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Paul Graham: Six Principles for Making New Things

173 points by Darmani 19y ago

333 18y ago
ghgff samp
dkokelley 19y ago
There's one paragraph in there that I think sums the entire essay. When I read it I was so stuck by it that I put that paragraph on my desktop image (http://www.cocunderground.com/desktop.jpg http://www.cocunderground.com/desktop.jpg). Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.
- pius 19y ago
  I'd add the closing paragraph to this as well: So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.
  - deleted 19y ago
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  - ratsbane 19y ago
    Reading PG's essays makes me very happy. Quoting again: Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. Perfect.
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- papersmith 19y ago
  (g) Profit! Hence the gnomes' predicament is solved.
aswanson 19y ago
I remember reading Paul's essays, pre YC. When he wrote the essay announcing it, I remember thinking, "This guy is crazy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of school projects." Sure enough, he did, and wrote about it. I felt vindicated by that, saying to myself, "I knew THAT was going nowhere." People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. After reddit, loopt, zenter, anywhere.fm, etc., however, I don't think I was completely accurate in my prediction....
- BrandonM 19y ago
  People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. I know there are a lot of people like this, but there is also a perhaps equally-large number of people who feel the opposite way. Personally, I love to be proven wrong when I predict failure, unless I have some other reason for wanting someone to fail (they use unethical practices, they're my direct competition, etc.).
  - aswanson 19y ago
    I know what you mean, and I was happy to be wrong in this case.
  - Xichekolas 19y ago
    I think people like to be correct in predicting the failure of crazy-sounding ideas because they don't want to feel like they are missing out on something big. I know I predicted that Google was all hype when it was selling at $200/share and unloaded the few shares I had. I kick myself for it now obviously, and even though it made no financial difference to me whether it sunk to $25 or went up to $600 (since I no longer owned shares), I still couldn't help hoping it would tank so I would feel like I made the correct decision. I think this is really why you don't have to worry about competitors. If your idea is good enough, everyone will think you are crazy/naive. If your idea is simply decent, you'll never pick it anyway (because it's not exciting enough to you) and it will end up getting done by some existing company. Either way whatever you actually choose to work on will be unique until it's proven, by which point no competitor is catching you anyway.
jey 19y ago
"... your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own." Which Feynman quotation is this referring to?
- kradic 19y ago
  http://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+imagination+of+nature http://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+imagination+of+nature
skenney26 19y ago
If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.
- BrandonM 19y ago
  Maybe the ability to reach customers around the world much cheaper than any other way? Remember that the first (and most of the) customers were already-existing businesses, hence they presumably already had a method for processing transactions. At least, that's my guess.
- dkokelley 19y ago
  I don't think anyone was really processing credit cards through the web at that point, at least not unless you paid out the nose for a custom system. "Sales" could still be made over the web, you just couldn't receive payment for them - like an online catalog really.
- pg 19y ago
  They wanted to be able to generate a good-looking site with large numbers of products and a way for people to order them. Till about 1997 online order volumes were so small that it was no problem for merchants to manually punch in credit card nos on their POS terminal.
nostrademons 19y ago
I agree on general principle, but there's a big difference between Viaweb & YCombinator vs. Arc: Market. Viaweb and YC were each aimed at the overlooked low end of a market. Small businesses may not be sexy, but they had a pressing need for a web presence, and the can't write it themselves.. College students and young professionals may not be experienced, but they have a real need for money and advice, and they (usually) can't fund it themselves. Arc, however, is explicitly aimed at the high end. It's meant to be a "LFSP". And smart people can write Arc themselves (and have ;-)). They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves. Hence the contemptuous reaction, and why I think Arc is in more trouble than either Viaweb or YC. It's not really a problem when your peers are contemptuous, because that just means they're less likely to compete with you. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project. If I were in charge of Arc marketing, I'd position it as the "PHP for the ones that PHP forgot". PHP initially got its start as a way to throw a quick & dirty webapp prototype up on the web, and then incrementally refine it. But around version 5, it started getting complex and adding all these features from Java. That's left a vacuum at the bottom of the web language market. Rails and Django tried to fill it, but the average Django user is quite a bit more sophisticated than the average PHP user circa 1999. And Arc's design is already pretty well-suited to throwing a design up on the screen quickly. Right now, the majority of Arc users seem to be disenchanted Lispers. Disenchanted Lispers tend to be smart people, and they also tend to be interested in language design. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. On arclanguage.com, I've seen one person write an app with the language, and several dozen people write enhancements of the language itself, either in the form of macros or as hacks to the interpreter itself.
- aston 19y ago
  Upmodded for your first half. But Arc is definitely not drop in replacement for PHP. And you can use PHP 5 in basically the same ways you could use PHP 3.
- pg 19y ago
  They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves. Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write? What you seem to be saying is that being smart automatically makes people good at language design. And you are just dead wrong. Being smart may make you a good language implementor, but there's little correlation between that and the kind of skills you need to be a good language designer. Some of the worst languages in the world were designed by smart people. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project. The Arc users on arclanguage.org don't seem that contemptuous. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. That seems a good sign to me. Munging the language is what you do with Lisp, like numerical calculations are what you do with Fortran. So what this means to me is that the users are real Lisp hackers, using the language as Lisp is meant to be used. Plus I explicitly said that at this stage I'm mostly interested in the core language, and that I want to hear new ideas in that department.
ldambra 19y ago
The Law of New Inventions by Mike Rozak (game designer) : http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/LawOfNewInventions.htm http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/LawOfNewInventions.htm It fits perfectly with your essay. Good write btw.
jacabado 19y ago
Is it just me or Twitter fits perfectly in that definition?
