When Paul Graham uses a phrase like "great work" I can't help but only consider it as being synonymous to "work that generates a big return for the investor" in his context of Y Combinator
Maybe but i consider other things in that as well.
One thing is art. I was in new orleans once and heard a kid play jazz saxaphone out on a street corner in the middle of the night. It was legitimately the most beautiful music ive ever heard in my life. I think that man put all his life into that solo and hit the frontier of how music can affect a listener's soul. I think he was doing great by paul grahams definition
I didn’t read the whole essay, but it seems to be more like: find something you are interested in, interested enough to work very hard at it, and don’t worry about what others think too much. It seems basically true (and legitimately good advice), if a bit generic. It doesn’t seem particularly tied to start-ups or whatever.
I didn’t get much from it, but I’ve gotten that sort of advice my whole life, so it was a little boring. As a result of being bored, I skimmed it. As I skimmed it, it started to feel repetitive. It is possible that a deeper reading would reveal some non-repetitive aspect to the parts I found repetitive. It seems like a good blog post to give to a smart teenager.
Edit: I think we’ll get some dismissive responses here because most of the posters here are at least somewhat mid-career, so they’ve already gotten and acted on this kind of advice. Imagine reading it before college, though. I’d have enjoyed it.
What do you want it to be synonymous to? The people who've managed to do great work without generating large investment returns not that large. Compared to the number of ambitious people presently looking for advice it is small.
I disagree. There are millions of local activists that are improving the immediate lives of their communities in real impactful ways that never see the light of day. Starting after school programs or setting up mutual aid stations or community gardens or creating tenant unions, are all things any one of us can do to improve the lives of those around us.
If you're great work only consists of work that generates money, then you're neglecting the entire spectrum of the human experience.
> There are millions of local activists that are improving the immediate lives of their communities in real impactful ways...
Most people manage this. It is hard to earn a paycheck if someone isn't improving the immediate lives of their communities in real impactful ways. Great work has to be something a bit more. There are a lot of thresholds for that which could be reasonable, but if we aren't going to go with solid investor returns someone is going to have to come up with a rough standard that can be talked about.
> Starting after school programs or setting up mutual aid stations or community gardens or creating tenant unions, are all things any one of us can do to improve the lives of those around us.
I mean, sure. But my mind automatically drifts to China and the millions of people being dragged out of poverty by sweatshops and investors making out like bandits. Industrial improvements to living standards, driven by profits, are a lot faster and larger than people setting up mutual aid stations. The scales are just different once people figure out a way to improve the world profitably.
There are examples of people who managed to scale up their work to do amazing things without making a profit along the way (major religious figures spring to mind), but generally it is just easier to have a sustainable impact if the returns are good too.
There are and have been lots of people doing great work without generating large investment returns, because they aren't doing the kind of work that generates large investment returns at all.
(If you're looking for greatness on their scale, then of course the number will be "not that large" because work that great is very rare. But there are plenty of artists and scientists and whatnot achieving lesser levels of greatness and most of them are not getting large investment returns.)
I agree. Though the article mentions work from people like Einstein, Copernicus, Darwin, etc. A far cry from the kind of work Y Combinator funds. It gives the post a comedic air to it. Perhaps if had given some more grounded examples that feel more relevant to the work he's done himself then the article would land more for me.
>The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work.
>In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion. Ambitious people are if anything already too conservative about it. So all you need to do is find something you have an aptitude for and great interest in.
Bull-shit. The set of all things you enjoy and have aptitude for is much larger than the set of things you can make money on. There's a reason why Paul Graham chased coding and making an e-store in the 90s and not becoming a great philosopher, which he seems to have natural interest in (and he probably thinks he has quite a bit of aptitude for it).
That reason is $$$. I've found in my time that the number one rule of making $$$ is that you must chase $$$. It doesn't knock at your door, it doesn't come when you least expect it. $$$ is degrading in that you must submit yourself to it. If the $$$ is in code then you code and there's no room for individuality beyond that. It's genuflect or be poor. That's why all these rich people narrowly chase code or similar cash cows. The number two and three rules is chase it a lot and chase it efficiently. If you chase something else a lot and efficiently you will still be poor.
Charitably maybe the concept of chasing $$$ is so ingrained in these people that it's not a conscious decision to them. That seems to be what he says anyway. You could call that greed and I think a lot of brilliant people don't have it to the same degree that most billionaires do so failing to acknowledge it even by accident leads to gatekeeping money.
Chasing money and making money is a virtue. Making money is not zero sum. If you are good at something and no one wants to pay for it, then you probably shouldn't be appreciated for it.
