Patrick Collison

Of course I get your point, my all time best design website is Craigslist, so I'm on the same boat. Would love to see internet as plain html with minimum styles. :) Other great example is: https://patrickcollison.com -- Yet, world is full of designers and developers who want to achieve something more than plain website. For ordinary Joe it doesn't matter at all if Craigslist is ugly or Facebook, they just use it. But creators want to think users admire good design and user experience. :)

These are my two favorite blogs of Q4`19: Pat Collison [1] (Co-founder, CEO Stripe) doesn't blog often, but is one of the most interesting and insightful people I have ever read I don't know much about Alexey Guzey [2] yet, but he also has some very good posts (he writes more often and more long form, and is more similar to Gwern and SSC, in part because I think those two blogs have influenced him heavily) [1] https://patrickcollison.com/ [2] https://guzey.com/

> I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up hurting tech development in Ireland in the long term. I'm not sure there is much tech development to hurt. "The talent pool here is much smaller than that of Silicon Valley. The single most important aspect of Silicon Valley is that it’s where many great people choose to live. Stripe’s employees come from Honduras, Kenya, India, Sweden, Canada, Austria, and more—but they’ve all chosen to live in Silicon Valley. Because Ireland has fewer of these immigrants, Irish start-ups are forced to either hire from a much more limited group, or to try to convince people to move here. (A third option is to have a geographically distributed team from the start; this route is also quite tough.)" source: (scroll down) http://patrickcollison.com/

Patrick Collison, the CEO & co-founder of stripe. His profile mentions his personal website: http://patrickcollison.com.

For inspiration in this direction see Patrick Collison's great list: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other. pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

The 10x developer was never supposed to be "churning out code at breakneck speed" or "leave a trail of destruction in their wake", except for maybe some misguided recruiter/manager/CV-padder. Saying that they are is an easy strawman argument since we all agree no one wants those. When you think 10x developer, you should instead think about devs who built industries, or devs that made such huge impact that them being human has been questioned. Widely known examples might be: John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, Joel Spolsky, etc. For industry-specific ones, in JS-land you could think of TJ Holowaychuk or Sindre Sorhus. And for quantifying it a bit from the "business" side, think that Instagram reached 14M users with 3 Engineers and Whatsapp supported 450M users with 35 engineers. For a more general view, "/fast" is a great read: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

This map makes my optimistic about humankind. Similar to https://patrickcollison.com/fast. Amazing we can achieve such feats, it's inspiring.

Thank you! I'm waiting to write this post (I follow Patrick Collison's advice methodology -- wait 10 years before you can accurately reflect [0]). But here's Marc Andreessen thoughts: > "Seek to be a double/triple/quadruple threat." He talks about the MBA + Undergrad Engineering combo in this blog post. https://fictivekin.github.io/pmarchive-jekyll/guide_to_career_planning… [0] https://patrickcollison.com/advice

Figuring out how America can go fast[0] again. Solving would be great but I would also settle for a theory of mind as to why we haven't been able to for the last 50 years or so. [0] https://patrickcollison.com/fast

This is a great idea. You mention: "We noticed that the people we admired used plain lists on their personal websites" Any way to collect book reccomendations from public sources and preload it? I imagine this maybe some manual work but the utility will be great. For e.g.: Gates - https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2020 Collision : https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf Andreessen - https://www.goodbooks.io/people/marc-andreessen Btw - I just noticed while googling that this may be what GoodBooks.io is attempting

It's a matter of leadership. I'd recommend checking out Patrick Collison's reading list to see what might inform their decision making (and the ethos backing the company): https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

https://patrickcollison.com/fast is a great catalog of similar issues. It is periodically discussed here.

A 2019 OECD paper analyzing European satellite data estimates "that a 1 µg/m³[!] increase in PM2.5 concentration (or a 10% increase at the sample mean) causes a 0.8% reduction in real GDP that same year. Ninety-five per cent of this impact is due to reductions in output per worker, which can occur through greater absenteeism at work or reduced labour productivity." [1] https://patrickcollison.com/pollution

One thing I find amusing is that Stripe's CEO's webpage is a lot closer to Sourcehut in design than Stripe: https://patrickcollison.com/

Tesla has some blame in this for sure but Caltrans (maintainers of the 101) are equally if not more to blame. California is rich in capital but so poor infrastructure. Moving here from South Carolina(where taxes are much lower and roads are paltry) I was shocked at how dismal a state many of the roads are and at the sheer amount of time it takes to complete. Patrick Collison of Stripe actually wrote a blog piece(1) condemning SF for their lack of speed when it comes to road maintenance. There is no end in sight. Until we we a nation hold our governments accountable for road maintenance and proper engineering we will never have any great resolution. (1) https://patrickcollison.com/fast

The quoted article[1] mentions Berlin's Tegel airport being built in just 3 or 4 months. This is an amazing feat! Contrast that with Berlin Brandenburg Airport that started being built in 2006 to replace Tegel and is still under construction and massively behind schedule. [1] https://patrickcollison.com/fast [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport

'pc proclaims that San Francisco is the best city in the world elsewhere on his site. Your critique has a tinge of irony to it. https://patrickcollison.com/advice

Based on that last entry about the SF bus line, I would really love to see https://patrickcollison.com/slow

How Asia works, by Joe studwell. A really good introduction to how certain Asia countries industrialized and why others failed to do so. Something incredibly wonderful happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up by K.C. Cole. I just started this one but it's really fascinating and engrossing. I found it on Patrick Collison's bookshelf which looks like it has a lot of other really great recommendations - https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa: another one that I'm still currently reading. a very sad book but so well written and thought provoking that I only read 5 or 10 pages at a time and then spend any equal amount of time pondering. Unlike anything I've ever read

Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, keeps a cool reading list with tons of books, color coded by the impact they had on him. He's clearly a voracious reader on a wide range of topics. I happened to find it yesterday and found tons of books and authors to add to my Amazon wishlists: https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf If you're interested in games / startup stories, I have to recommend Masters of Doom, about the early days of id. It's thrilling and exciting to read: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture/dp/081… - It's also in the news that USA has ordered a pilot for a TV adaptation. Here's hoping it's good!