- pg 19y ago
  Yes, when Evan came to speak at YC recently I was struck by the similarities. Here was an idea that was literally right under everyone's noses for about 10 years, and everyone ignored it. Evan is a great product designer. That's his secret weapon.
  - jacabado 19y ago
    Yesterday I was watching Smith&Jones, Britcom also has much of this, constructing ideas around the stupidly obvious and ignored on the perspective of the comic writer.
Alex3917 19y ago
"When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction." Jeffrey Rosen has some good stuff to say about this in his book The Unwanted Gaze. One of his defenses of the right to privacy is that new ideas often seem wrong at first, especially when they're still only half baked. And because of this, progress is seriously impeded when the government has the ability to go through our journals and sketchbooks at any time. This is especially true in our made-for-TV society where most people won't put more than thirty seconds into trying to understand something, esp. considering the factors PG mentions. He suggests that for these reasons innovation may not be possible in a fully transparent society.
- akkartik 19y ago
  The govt or anybody being able to read your scrapbook is not the same as them telling you to stop based on it. I've put the book on my list.
edw519 19y ago
If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. - Albert Einstein
rtf 19y ago
The saying I have for this negative reaction is "people see only what is in front of them." A good concept with poor presentation will be dismissed, and in the case of a language like Arc, presentation could also be defined to include "number of features, immediate utility, etc." I know my reaction was similar to the crowd, but even so I recognize that it's the wrong thing to look for. If Arc's initial release state could be summed up as "Lisp with some cleaned-up and rearranged features," then it's really not that different from say, Digital Mars D, which is best described as "C++ with some cleaned-up and rearranged features." The difference is, D has a massive compiler backing it, and its scope is unlikely to change. Arc's minimal implementation substance only makes it easier to change tack midway. I've only gradually learned to restrain my sense of ego and take a similarly minimal approach with my own projects(indie games) - my newest process is to always start the final implementation with a text console interface. Besides encouraging better architecture in preparing for a later graphical interface, it's easier to debug the key elements this way than to have "stuff moving on the screen" at 30 or 60FPS and get frustrated figuring out which of those frames is the one where you're getting an error, let alone what routine is causing the problem.
maxwell 19y ago
Awesome essay.
fuzzythinker 19y ago
I like to add a 7th - the ability to ignore problems that are irrelevant to the problem at hand. PG actually mentioned it all over the essay, but seems to have left it out. btw, thanks PG, this essay has a very profound effect for me; makes me rethink some of the "ideas" I have and how I will approach them.
pchristensen 19y ago
For more details, read the Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution.
- davidw 19y ago
  Or just read a summary of it:-) http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dilemma-the-revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-collins-business-essentials http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dil...
- zach 19y ago
  Or if you have some time to kill, listen to the author's highly-rated talk on IT Conversations: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail135.html http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail135.html
neilk 19y ago
I like a lot of what this essay says, but I still don't think it applies to Arc. Because the criticisms of Arc would have happened no matter what the design had been. For the most part, Lisp people will never like any modification to the language that changes their pure abstract computation engine into something that more people would want to use. Behold, a Usenet post from 2000 on the notion of a "lispscript" that could compete with perl or awk: http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/brief/why-lisp-will-never-win http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/brief/why-lisp-wi... That said, I personally have no idea if Arc is all that good or not. I get it, but it doesn't inspire me the way Haskell or Erlang do right now. But Arc seems to be successful by the designer's own standards.
- deleted 19y ago
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bayareaguy 19y ago
I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. I'm still trying to get a handle on which of these apply to Arc. Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way, but Arc feels a little light in areas (a-c).
- pg 19y ago
  Arc is a simple solution to the overlooked problem of core language design. http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html
  - serhei 19y ago
    In general, at this stage, the amount of flak that Arc has received is so disproportionate to the normal amount of flak that new ideas receive because it hasn't solved any problems that real hackers have encountered, well enough that they'd want to switch to writing programs in it. You haven't really solved the overlooked problem of core language design until people start using your cleaner core language, and to do that you'll have to give people compelling reasons to start using it. If you don't agree, the BeOS people have solved the overlooked problem of operating system design and are on their way to meet you, together with the people who invented Esperanto.
    - pg 19y ago
      It solves the problem hackers face in every program they write, and which high level languages exist to solve: making programs smaller. Try translating some Arc programs into Common Lisp or Scheme and you'll see what I mean. And incidentally, I don't have to give hardened users of existing languages reason enough to switch. There are new people learning to program all the time, and to them, all languages are on a level playing field. If they look at Arc and CL and see that programs are 50% longer in CL, why would they choose CL?
      - bayareaguy 19y ago
skmurphy 19y ago
It's a succinct summary of a method for developing new ideas/products. The closest I have seen for brevity is Bob Bemer (the inventor of ASCII) with "Do Something Small But Useful Now" which he also wrote as ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!) so that it became this sequence: Do Something Do Something Small Do Something Small But Useful Do Something Small But Useful Now see http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/ http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/ for more info
zoltz 19y ago
I think the six-principles approach is great, and it really shows why the initial reaction will always be contemptuous and therefore doesn't mean anything. Of course, not everyone can easily copy the approach, you need to be an original thinker in order to not overlook overlooked problems. I don't understand the last part of the essay about reddit as a classic example. "Tell people what was new", was that an overlooked problem? News agencies have been around for a long time. "Stay out of the way" was only possible because of the user-submission-and-voting system, which seems to me a clever and non-obvious idea. What I like most about this idea is the voting part, it tells me what's interesting, I don't care about whether it's new.
iamelgringo 19y ago