There's nothing dishonest about what he is saying and if you think you can make money just by making it your optimising function then I suggest following it because that's the most pro-social thing you can do. The literal economy is design in such a way!
If by "chasing money", you mean "I want money, so I'm going to find out what people want badly enough to pay for, and I'm going to figure out a way to make that in a way that lets me profit", that may not be virtuous in a purely moral sense, but it's at least likely to lead to a virtuous outcome.
If by "chasing money", you mean "I want money, so I'll do whatever is the easiest way to make money, and that seems to be scams and grift so I'll start there", then no, there's nothing virtuous whatsoever there.
I've fat fingered the "hide" button quite often when I was trying to hit the comments button. That's the main thing that I find slightly annoying about the default HN layout
I don't quite understand the mentioning of node at the start of the article as a cause of this. You can write a monolith in node just as well as you can write a web of microservices. That said I agree with the sentiment of this article, it's very frustrating to deal with in any company. Especially when these microservices aren't versioned under the same repo and/or are hosted at different providers causing unnecessary latency.
They argue that Node tricks frontenders into thinking they can do server-side, then says they 'huff and puff' when this is pointed out to them. It's an incredibly patronizing argument to make.
One piece that I removed from the draft was about how I wanted to join in on the Node fun. In 2014, when I was writing very simple async Python Tornado code with "await", I saw the mess that was Node asynchronous development, and I was truly bewildered by why it was considered revolutionary and cool.
How would you sell Node to other old guys? Especially compared to Go.
I try to favor simple, efficient software. I used to dislike PHP because it was so messy and inefficient, until newer frameworks like Django made it look like it was slim and snappy.
Maybe, in this race to the bottom, Node stands out in a way I hadn't seen, so I'm genuinely interested.
> How would you sell Node to other old guys? Especially compared to Go.
JavaScript has a huge business case in the front-end. Going another direction is possible, but you're really fighting against the grain to do so.
Go node/bun/deno and you can build back-end and front-end with one language. This has pretty significant advantages. Particularly if your goal is small teams (or solo) with "full stack" style devs. There are fewer siloed specialists required in the org.
Language concepts, syntax and patterns are a significant part of the cognitive load needed to develop.
If you're in a siloed org with specialists anyway, there is minimal draw.
I've done things like have a backend I brought into the front end to mock an immature system. Shared code between the back end and front end for offline-first systems. You just can't do that kind of stuff when you don't share a language between front-end/back-end.
What's the reason for the max length in the input? 400 characters is very short to answer the prompt "Please start by introducing what you are doing and what are any other industries and nature of the job that you are looking for"
Hi, thanks for trying out. OpenAI just limit the whole prompt to 4096 token (that's around 2,000 words), so I have to limit each answer. I tried hacking by adding summarization for the first part of the convo, then chat along as normal, but the result wasn't that great. Will tweak more.
I don't really want Git to change so much. What I do want however is for other tools to take over features from Git. Pretty much every app that I use in my daily life would be enhanced if it had git-like features.
Here's a weird take: because the landing page is so vague the user doesn't know whether the app is useful or not so the user will sign up just to take a look at the app to figure out what it actually is. Once the user realizes it isn't for them they bounce. So higher signup rate, higher bounce rate in this case? Total baseless speculation here :D
This article is very frustrating, it's full of assumptions that are stated as facts.
> Most of all, it makes people perceive your site to be faster than it actually is. Remember that we are designing interfaces for use by real people. We need to give people the illusion of speed.
The first claim is not backed up by evidence? At least not in this article and the claim "we need to give people the illusion of speed" makes no sense?
And then for the perceived benefits of skeleton loading screens.
> 1. Helps people perceive your screen to load faster
Again 1. is just an assumption for all I can tell, you don't cite any research on this.
> 2. Eliminates surprises
As for 2, with skeleton screens there is still pretty much always a significant layout shift as it is quite uncommon for all elements to have pre-defined dimensions so the skeleton screen actual works. So it can work for some screens. But if you implement it only for some screens, users will be surprised about the differences. Hence, user is surprised? :D
> 3. Gradual loading of UI – clear indication of progress
As for 3, there is literally no difference in the indication of progress between this and a spinner.
> 4. Shows exactly what’s loaded and what’s yet to load
Specifically being able to create a deep link to a passage is a very powerful capability indeed. The friction required to look up a paper and navigate to the specific passage for a given reference can really be so high that we just end up avoiding it altogether I feel. Kudos to you for trying to solve this problem!
