Taking YC advice is sort of like getting cooking tips from customers coming out of a nice restaurant.
They’ve eaten good food, but they may or may not know anything about starting a business.
Paul Graham hasn’t started a company in several decades now. Just because he has proximity with a lot of people who have, doesn’t mean his advice is still sound.
He was competing with Perl shops, for crying out loud!
The scene has changed. A lot. Seek out lessons from success by yourself, directly. Ask local, search local, find the people successful near you in your industry and just ask them. Many will tell their tale over lunch, and then you’ve received personal, actionable advice for the price of a good meal.
If you like it, you might enjoy a book called Seveneves. The first sentence involves the moon blowing up, and the rest of the book is about the consequences of that. Quite good, imo.
I really enjoyed the first "part" of Seveneves. I felt the second part went a bit off the rails and was almost _too_ out there for me (at least as it compared to the first part. Love Neil Stephenson though (Cryptonomicon was amazing and Diamond Age / Snow Crash hold a special place in my heart).
I’ve heard this sentiment a lot from people who’ve read it.
I think he wrote himself into a tight spot though, and I’m happy with the result. Part of me thinks the second act could’ve been broken down into maybe like 0-1000, 1000-5000, and then the final act could’ve been essentially as it was, stripped down a bit. It felt to me like he crammed a little too much worldbuilding into it and couldn’t draw on the resourcefulness and resilience of humanity that dominates the first act. But it makes sense in context, because they’re not in such dire straits in the second half, and are approaching the whole issue from complex standpoints of religion and meaning and societal archetypes.
I surely couldn’t have done better, I know that much.
I thought both books were entirely too generous in their depictions of humanity's ability to coordinate for enormous, earth-saving efforts. I have a feeling that a real extinction level crisis would be much more like Don't Look Up or Greenland(extra optimistic ending scenes not included) than we'd care to admit. Bureaucratic incompetency and political infighting leading to a tragic and preventable end in both cases presented in the books.
I think this happens a lot to Stephenson. He's great at creating worlds, and that's the genius of his writing. Then what happens in those worlds is sometimes underwhelming.
The answer to the (paraphrased) question "how long do you expect that to last?" is so subtly delivered and unexpected and unhyped, and beautifully sets up the rest of the first (of two) section of the book.
I had to read the small passage through a couple of times to make sure I had the right context.
Also read, and loved, and had emotional reactions to Project Hail Mary. Highly recommend.
I liked Project Hail Mary (and Artemis, and The Martian) but I thought it was a little too heavy in the programmer narrative style. I won’t spoil anything in case someone reads this comment who hasn’t read it, but a large section involving establishing a communication protocol really wore me down from the story.
The big revelation about how he got there also felt nearly translucent in how obvious it was when it was revealed.
I hope he writes a couple more books though, if I can ever get some grandkids outta my kids, Weir’s books will be in their collection for sure.
I’m the biggest python fan in the world, and you’re out of your mind if you think it can compete with Java for enterprise programming or even embedded programming for that matter. Not to mention the JVM underlying it, likely the second or third most sophisticated software project in the world.
In ten years, maybe Go. Long, LONG way to go in adoptability to push against Java shops.
In this thread: lies, fabrications, misinformation, disinformation, deception, skullduggery, wayward words, dirty deeds, and a case and a half of the finest bullshit you’ll ever read.
They want you back in the office to make the management happy, to make the corporate rent make sense, to make the banks happy, to feed the giant machine whose primary purpose is 100% unequivocally NOT getting stuff done (tm)
If your team isn’t getting stuff done remote, investigate a protocol for communicating the business and product needs to the developers, and maybe skim some commits.
If you are being threatened with back to office and you don’t want to go, make them fire you, use your resources, and I’d estimate there’s about a 95% chance most of you can find a higher paying position elsewhere, or at least equal pay & remote-first. The world is changing, don’t let them play tricks on you.
I’ve fought with DC traffic for twenty years, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to show up in an office for less than a client-vendor situation or L5/6+ all hands. If it’s on fire, you better call my work phone and make sure my deposits are up-to-date.
I know it’s tougher for the younger bucks out here, and that loans and rent and everything might tip the scales a little further away from you. Do your best, do what you can, but I strongly recommend putting up the fight for more comfortable work arrangements.
If we’re all gonna be obsolete in ten years, they might as well be paying us right and speaking to us right for the next nine!