I enjoyed the article, as I enjoy most of Paul's articles. But, I'm coming to the tech world after having worked in the health care industry for 15 years. And, I studied art for 6-7 years, thinking that I could make a career out of it. So, I guess that I have a different perspective on the geek/hacker culture. And, something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this--the nastiness. Paul referenced it in his article, referring to the trolls. I just don't understand why people troll like they do. I didn't understand why people were so up in arms about Paul's trying to write a new language and offer it up for public consumption. I don't understand why people have been so quick to criticize Y Combinator. I don't understand the hating that goes on in language flame wars, or OS flame wars. I understand that people are passionate about technology, and passionate about their language of choice, or OS of choice, but... really. Do people really need to get nasty about it? Why aren't people able to have a discussion about the merits of a language, or strengths and weaknesses without getting personal or mean about it. I just don't understand. A great doctor that I worked with, was explaining to me why he got out of teaching at a medical school. What he said struck a chord with me: The reason that there's so much back-biting and politicking in academic medicine is very simple--it's because the stakes are so low. Which leads me to ask the question--Are the stakes really so low in the technology world, that people are so nasty? I have a hunch that for many trolls, that's really true. I know that shortly after reddit got purchased the trolls made camp and set up a small troll swamp. There are a few cool sub-reddits, though. Why did that happen? Because the stakes became so low.
- edw519 19y ago
  Interesting angle, but I really don't believe nastiness has much to do with it. We hackers are just dying to let others know how smart we are. It's what makes us tick. So we come here (and other forums and blogs) because most of us have trouble finding peers who even understand what we're talking about. Add in a lack of writing style and the anonymity of the internet, and our puffing and strutting APPEARS to be nastiness. Put us in a room together to discuss the same subjects and I'm sure it would be much more civil. Honestly ask yourself. Whenever you heard someone else getting a compliment for being smart, (Alan made the Dean's list!), (Joe is a great chess player!), (Fred wrote the best program I ever saw!), don't you get JUST A LITTLE BIT JEALOUS. You almost want to scream out, "Hey! What about me? I'm smarter than that!" We hold back in person because we're polite. But we don't hold back here, because most of us understand. Sometimes I think that if you DON'T think like that, maybe you shouldn't be a hacker. Reminds me of an old story that Rabbi Harold Kushner told about a young man trying to temper his competitiveness, so he joined an ashram in Japan. He wrote to his father, "Dad, this environment has helped me evolve to the point of enlightenment where I no longer have to compete with others to achieve my bliss. The meditation has done it. I'm one of the top 5 meditators here, and hopefully, by next year, I'll be Number One." [UPDATE: I just read the comments about this pg essay on Reddit, and realize that it's different over there. They ARE nasty. What's happened to Reddit? Whatever it is, I sure hope it never happens here.]
simplegeek 19y ago
I still wonder why RTM doesn't say anything at all. Does he read HN? I would like to know his point of view, too.
- pg 19y ago
  I still wonder why RTM doesn't say anything at all. People have been wondering about that since he was a small child.
bouncingsoul 19y ago
If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. I'd like some help interpreting this sentence. Why does the lack of competition make it more likely you'll discover new things? (And what is things referring to?) I assume it means you can attack a problem at a more leisurely pace, so you see solutions you would have missed if you were in a feature-copying war with competitors. But I doubt PG would advocate running your startup leisurely.
- Alex3917 19y ago
  From No Contest by Alfie Kohn: "Robert L. Helmreich [tested] the relationship between achievement, on the one hand, and such traits as the orientation toward work, mastery (preference for challenging tasks), and competitiveness, on the other. A sample of 103 Ph.D. scientists were rated on these three factors based on a questionnaire. Achievement, meanwhile, was defined in terms of the number of times their work was cited by colleagues. The result was that "the most citations were obtained by those high on the work and mastery but low on the competitiveness scale." This startled Helmreich, who did not expect that competitiveness would have deleterious effect. Could the result be a fluke? He conducted another study, this one involving academic psychologists. The result was the same. He did two more studies, one involving male businessmen, measuring achievement by their salaries, and the other with 1300 male and female undergraduates, using grade point average as the attainment criterion. In both cases he again found a significant negative correlation between competitiveness and achievement. ... But Helmreich did not stop there. As of 1985, he had conducted three more studies. The first compared the standardized achievement tests of fifth- and sixth-graders to their competitiveness. They were negatively correlated. The second examined the relationship between performance of airline pilots and competitiveness. The relationship between the latter and superior performance was negative. The third looked at airline reservation agents and again found a negative correlation between performance and competitiveness. ... Consider the question of artistic creativity. The little research that has been done suggests that competition is just as unhelpful here as it is in promoting creative problem-solving. In one study, seven- to eleven-year-old girls were asked to make "silly" collages, some competing for prizes and some not. Seven artists then independently rated their works on each of 23 dimensions. The result: "Those children who competed for prizes made collages that were significantly less creative than those made by children in the control group." Children in the competitive condition produced works thought to be less spontaneous, less complex, and less varied. ... Consider journalism, a profession that, while no more competitive than many others, is worth exploring by virtue of its unusual visibility to outsiders. The frantic race for news generates terrific levels of anxiety ... on the part of journalists. Can we at least point to better reporting as the result of this competition? Setting reports against one another in a battle for space on the front page or the first block of a television news show probably lowers the quality of journalism in the long run, and so, too, does the contest among news organizations for subscriptions or ratings."
ensignavenger 19y ago
Thanks, Paul! I always enjoy reading your insigts. Some of the best free advice around. You might find that my companies design philosphy (for some reason...) is similiar to yours! www.ensigntech.com
netman21 19y ago
