Paul Graham

> http://www.paulgraham.com/, which contains a link to his Mastodon profile It doesn't even contain a link. It contains the mastodon handle (username and instance), but you can't click on it because it's not a link; you can paste it on the search bar of your own instance to follow him (and see some of his posts, if someone on the same instance has already followed him).

those are all really great resources. i’d also mention pg’s personal site (http://paulgraham.com) as well. it’s not really a blog, but his essay’s provide a level of depth that’s often lacking from many of the more active blogs and steve blank’s site (mentioned above) also has an incredibly long and comprehensive list of resources for new entrepreneurs including many other blogs worth checking-out as well i’ll also throw out one more, "Bloomberg Businessweek: The New Entrepreneur" (http://www.businessweek.com/blogs/the-new-entrepreneur) it’s (obviously, given the name) a news blog, but i find they cover a lot of interesting topics less frequently touched-on by the major business/tech sites out there

For me Paul Graham's essay are real worth inspiration and teachings. I just follow his essay more than any other readings. I prefer to explore you his essays, can give you a nice insight. http://www.purchase.com/blog/fundraising/3-tips-for-startup-founders this is here his essays you can find. http://paulgraham.com/

This might be a matter best resolved in private with the administrator. Details for contacting him directly can be found on his website: http://www.paulgraham.com/

>Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach. The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium. It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like "reachable ip address or DNS resolution". Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter tweets acting as global "billboards". E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was referencing a Twitter post.) Another example related to HN... the creator of this site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010 (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him exposure that his existing email address (and his web blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site ycombinator.com) -- does not.

Anyone can tell people to do what makes them happy or leave their dissatisfying job. These exhortations have become platitudes. If you want to help people find fulfillment, you need to move beyond the low hanging fruit of personal development advice. You need to do work. You need to talk to people and find out why they stay in their jobs. Then you need to address those concerns. The exhortation to "do what makes you happy" has been around for a long time, yet there are still people in dissatisfying jobs. Is offering another formulation of the same message going to make a difference? If your audience doesn't respond to your message, you work on your message, you don't just repeat it with subtle variations. If you want to see someone who is doing work in this field and saying something new, read http://www.unicornfree.com/ or http://www.paulgraham.com/. There is simply no comparison between the kind of practical, "actionable" advice Amy Hoy and Paul Graham are offering and the platitudes presented in this post. Specifically, read http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html which almost exactly echoes what I just said (despite reading it only after making this post): "We've got it down to four words: 'Do what you love.' But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated."

If you're interested in this topic, I love pg's Why Nerds are Unpopular. It was the first place where I started to realize things like being popular, being happy and others require their own sort of intelligence and effort. https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html > When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using AI as a grammar checker and as a help for finding formulations. But I would very much recommend to you to only use it as an aid and to actually write yourself. You can put every iteration through an LLM to flag errors and unclarities. That way you even learn something and the writing is still you thoughts in the end. Recommended reading: https://paulgraham.com/writes.html Writing is thinking. In the end you do you, but personally I generally only bother to read things that someone else bothered to write; and so far that has heen an extremely good heuristic to distinguish what might be worth reading.

The only way I ever learned anything or built anything of value (one of those things still accounts for most of my revenue, 10-15 years later) was by blowing off doing what I was supposed to be doing at that moment, in the classic sense described by PG here: https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html (Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.) Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.

A counter point to Paul Graham’s How to Earn a Billion Dollars speech at the Oxford Union. https://paulgraham.com/earn.html I agree more with Graham, but it is worth a debate as so much power is tied up with People like Elon Musk.

I don't agree with Paul Graham on everything but he nailed this argument: https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html > If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. Of course one can't have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.

>> A true, but vapid speech. PG got into an argument with AOC about it on Twitter. It sounded like he was personally offended by what she was saying. Which makes sense because, as someone who has helped startup founders become famously wealthy, he probably took her statement as an attack on his identity. Perhaps PG should follow his own advice, though: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

Again, if you disagree with Penrose’s idea, just explain your disagreement. It’s so ironic how you’ll call it bullshit and link to some pop culture skeptic idea with no scientific backing to try and undermine an idea in defense of “real science” > Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. https://paulgraham.com/say.html

This is a classic debate in programming, literally: 2001: "Beating the Averages" (Paul Graham) [1] 2006: "Can Your Programming Language Do This?" (Joel Spolsky) [2] Both of these articles argue for the thesis that programmers that have been deprived of certain language features often argue that they don't need those features since they are already comfortable working around the lack of said features. It's a fancy way of arguing: you don't know what you're missing because you've never had it. Or, don't knock it until you try it. Consider, is your argument a) I've never used it and don't see a need for it, or b) I've used it before and didn't get any benefit? 1. https://paulgraham.com/avg.html?viewfullsite=1 2. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/01/can-your-programming-languag…

On the hierarchy of disagreement, attacking the character of either side is the lowest form of intelligent commentary you can make: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html > Do you not think horrible behaviors should be highlighted/called out/brought up? Or just that US leadership Epstein connections should be? If non-sequiturs are your best argument, then yes, you you have nothing to contribute by participating in good-faith speculation. Iranian child marriages do not reframe the "Tail that Wags the Dog" scenario in Washington. It's textbook whataboutism that you failed to elevate into meaningful commentary, making you look suspiciously disengaged.

