investing in a rice cooker, if you don't have one.\nRice and Beans for 2n\nolive oil or butter\n  n yellow onions\n  other fresh vegetables; experiment\n  3n cloves garlic\n  n 12-oz cans white, kidney, or black beans\n  n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon\n  n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper\n  3n teaspoons ground cumin\n  n cups dry rice, preferably brown\nPut rice in rice cooker. Add water as specified on rice package.\n(Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice.) Turn on rice cooker and\nforget about it.\nChop onions and other vegetables and fry in oil, over fairly low\nheat, till onions are glassy. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin,\nand a little more fat, and stir.  Keep heat low. Cook another 2 or\n3 minutes, then add beans (don't drain the beans), and stir. Throw\nin the bouillon cube(s), cover, and cook on lowish heat for at least\n10 minutes more. Stir vigilantly to avoid sticking.\nIf you want to save money, buy beans in giant cans from discount\nstores.  Spices are also much cheaper when bought in bulk.\nIf there's an Indian grocery store near you, they'll have big \nbags of cumin for the same price as the little jars in supermarkets.\n[\n2\n]\nThere's a good chance that a shift in power from investors\nto founders would actually increase the size of the venture business.\nI think investors currently err too far on the side of being harsh\nto founders.  If they were forced to stop, the whole venture business\nwould work better, and you might see something like the increase\nin trade you always see when restrictive laws are removed.\nInvestors\nare one of the biggest sources of pain for founders; if they stopped\ncausing so much pain, it would be better to be a founder; and if\nit were better to be a founder, more people would do it.\n[\n3\n]\nIt's conceivable that a startup could grow big by transforming\nconsulting into a form that would scale.  But if they did that\nthey'd really be a product company.\nThanks\nto Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.\nJapanese Translation"}
{"text": "@gfodor You must be completely clueless if you think I only started fighting wokeness in 2022. Pmarca and I were the default targets of the original Silicon Valley woke mobs back in 2012/13.\n\n@gfodor You won't find anyone's early tweets if you search for \"wokeness\" because the pejorative sense wasn't common til 2020/21. In 2019 I had to call it \"PC 2.0\" for lack of a better name.\n\nhttps://t.co/0G6FLrjWtP\n\n@Alec_Mazo No, I still feel the same about Trump. That's why I want Elon to take over as much of his brain as possible.\n\n@cfreud @GrowSF The return on that million for the city will be stupendous.\n\n@lisperati For a long time I thought Hercules and Heracles were two different people.\n\n@anammostarac I have a pair of silver sixpences minted during his tenure in my pocket right now. They make a pleasing talisman.\n\n@adityaagashe Ooh, that is bad...\n\n@jasonaholloway Very likely, but the appointments that get made now will persist.\n\nSome journalists seem alarmed that Elon has so much influence over Trump, but this is actually good news. Someone would have Trump's ear if Elon didn't, and it would surely be someone less smart and more politically extreme. Remember Steve Bannon?\n\n@Chris_arnade There's a tanuki too. That's why Tom Nook is called that."}