Your point about having a version 1 and iterating quickly based on real world input reminds me of my experience as a mechanical design engineer. The most costly mistakes made in that field resulted from too much design and not enough prototype phases. The typical design process back in the 80's was to meticulously draw every aspect of a component, send it to a machine shop for tooling, get manufactured parts and put them on the test stand. Only then would you discover that the gage was too light, the material was the wrong spec or the welds had to be moved. I introduced the concept of prototype early and often. Actually re-introduced, as this is how most products were engineered in the olden days. Someone would suggest a new gage, weld placement, cross section, and I would don my overalls, head to the shop, cobble up something and demonstrate its feasibility before the draftsmen could decide what size paper to draw it on. When I worked at Chevrolet I took this to the max and prototyped entire vehicles years before the official prototype build phase. When I transitioned to the world of networks and software I was shocked at how little prototyping there is. Website developers would deliver project plans that had two weeks of "QA" built in before the launch date. It was crazy, any major problem uncovered in that two weeks would delay the launch. It is still challenging to get a programmer to demonstrate a prototype early. So, I think you are on to something. Good luck with ARC!
kashif 19y ago
You know PG, you can't discuss Arc beyond a point - the whole discussion gets trivial - not the content but just the fact that there have been so many discussions on the subject that one tends to skip or hurry through it. I think the best response will be your continued work at Arc as opposed to a well written essay.
ivankirigin 19y ago
How does this mesh with "don't try to create trends, find and ride them"? That's advice I've heard a lot. The final note about Reddit seems to say the opposite: "The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it". That is probably incorrect. They found a local maxima in the trend for social news before others spotted it. This doesn't really repudiate anything you say in the essay. But people shouldn't get the idea that just because there is resistance, they are doing something good. There needs to be a reason why the critics fail to see the light for you to claim you're working on an overlooked problem. The trick here is that while you're working on it, you don't know if it something that needs to be solved.
- pg 19y ago
  How does this mesh with "don't try to create trends, find and ride them"? You mean Joe Kraus's advice? That's advice for making money at something before your funding runs out. If burn rate is a factor, you may not be able to survive a contemptuous initial reaction, even if you're right.
  - ivankirigin 19y ago
    Yes, I meant Joe Kraus's advice. It's interesting how I took it to mean something different than you did: a bad idea generally, not just if you don't have enough money for it. I suppose you're right and I only found it general advice because it completely applies to my current state in life. Lots of people make that mistake: "this totally applies to me, it must be good advice generally" After the first $10B, once I start working on a space elevator and robotic asteroid mining, I expect the luxury of a contemptuous initial reaction.
petekennedy 19y ago
Excellent article. I've been reading your essays for well over a year now and am always impressed by your insights.
smithfield 19y ago
The bulk of the programming community substitutes "can we?" for "should we?" Your design philosophy is a result of asking the 'should' question. The work of the 'can' question people piles up opportunities for proper application of the 'should' question. This is one way of determining the trolliness of a person or point of view. The troll is incapable of asking the 'should' question. Love your stuff, Paul.
semigeek 19y ago
>> 'Startup funding meant series A rounds: millions of dollars given to a small number of startups founded by people with established credentials after months of serious, businesslike meetings, on terms described in a document a foot thick.' This is a bit of a stretch in my opinion - there has always been companies taking smaller investments; whether seed from a VC, seed from an individual Angel, or borrowing money from family.
corriganjc 19y ago
The Design principles are solid. Thank you for expressing them lucidly. Personally, I am encountering the same forces, and this essay provides useful arguments.
fattybob 19y ago
great words as ever, best place to find feedback is indeed on hits and seeing who reads, not the comments of those that are too lazy to read. As fro slashdot, it used to be my staring portal to the web, but has been replaced by reddit :-)
blahblah 19y ago
I like Arc, but there's just no way that it follows the six principles laid out here. (a) simple solution - yes (b) to overlooked problem - no. It's just a personal spin on Lisp/Scheme. It covers exactly the same territory. (c) that actually needs to be solved - no. Programmers have many good languages to choose from. Arc is a nice little wrapper on top of Lisp to make it pretty, but any undergrad could do the same thing. (d) deliver them as informally as possible - no. You don't write long essays about a language 5+ years before you show a prototype if "informality" is your goal. (e) starting with a very crude version - yes (f) iterating rapidly - no. You could get a master's degree in computer science in the time it took for the minimal prototype of Arc to show up.
konsl 19y ago
This is an interesting take on (b) overlooked problems: A few years ago, Gary Hamel and colleagues analyzed more than a hundred cases of business innovation to learn why some individuals, at certain points in time, are able to see opportunities that are invisible to everyone else. They learned that you need to pay close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed: 1. Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities. 2. Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms. 3. Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones. 4. Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address. original @ http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel/2008/01/innovation_hacker.html http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel/2008/01/innovation_ha...)
- skmurphy 19y ago
  This is a great list and nicely expands "(b) overlooked problems." In his book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" Peter Drucker offered the following observation on the frame of mind need to spot opportunities for innovation. "Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred but whose full effects have not yet been felt, and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires existing companies to abandon rather than defend yesterday." He goes on to suggest seven places to search systematically for opportunities The Unexpected The Incongruous Weak Link In Existing Process Industry Or Market Structure Change Demographics: Size, Age Structure New Zeitgeist: Perception, Mood, Meaning New Knowledge
Mistone 19y ago
the crux of the essay is the process Paul refers to(steps a-e). This model gives me great confidence that we are on the right track, and while we were not able to launch as fast as we would have liked we still see the basic unsolved, overlooked, problem that inspired us to begin. At the same taime its what annoyed me about being passed up last funding round, if this is how they judged ideas, how could they have glossed over us. Oh well, until we are a success they where correct. @pg: thanks for the inspiration and clarity as always
ojbyrne 19y ago
Reddit started out as a blatant copy of digg, which was 6 months old when reddit launched. I think that sort of invalidates large parts of this essay. Some digg copy from Dec. 2004: "What's Digg? Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do." Reddit copy from August 2005: "A source for what's new and popular on the web--customized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and simultaneously, which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity." And, yes, I realize there was nothing completely original about digg, the idea was originally done by kuro5hin, yadda, yadda, and I actually have plenty of respect for PG and the reddit guys. I'm just saying....