I personally find LaTeX a little too friction-full (is that a word?) on the input side. The output looks beautiful but the lack of feedback when writing stuff keeps me from actually adding stuff to it. Although your daily notes seems like it might help with this tendency a little bit.
This is a problem I'm currently trying to solve with my current project (https://topictrails.com/ if you're interested).
Modern tools like Overleaf are great, especially for collaboration. But it's still extremely annoying having to google every little thing like "how can I move this element on the slide a bit to the right?" or even things that you'd expect would be easier in a software designed for mathematicians like "how can I format this common type of math problem (eg an optimization problem) nicely?". Plain LaTeX's overall useability has strong 80's vibes and the output does look nice, but imho doesn't justify the effort (especially given that the competition like Word has really come of age wrt to equation editing). If it wasn't for tools like Overleaf I might have ditched it, but there is also strong peer pressure in math-heavy fields to keep using it.
Maybe Word has come of age in terms of equation editing, but has it come to age in terms of usability? I haven't used in about 10 years, but back then it crashed a lot on larger documents, and I suffered a lot from never knowing if I was inside the invisible tags or not, so I never knew when I was typing right after a list if I would start a new list item or not, or when typing next to italic text if the new text would be italic or not. I also remember that trying to move anything, like an embedded image, would move tons of other things too. I definitely found LaTeX much easier to use.
And that's excluding Word line-breaking which always looked rather poor to me: some lines were left very empty and others overcrowded. It just didn't look professional to me. Perhaps that was been fixed too.
I don't know whether to what version you were referring to, but my guess is that you might still consider indentation and text formatting unintuitive. But it is actually easy to pick up the rules that Word uses, and there are keyboard combinations as well.
It's a personal preference, but I think it easily beats the typical LaTeX workflow for most people I know, which starts with copying an old project or some template with a ~50 line preamble and then constantly having to turn to Google for literally anything that's a bit out of the ordinary - including a lot of things that really shouldn't be extraordinary for a math software, like typesetting optimization problems, conditional expectation, argmin, table footnotes,... all of which have multiple options and most don't look great. Heck, you even need to define a theorem environment manually in the preamble to get them to look like you're used to.
Since you complain about moving around figures, in LaTeX the workflow for most users is trial-and-error multiple option combinations to get them roughly where you want them. Just check the Google autocomplete options for latex and tell me that people aren't confused by those things.
I guess that, as most things related to using software, it boils down to familiarity. You say you managed to figure out Word's rules for when text will inherit formatting of the text to the left of it and when it won't. I believe you, I imagine I would have learned them too if I kept using Word. On the other hand when I taught Linear Programming I typeset lots of optimization problems and didn't Google anything, because I already know plenty of LaTeX. I certainly have googled stuff for LaTeX and found it is a quick and painless way of figuring out how to do something. This seems like an advantage of LaTeX, not a disadvantage as you seem to think. What do you do in Word when you want to do something you don't how to do? Doesn't googling also work there? And if not, that seems like a disadvantage of Word.
Googling also works for Word, but I practically never need it there. It's just so easy to find solutions to those questions that you barely perceive them as such. I even figured out the shortcuts just by trying something that seemed to make sense (fyi: Italics is Ctrl+I, bold is Ctrl+B; changing indentation levels in a list is Alt+Shift+Arrow, getting out of the list indentation requires three times backspace, which I agree doesn't make sense, but it's easy enough to figure out within seconds of the first encounter; and yeah, you can google those if you want). In LaTeX I need to switch to a different window get to Google much more frequently, and I find that breaks my flow. I don't see how this could be framed as anyhting but a disadvantage.
Anything becomes easy if you practice it enough, but I find both the 'onboarding' as well as the 'steady-state' productivity higher in Word, because you spend next to no time looking for how stuff works and instead focus on your content. Yes, LaTeX formatting generally looks better (eg spacing, LaTeX even lets you adjust the spacing between individual characters), but looks come second to content imho.
Personally for feedback I use editors like overleaf or the extension for vscode that autocompilea and displays a PDF next to the working TeX file. I prefer it over something like LyX or waiting to compile manually.
* The "seamless" mode for all the views that removes action buttons. Feels kind of like an "exploration view".
* New cards created on the home page are automatically added to a "daily" page (but can still be moved to another day).
* I like how the sidebar is done, it doesn't get in the way as much as in other apps.
* The "thoughts" collection, where notes without links go. The name is perhaps a little confusing though.
What I don't really like:
* The editor experience. I feel like a rich text experience might have been a better fit for this kind of application. I like markdown as a portable format, but not to write in. But that's pretty personal I guess.