I'd say a code artist, more commonly called a hacker. https://paulgraham.com/hp.html To be clear for the past five years I've done nothing but write OSS code (https://github.com/conartist6) while sharing pretty much all my engineering thoughts on a public Discord server (https://discord.gg/NfMNyYN6cX), so I'm not very worried at all that a person determined to find out would be unable to tell if I'm legit. You just can't fake 20,000 hours worth of public toil.

My favorite is "Do things that don't scale" (https://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html), which has been really inspiring for my indie product work. Especially for those of us building internet products, we often tend to build scalable things right from the start, but in reality, products in the early stages require founders to do a lot of non-automated dirty work. For entrepreneurs, reading Paul Graham's articles is incredibly useful. (Sent via haiker.app — My handmade Hacker News app)

A classic but I think relevant pg essay - https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html The closest I attained to flow state vibe coding involved building UIs with claude 4.6 fast mode low thinking, a local TTS model (nvidia's), and hot reloading browser. Arguably maybe I could have done better on higher thinking and then done more in parallel but it is more tiring.

Reminds me of PG's classic essay, "Taste for Makers" (2002): https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

> Being offended on behalf of software is weird. Yes. I can really recommend this essay of PG about that: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html

https://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html I would love to dunk on this or something, but the lesson is that it's all about distribution. Sama is really good at that, and also.. gotta give props for a lot of forward thinking like the orb, which now makes a lot of sense to me, as a non-Apple/Google proof of human.

Agreed! I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays. I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book. More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl. https://paulgraham.com/power.html

The act of writing something like this can be a way of helping yourself do it. I'm not sure that's his intent, or not, but I like the idea of writing at an intermediate stage. Should he wait until his behavior is perfect before sharing his experience? If so it might never get written. There is a generosity in talking about your own flaws, it can help people who are working through their own flaws as well. Paul Graham is among those who have written about how putting thoughts into words tends to change those thoughts: "You can know a great deal about something without writing about it. Can you ever know so much that you wouldn't learn more from trying to explain what you know? I don't think so." https://paulgraham.com/words.html

Given sufficient historical context, this should not be surprising; Paul Graham's influence on Hacker News is foundational, as he created the platform to foster an intellectual community, personally shaping its culture, design, and moderation policies. For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html "I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."

> We have a sense of what we would most love to do but we immediately push it aside. Why? Typically because “it is not realistic” which is code for, “I can’t make money doing this.” Reminds me of PG's "How To Do What You Love"[1] [1] https://paulgraham.com/love.html

Sort of true, but I often hear this take from Java programmers and it feels like "Blub" [1]/Stockholm syndrome to me. Personally, I'm extremely glad to not have had to write .toStream().map(...).collect(Collectors.list()) or whatever in years for what could be a map. Similar with async code and exception handling. For me one of the main advantages of Kotlin is that is decreases verbosity so much that the interesting business logic is actually much easier to follow. Even if you disregard all the things it has Java doesn't the syntax is just so much better. [1] https://paulgraham.com/avg.html

This is a philosophy. One which many people that write Ruby subscribe to. The fundamental idea is: create a DSL that makes it very easy to implement your application. It is what made Rails different when it was created: it is a DSL that makes expressing web applications easy. I don't know its history well enough, but it seems to originate from Lisp. PG wrote about it before [1]. It can result in code that is extremely easy to read and reason about. It can also be incredibly messy. I have seen lots of examples of both over the years. It is the polar opposite of Go's philosophy (be explicit & favour predictability across all codebases over expressiveness). [1]: https://paulgraham.com/progbot.html

https://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!" Это к вопросу о эпицикле Оракла-Нвидии.

Not to be that guy but PG has a great one on this: https://paulgraham.com/love.html And here's another great one about how ease, and not grind, arguably led to some of the biggest discoveries ever, like General Relativity: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/on-thinkers-and-doers I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact reasons discussed in the link. It's just a grind pit here. And its harder to swallow this pill when you realize that university campuses are one of the few remaining venues well suited for exploring new ideas and having intellectual serendipity. When you're in a job, you can't easily just find a biology expert or economics expert and chat with them. When students are assaulted with work, they lose the ability to take advantage of that unique quality of the university environment.