deleted 19y ago
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mroman 19y ago
Thank you for yet another great essay Mr. Graham . . . I think that - in a sense - your essays are programs for human minds.
kizildere 19y ago
Great essay Paul, I especially liked this part: "Don't worry about trying to look corporate, the product is what wins in the long run." This is so true! I consider this one of the top reasons many startups fail but at the same time, this is a result of the paradox of offline vs. online culture as it still holds true that many offline businesses would fail without looking corporate. Its a transition so we'll be fine in a couple years. Do you agree? Basar Kizildere Istanbul, Turkey
steelstonehenge 19y ago
Hi Paul: My father-in-law was an inventor. His one claim to fame was a cheap plastic pulley-like thing you could stick on the bottom of a telephone, and wrap the cord around it. It was called a "Cord Caddy." He made a small...no a medium fortune on this in the early 1970s. I went to a few home trade shows in L.A. with him. The creative energy at these places was palpable. (I even got to meet Ron Popeil there once). You'd go around the booths, see all these incredibly simple....no STUPIDLY simple things all these guys were making fortunes at. I'd mutter at myself, "Heck, anybody can come up with this crap." And then a voice from above thundered down, and slapped me upside the head. My ears are ringing thirty years later. The Voice from above said, "Yes...but you DIDN'T, did you!" That's the secret. ANYONE can come up with stuff...but almost nobody does. The real inventors in this country are a minuscule percentage of the population who actually DO something with their dumb ideas. I have unmitigated respect for Ron Popeil and his ilk, regardless of the obnoxious late night commercials. eric
qwerty 19y ago
IMHO the reason behind the response to Arc is "underwhelming" - because the anticipation has been built for 5 years, but it turns out the implementation is a "just" set of macros. And it certainly don't fit the "iterate rapidly" concept. Now - this is not a criticism of PG's work - on the contrary, I believe his design matches up with his philosophy in On Lisp very well. Looking past how the process, people now actually start to play with the language and make use of it. What I'm mostly interested though - are the learning lessons if PG is willing to share them. Why did it take as long as it had? Is it because this is not his day job, or are there additional design changes or problems that he has to solve along the way, etc. Getting a sense of that will shed light for other aspiring developers. I for one tend to try to shoot for just the right things and have scratched quite a few prototypes so I can go for the perfect one, so would sure love to hear from PG on his experiences.
GT 19y ago
but Hamming (www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html ) in "Your and your research" says exactly opposite thing: "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" Why both appoaches work?
joshua_steffan 19y ago
Graham, When will you stop ranting about Viaweb? I understand it was your single achievement, but it was essentially a fluke. There were hundreds of startups trying, one of them got lucky. And where's Viaweb now? It was a long time ago, and you should considering moving on with your life. Now, as a self-proclaimed nerd, you know of Gary Gygax? Well, if Viaweb was your D&D, YC is your Lejendary Adventures: a heartbreaking attempt of a spent man to recreate his former success. And just as Gygax died, Arc is your death. You're dead, Paul. You're as dead as that Lisp of yours which you keep rambling about. Even people who leech your money can't keep up with your delusions of Lisp; Reddit, for example, was redone in Python as soon as the mad old grandpa loosened the sack. And that's why Arc is depressing and smells of rot. Rest in peace.
- jwolpert 17y ago
  Wow! Tough words. For a lot of us, Y Combinator is showing us a way forward during troubled times. Paul is definitely not dead. His name and thinking come up nearly every day among my colleagues across many companies. Funny - even though Paul says he is a hacker, it is his impact on business model innovation that will last.
simg 19y ago
I particularly agree with (a) creating simple solutions but even more so with (c) solving problems that actually need to be solved. It’s amazing how often a complex solution can create more problems than it solves and / or completely miss the underlying problem.
pbazant 19y ago
“Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Your essays are not bad, but there are still parts you can take away. Creating a good design is very time consuming. One spends most of the time searching for the onions. PB
puneetht 19y ago
In the 90's people were saying the same things about perl that are now saying about arc.
puneetht 19y ago
In the 90's people were saying the same things about perl that are now saying about arc.
baristabrian 18y ago
As with everything else that I can remember reading by you, I guess it's the fact that you write the way I'd advise people how to talk to me: don't be pedantic [don't treat me like I'm an idiot or just a "child"], and don't speak as though trying to impress me [don't waste time using big words when small ones will do; don't use many words when a few will do]. I like the way you share ideas and concepts with me, the reader and message receiver. Obviously, Paul, the whole is greater or less than the sum of the parts. You some how manage to make points that others couldn't with many more words. It's how you use the English language. It's how you reason and think. I think. I think you annoy the hell out of insecure little twits whose "authority" they cling to like little kids afraid as hell that somebody (a "bully," perhaps?) is going to pry their "binky" (or toy or some other thingy [sic]) out of their sweaty little hands. Or something like that.
pengo 18y ago
Yes yes yes! Once again the astute Mr Graham slices through conventional thinking. I've received a standard reaction to new ideas all my life. In the early seventies I went looking for a sound system with dual cassettes ... "why would anybody want that?". A few years later I wanted to use VHS cassettes as the basis of a multi-track audio recorder ... "why would anybody want that?" In the early nineties I started writing radio automation software that ran on a standard PC ... "why would anybody want that?" All these things (and many others) eventually had their season. And now when I hear that phrase, my ears prick up because I =know= I'm on to something. ::Leigh
jwolpert 17y ago
Simple, Informal, Crude and Fast: Lessons for many things, not just Web 2.0. Small teams of hackers definitely present the fewest problems with this kind of approach, but if people in large, established organizations in fields from mechanical engineering to life science (with the possible exception of virology...which can take longer than a Y Combinator season just to incubate the test vector) don't start applying this approach, they will be overtaken by fast newcomers when instead they could have fostered and benefited from them. http://thethreepercent.com/2009/05/04/paul-graham-simple-informal-crude-and-fast/ http://thethreepercent.com/2009/05/04/paul-graham-simple-inf...
KINSEY 18y ago
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173 points by Darmani 19y ago