It’s not quite arbitrarily. That’s an uncharitable definition. Python a) handles function arguments in a way that would make recursive functions awkward to use and b) cares about stacktraces being meaningful, so TCO would be a worse tradeoff towards that end as well.
There’s trampolines in almost any programming language to implement recursion if necessary, and python has itertools to build what Scheme calls streams, for arbitrary computation.
Indeed, I did have a bit of a flippant tone. This was not intentional.
I help support my spouse and without my major contribution (almost 4x theirs) to our income pool (where they can only find part-time work), we'd be much worse off. So in some regards I am earning close to this rate as I help pay not for just myself, but my partner too (I have multiple pets but no kids, thank god). If that give you some idea of how much I make and they make.
To be clear, I am still paid hourly. I am not a developer either, so that kinda goes to my point (but I do work in IT). My company doesn't want us to go over 40 hours though, so if I reach it mid-day Friday, I leave early.
If it wasn't for paying _well below the average_ in the area we live at for rent, we'd have some struggle as we have high utility rates, car payments, insurance, 401k, medical bills, entertainment/social lives, etc, etc that everyone needs to balance and still avoid major anxiety over something ruining the routine financially. Inflation is the dark cloud over every horizon at the moment. I can't finance a home like I wanted to. I'll have to hold off a little longer.
The idea is that it's absurd that the Govt. has not increased this scale with CoL/inflation. To categorize someone exempt at such a low rate is a bit of a slap in the face.
EDIT: As for people much more educated, that's a similar but tangential argument. People who put in their time and money to be educated and become experts/pioneers in their field should be compensated appropriately. This is another societal failure that needs attention.
I love Derek's writing. He's so casually eloquent, without being up his own ass like PG. I've learned a lot from reading what he's produced, and I can certainly attribute (in part) a few successful endeavors to being a "slow thinker" as he calls it.
We live in such an insane, reactionary world these days and I find it very refreshing to hear from people who've clearly thought hard about what they're about to say/write.
Sometimes, I even wish HN worked this way. I wish the front page was about 10x as slow, and that we could discuss things for a week or two instead of a day or two. It'd be messier, but I think the fruits, separated from the weeds, would be juicier.
This level of cynicism would make more sense if you spent any time on the Internet, where normal people regularly evangelize for their browser of choice simply because they feel strongly about it. It's a very common thing. Check out Reddit.
I preferred the alpha syntax, which was ML-inspired, but it’s decent in its current incarnation.
I’ve always though the beam was really nice for building programming languages, and clearly that is true, as there are now more than a dozen targeting it.
I will put in a good word for PureScript for the beam with `purerl`. It's my go-to for writing BEAM code nowadays. Notably PureScript tooling including LSP, package management, etc., just works, so you are able to just get to work in internalizing the way OTP and other Erlangy things are expressed in a statically typed, pure language with much better facilities for functional code than any other BEAM language.
I'm writing proof-of-concept applications in it for our company currently. Our core technology is Erlang (and Elixir), so the jump isn't comparatively as ridiculous as a Java shop suddenly writing PureScript on the BEAM. I trust code written in PureScript far more than I do code written in Elixir and there are already at least 2 companies using `purerl` in production with the majority of their code in PureScript.
With that said, I've been writing Elixir since 2015 and have worked with Erlang & Elixir since a couple of years after that (+ Haskell), so I'm both much more likely to use niche languages and I'm also well versed in using the BEAM. PureScript with `purerl` actually matches Erlang much better than Elixir does, since Elixir spends half the language and standard library trying to not be Erlang, so I find that it's a better match than Elixir even as a citizen of the BEAM, and the type safety is something I've wanted on the BEAM since I first wrote production BEAM code.
All in all I've been blown away by how solid `purerl` is. The runtime is Erlang, the language is excellent; it's what I dreamed about Haskell being but couldn't quite get.
They’ve eaten good food, but they may or may not know anything about starting a business.
Paul Graham hasn’t started a company in several decades now. Just because he has proximity with a lot of people who have, doesn’t mean his advice is still sound.
He was competing with Perl shops, for crying out loud!
The scene has changed. A lot. Seek out lessons from success by yourself, directly. Ask local, search local, find the people successful near you in your industry and just ask them. Many will tell their tale over lunch, and then you’ve received personal, actionable advice for the price of a good meal.