I'm a fan of Patrick Collison's blog: https://patrickcollison.com/ And I use my personal site (https://www.mdolon.com/) for sharing projects and writing, the design is based on a free Jekyll theme that I've customized. You're welcome to build on it if you'd like: https://github.com/mdolon/mdolon.github.io/

I'm a fan of naked-feeling 2000s sites. https://patrickcollison.com/ https://tomual.com/ http://halvor.work/

I always found this question pretty impossible to answer. There are so many books that i find myself wanting to recommend, and the list soon becomes unmanageable. So, instead i'm going to provide a different resource - Patrick collisons whole library. He color coats the books he thinks are great, and lists hundreds of books. https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf

Well Patrick Collision, the founder of Stripe has an interest in silicon valley history. He maintains a list of recommended books on this topics on his personal website here- https://patrickcollison.com/svhistory

I agree with this article, however I think it misses the most valuable aspect of speed: compounded returns on experience. Experience isn't 1:1 with time spent. It's easy to spend a lot of time on something but learn very little. Conversely, its possible to gain a large amount of experience in a short period of time. By being able to develop faster, you become able to accumulate more experience in a smaller amount of time. This experience then enables you to develop faster, kicking off a virtuous cycle of growth. Following this thought provides clarity on what action you should take immediately: do anything as long as its something. Through doing something, you will become more experienced and that experience will enable you to do something else even faster. This is why you end up with so many aphorism in the industry promoting rapid action over inaction: - Move fast and break things - Worse is better - Fail fast - Hacker mentality - "Action oriented" See also: https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ and https://patrickcollison.com/fast

To emphasize, I agree with you. I don't think "back in the good ol' days" that things were always benevolent, nor do I believe that today that things are always evil. But I do think it's a mistake to say this is just another step, or going from an "8 to a 9". I think this idea that so much of our technology is actively hostile is a part of the puzzle around why many people feel that our pace of real technological advancement and our ability to build big projects has slowed greatly (Patrick Collison has a great blog piece, https://patrickcollison.com/fast) I feel part of this is a consequence of the fact that we've gotten so good at data analysis, when you look at 2 alternatives and one shows an immediate, clear payoff (but the downsides are long term and not all that clear), while the other shows a riskier, longer term payoff, we (collectively) nearly always go with the short term win. E.g we can see with A/B testing what keeps people the most "engaged", but we just kind of ignore that this "engagement" is with the lowest common denominator of content like rage-inducing tribalism.

Rose-tinted Red Car nostalgia is common in the post Roger Rabbit era. It was a poor private solution to what would later be a big public problem, and you can read a more neutral take on its demise at 99% Invisible [0]. I lived in LA for quite a few years and they opened the expo line through my neighborhood (Culver City) towards the end of my time there. It was transformational. It wasn't the fastest way to get downtown (assuming no traffic), but it meant you could have a drink without worrying about getting home. You could have a nice afternoon walking around without searching for parking. You could see an event at Staples Center and easily get home when it was over. Now the line goes all the way to Santa Monica, bringing more and more people into the fold. I get that it is not as extensive as other systems, and parts of it share passage with cars, but it would have never gotten done as an underground system [1], and it works quite well as a complement to local bus lines. Basically, LA Metro is actually building the infrastructure people imagine Red Car to have been. It takes decades because it is a big project and we are not good at building infrastructure quickly anymore [2], but it is a long-term investment in helping the city grow. [0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-70-the-great-red-car-co… [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Avenue_Subway [2] https://patrickcollison.com/fast

Very insightful article. I find it crazy how few people I know read. Successful people seem to unanimously agree with the article that books are "one of the best ways to engage with the world, become a better person and understand life’s questions, big and small". From Warren Buffett[0] to patio11[1] to Bill Gates[2] to Patrick/John Collison [3][4] it seems incredibly rare to find a successful investor/CEO/founder who _doesn't_ read. Yet for some reason almost no one (especially not my friends in their early 20s!) reads. I'd like to understand why, if anyone has any ideas? I think the obvious argument is social media and shortening attention spans, but it's probably more nuanced than that. [0] Warren Buffett apparently spends 80% of his day reading [1] "This makes buying books a stupidly high ROI, assuming you read and get value out of them." from https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/investing-for-geeks [2] Bill Gates reads a book a week, from http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-favorite-books-2015-10 [3]http://www.johncollison.ie/2013reading.html [4]https://patrickcollison.com/bookshelf By the way, I'm working on a tool that makes it easier to keep track of what you're reading and discover who's read what. I'd love to chat with any active readers on HN and hear about your reading pain points (I'm at [email protected] ).

https://patrickcollison.com/fast has other examples of ambitious projects with short timelines