333 18y ago

ghgff samp

There's one paragraph in there that I think sums the entire essay. When I read it I was so stuck by it that I put that paragraph on my desktop image (http://www.cocunderground.com/desktop.jpg http://www.cocunderground.com/desktop.jpg). Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

pius 19y ago
I'd add the closing paragraph to this as well: So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong.
- deleted 19y ago
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- ratsbane 19y ago
  Reading PG's essays makes me very happy. Quoting again: Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. Perfect.
  - deleted 19y ago
    [deleted]
papersmith 19y ago
(g) Profit! Hence the gnomes' predicament is solved.

aswanson 19y ago

I remember reading Paul's essays, pre YC. When he wrote the essay announcing it, I remember thinking, "This guy is crazy, all he's gonna get is a bunch of school projects." Sure enough, he did, and wrote about it. I felt vindicated by that, saying to myself, "I knew THAT was going nowhere." People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. After reddit, loopt, zenter, anywhere.fm, etc., however, I don't think I was completely accurate in my prediction....

BrandonM 19y ago
People like to be correct in predicting failure for others, for whatever reason. I know there are a lot of people like this, but there is also a perhaps equally-large number of people who feel the opposite way. Personally, I love to be proven wrong when I predict failure, unless I have some other reason for wanting someone to fail (they use unethical practices, they're my direct competition, etc.).
- aswanson 19y ago
  I know what you mean, and I was happy to be wrong in this case.
- Xichekolas 19y ago
  I think people like to be correct in predicting the failure of crazy-sounding ideas because they don't want to feel like they are missing out on something big. I know I predicted that Google was all hype when it was selling at $200/share and unloaded the few shares I had. I kick myself for it now obviously, and even though it made no financial difference to me whether it sunk to $25 or went up to $600 (since I no longer owned shares), I still couldn't help hoping it would tank so I would feel like I made the correct decision. I think this is really why you don't have to worry about competitors. If your idea is good enough, everyone will think you are crazy/naive. If your idea is simply decent, you'll never pick it anyway (because it's not exciting enough to you) and it will end up getting done by some existing company. Either way whatever you actually choose to work on will be unique until it's proven, by which point no competitor is catching you anyway.

jey 19y ago

"... your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own." Which Feynman quotation is this referring to?

kradic 19y ago
http://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+imagination+of+nature http://www.google.com/search?q=feynman+imagination+of+nature

skenney26 19y ago

If Viaweb didn't process credit card transactions for the first year I'm curious what initially attracted merchants to using it.

BrandonM 19y ago
Maybe the ability to reach customers around the world much cheaper than any other way? Remember that the first (and most of the) customers were already-existing businesses, hence they presumably already had a method for processing transactions. At least, that's my guess.
dkokelley 19y ago
I don't think anyone was really processing credit cards through the web at that point, at least not unless you paid out the nose for a custom system. "Sales" could still be made over the web, you just couldn't receive payment for them - like an online catalog really.
pg 19y ago
They wanted to be able to generate a good-looking site with large numbers of products and a way for people to order them. Till about 1997 online order volumes were so small that it was no problem for merchants to manually punch in credit card nos on their POS terminal.

