paul-graham on S Anand

Things I Learned - 07 Apr 2024

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

CSS nesting is now available in browsers
Cold starts in AWS Lambda: serverless functions stay alive for 5-7 min. All languages are fast but Docker is slow. More npm packages slow start dramatically.
WiFi only works when it’s raining because a tree was obstructing the signal but was weighed down when raining!
Good reasons why finding a technical co-founder won’t work.
- You want a unicorn to passionately trust YOUR idea after 2 meetings.
- Why should THEY risk money for YOUR idea? You’re the money guy. RAISE the money for YOUR idea!
- How passionate are you about software? And you want to build one now?
This is a subtle vulnerability. ChatGPT hallucinated pip install huggingface-cli. Sosomeone created the package and got 30,000 downloads!
Video-Llava is a video LLM
MusicCNN-embeddings provides embeddings for music genre classification
How I write podcast. Paul Graham essays
- Write simply. It helps communicate. (Don’t concise if communication worsens.). It forces you to make the idea better
- Do lame stuff. Else you won’t start. Low standards drive creativity
- The more to delete, the better your writing. Read your piece. Highlight what feels poor. Fix it. Ask friends to highlight what’s BORING? UNCONVINCING? Delete the first, brainstorm the second. Or ask, what’s the 10% to cut and 10% to keep.
- Write about stuff you don’t know above the. Writing GENERATES ideas
- Write about what’s BUS. GENERAL and SURPRISING. (Laughter is a sign of comprehension.) Do HARD things to cultivate taste.
- Spend more time with people who generate ideas in you. Ravi chithappa. Ram. Ankor. Ganes. Books!
- Build taste. I have a taste for picking technologies. Data visualization. Retrospect. Write down what you like and dislike. Copy what you REALLY like. Guilty pleasures.
- A benefit of lower standards is that it let’s you pick the path less travelled.
- ITERATE. Discuss ideas. Iterate. Acknowledge. ITERATE.

Scribd

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Scribd is a document sharing site. Sort of like a YouTube for documents. In other words, a book-lover’s paradise.

Comments

Dhar 7 Mar 2007 3:52 am: Anand, I found “The God Delusion” on Scribd. What were the interesting titles you found?
S Anand 7 Mar 2007 7:01 am: On Lisp by Paul Graham, Excel Time-Saving Techniques for Dummies and Patterns of Software.
prakash ayer 25 Mar 2007 11:54 am: Thanks Anand. Pretty good site.

Wisdom and Intelligence

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Paul Graham pens another brilliant essay on Is it worth being wise? It’s mostly about the difference between being wise (right most of the time) versus being smart (being right where few others are). If you’re picking between options, being wise is useful. There is a best option, and you’ll pick it most of the time. If you’re doing something creative, there’s no finite set of options. Then it’s worth being smart. Increasingly, tasks are asking for more creativity, so it may be better to be smart.

Great essays

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Great essays by

Dan Norman on design
Paul Graham on life and programming
Edward Tufte on visualisation

How to pick a course

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

In his article on The Power of the Marginal, Paul Graham suggests (among other things) a way of picking courses at college.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you’re probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who’s good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn’t. You often hear people say that you shouldn’t major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don’t learn things from teachers who are bad at them.

Hardest lessons for startups

Mon, 01 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Paul Graham on The hardest lessons for startups to learn.

So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups? I’ll tell you why. Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it drag on through your whole life.

Paul Graham on What Drives Bloggers

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

What Drives Bloggers?

I think what most bloggers are doing is thinking out loud.

It’s a little misleading to talk of “putting things into words,” because that implies the ideas come first. In fact, expressing thoughts creates them. And especially expressing thoughts to other people, even people you don’t know. So I think the reason many people like blogging is that they like the thinking it causes.

Being copied

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

It’s worth starting a startup based on an idea even if it is easy to copy.

First of all, it will take competitors a long time to realize that your idea is even a good thing to do.

Even when competitors realize your idea is good, (a) it will take them a long time to implement and (b) they’ll probably screw up critical things.

And finally, working on your ideas will lead you on to new ideas. So you’ll be a moving target; by the time competitors copy what you’re doing now, you’ll be doing more.

How to do what you love

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Excellent article by Paul Graham on How to do what you love.

[the] new definition of work [is] to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.

I think the best test is to try to do things that would make your friends say wow.

If you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they’d do it even if they weren’t paid for it

Comments

Arun 19 Jan 2006 4:22 am: Nice article. My takeway was this: Another test you can use is: always produce.

Paul Graham on procrastination

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Good and bad procrastination by Paul Graham.

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn’t always bad?

Picking a computer language

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Paul Graham on picking a computer language. Excellent read.

Great Hackers

Thu, 29 Jul 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Excellent article by Paul Graham on great hackers.