nostrademons 19y ago

I agree on general principle, but there's a big difference between Viaweb & YCombinator vs. Arc: Market. Viaweb and YC were each aimed at the overlooked low end of a market. Small businesses may not be sexy, but they had a pressing need for a web presence, and the can't write it themselves.. College students and young professionals may not be experienced, but they have a real need for money and advice, and they (usually) can't fund it themselves. Arc, however, is explicitly aimed at the high end. It's meant to be a "LFSP". And smart people can write Arc themselves (and have ;-)). They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves. Hence the contemptuous reaction, and why I think Arc is in more trouble than either Viaweb or YC. It's not really a problem when your peers are contemptuous, because that just means they're less likely to compete with you. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project. If I were in charge of Arc marketing, I'd position it as the "PHP for the ones that PHP forgot". PHP initially got its start as a way to throw a quick & dirty webapp prototype up on the web, and then incrementally refine it. But around version 5, it started getting complex and adding all these features from Java. That's left a vacuum at the bottom of the web language market. Rails and Django tried to fill it, but the average Django user is quite a bit more sophisticated than the average PHP user circa 1999. And Arc's design is already pretty well-suited to throwing a design up on the screen quickly. Right now, the majority of Arc users seem to be disenchanted Lispers. Disenchanted Lispers tend to be smart people, and they also tend to be interested in language design. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. On arclanguage.com, I've seen one person write an app with the language, and several dozen people write enhancements of the language itself, either in the form of macros or as hacks to the interpreter itself.

aston 19y ago
Upmodded for your first half. But Arc is definitely not drop in replacement for PHP. And you can use PHP 5 in basically the same ways you could use PHP 3.
pg 19y ago
They don't need a new programming language; if they wanted one, they could invent it themselves. Where is it, then? Where is the final, perfect Lisp that's so easy to write? What you seem to be saying is that being smart automatically makes people good at language design. And you are just dead wrong. Being smart may make you a good language implementor, but there's little correlation between that and the kind of skills you need to be a good language designer. Some of the worst languages in the world were designed by smart people. It's a big problem when your users are contemptuous, because that means they don't need your project. The Arc users on arclanguage.org don't seem that contemptuous. So instead of doing things with the language, they do things to the language. That seems a good sign to me. Munging the language is what you do with Lisp, like numerical calculations are what you do with Fortran. So what this means to me is that the users are real Lisp hackers, using the language as Lisp is meant to be used. Plus I explicitly said that at this stage I'm mostly interested in the core language, and that I want to hear new ideas in that department.

ldambra 19y ago

The Law of New Inventions by Mike Rozak (game designer) : http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/LawOfNewInventions.htm http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/LawOfNewInventions.htm It fits perfectly with your essay. Good write btw.

jacabado 19y ago

Is it just me or Twitter fits perfectly in that definition?

pg 19y ago
Yes, when Evan came to speak at YC recently I was struck by the similarities. Here was an idea that was literally right under everyone's noses for about 10 years, and everyone ignored it. Evan is a great product designer. That's his secret weapon.
- jacabado 19y ago
  Yesterday I was watching Smith&Jones, Britcom also has much of this, constructing ideas around the stupidly obvious and ignored on the perspective of the comic writer.

Alex3917 19y ago

"When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction." Jeffrey Rosen has some good stuff to say about this in his book The Unwanted Gaze. One of his defenses of the right to privacy is that new ideas often seem wrong at first, especially when they're still only half baked. And because of this, progress is seriously impeded when the government has the ability to go through our journals and sketchbooks at any time. This is especially true in our made-for-TV society where most people won't put more than thirty seconds into trying to understand something, esp. considering the factors PG mentions. He suggests that for these reasons innovation may not be possible in a fully transparent society.

akkartik 19y ago
The govt or anybody being able to read your scrapbook is not the same as them telling you to stop based on it. I've put the book on my list.

edw519 19y ago

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. - Albert Einstein

rtf 19y ago

The saying I have for this negative reaction is "people see only what is in front of them." A good concept with poor presentation will be dismissed, and in the case of a language like Arc, presentation could also be defined to include "number of features, immediate utility, etc." I know my reaction was similar to the crowd, but even so I recognize that it's the wrong thing to look for. If Arc's initial release state could be summed up as "Lisp with some cleaned-up and rearranged features," then it's really not that different from say, Digital Mars D, which is best described as "C++ with some cleaned-up and rearranged features." The difference is, D has a massive compiler backing it, and its scope is unlikely to change. Arc's minimal implementation substance only makes it easier to change tack midway. I've only gradually learned to restrain my sense of ego and take a similarly minimal approach with my own projects(indie games) - my newest process is to always start the final implementation with a text console interface. Besides encouraging better architecture in preparing for a later graphical interface, it's easier to debug the key elements this way than to have "stuff moving on the screen" at 30 or 60FPS and get frustrated figuring out which of those frames is the one where you're getting an error, let alone what routine is causing the problem.

maxwell 19y ago

Awesome essay.

fuzzythinker 19y ago

I like to add a 7th - the ability to ignore problems that are irrelevant to the problem at hand. PG actually mentioned it all over the essay, but seems to have left it out. btw, thanks PG, this essay has a very profound effect for me; makes me rethink some of the "ideas" I have and how I will approach them.

pchristensen 19y ago

For more details, read the Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution.

davidw 19y ago
Or just read a summary of it:-) http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dilemma-the-revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-collins-business-essentials http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dil...
zach 19y ago
Or if you have some time to kill, listen to the author's highly-rated talk on IT Conversations: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail135.html http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail135.html

neilk 19y ago

I like a lot of what this essay says, but I still don't think it applies to Arc. Because the criticisms of Arc would have happened no matter what the design had been. For the most part, Lisp people will never like any modification to the language that changes their pure abstract computation engine into something that more people would want to use. Behold, a Usenet post from 2000 on the notion of a "lispscript" that could compete with perl or awk: http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/brief/why-lisp-will-never-win http://perl.plover.com/yak/12views/samples/brief/why-lisp-wi... That said, I personally have no idea if Arc is all that good or not. I get it, but it doesn't inspire me the way Haskell or Erlang do right now. But Arc seems to be successful by the designer's own standards.

deleted 19y ago
[deleted]

bayareaguy 19y ago

I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly. I'm still trying to get a handle on which of these apply to Arc. Perhaps I'm looking at it the wrong way, but Arc feels a little light in areas (a-c).

pg 19y ago
Arc is a simple solution to the overlooked problem of core language design. http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html http://www.paulgraham.com/core.html
- serhei 19y ago
  In general, at this stage, the amount of flak that Arc has received is so disproportionate to the normal amount of flak that new ideas receive because it hasn't solved any problems that real hackers have encountered, well enough that they'd want to switch to writing programs in it. You haven't really solved the overlooked problem of core language design until people start using your cleaner core language, and to do that you'll have to give people compelling reasons to start using it. If you don't agree, the BeOS people have solved the overlooked problem of operating system design and are on their way to meet you, together with the people who invented Esperanto.
  - pg 19y ago
    It solves the problem hackers face in every program they write, and which high level languages exist to solve: making programs smaller. Try translating some Arc programs into Common Lisp or Scheme and you'll see what I mean. And incidentally, I don't have to give hardened users of existing languages reason enough to switch. There are new people learning to program all the time, and to them, all languages are on a level playing field. If they look at Arc and CL and see that programs are 50% longer in CL, why would they choose CL?
    - bayareaguy 19y ago

skmurphy 19y ago

It's a succinct summary of a method for developing new ideas/products. The closest I have seen for brevity is Bob Bemer (the inventor of ASCII) with "Do Something Small But Useful Now" which he also wrote as ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!) so that it became this sequence: Do Something Do Something Small Do Something Small But Useful Do Something Small But Useful Now see http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/ http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/ for more info

zoltz 19y ago

I think the six-principles approach is great, and it really shows why the initial reaction will always be contemptuous and therefore doesn't mean anything. Of course, not everyone can easily copy the approach, you need to be an original thinker in order to not overlook overlooked problems. I don't understand the last part of the essay about reddit as a classic example. "Tell people what was new", was that an overlooked problem? News agencies have been around for a long time. "Stay out of the way" was only possible because of the user-submission-and-voting system, which seems to me a clever and non-obvious idea. What I like most about this idea is the voting part, it tells me what's interesting, I don't care about whether it's new.

iamelgringo 19y ago

I enjoyed the article, as I enjoy most of Paul's articles. But, I'm coming to the tech world after having worked in the health care industry for 15 years. And, I studied art for 6-7 years, thinking that I could make a career out of it. So, I guess that I have a different perspective on the geek/hacker culture. And, something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this--the nastiness. Paul referenced it in his article, referring to the trolls. I just don't understand why people troll like they do. I didn't understand why people were so up in arms about Paul's trying to write a new language and offer it up for public consumption. I don't understand why people have been so quick to criticize Y Combinator. I don't understand the hating that goes on in language flame wars, or OS flame wars. I understand that people are passionate about technology, and passionate about their language of choice, or OS of choice, but... really. Do people really need to get nasty about it? Why aren't people able to have a discussion about the merits of a language, or strengths and weaknesses without getting personal or mean about it. I just don't understand. A great doctor that I worked with, was explaining to me why he got out of teaching at a medical school. What he said struck a chord with me: The reason that there's so much back-biting and politicking in academic medicine is very simple--it's because the stakes are so low. Which leads me to ask the question--Are the stakes really so low in the technology world, that people are so nasty? I have a hunch that for many trolls, that's really true. I know that shortly after reddit got purchased the trolls made camp and set up a small troll swamp. There are a few cool sub-reddits, though. Why did that happen? Because the stakes became so low.

edw519 19y ago
Interesting angle, but I really don't believe nastiness has much to do with it. We hackers are just dying to let others know how smart we are. It's what makes us tick. So we come here (and other forums and blogs) because most of us have trouble finding peers who even understand what we're talking about. Add in a lack of writing style and the anonymity of the internet, and our puffing and strutting APPEARS to be nastiness. Put us in a room together to discuss the same subjects and I'm sure it would be much more civil. Honestly ask yourself. Whenever you heard someone else getting a compliment for being smart, (Alan made the Dean's list!), (Joe is a great chess player!), (Fred wrote the best program I ever saw!), don't you get JUST A LITTLE BIT JEALOUS. You almost want to scream out, "Hey! What about me? I'm smarter than that!" We hold back in person because we're polite. But we don't hold back here, because most of us understand. Sometimes I think that if you DON'T think like that, maybe you shouldn't be a hacker. Reminds me of an old story that Rabbi Harold Kushner told about a young man trying to temper his competitiveness, so he joined an ashram in Japan. He wrote to his father, "Dad, this environment has helped me evolve to the point of enlightenment where I no longer have to compete with others to achieve my bliss. The meditation has done it. I'm one of the top 5 meditators here, and hopefully, by next year, I'll be Number One." [UPDATE: I just read the comments about this pg essay on Reddit, and realize that it's different over there. They ARE nasty. What's happened to Reddit? Whatever it is, I sure hope it never happens here.]

simplegeek 19y ago

I still wonder why RTM doesn't say anything at all. Does he read HN? I would like to know his point of view, too.

pg 19y ago
I still wonder why RTM doesn't say anything at all. People have been wondering about that since he was a small child.

bouncingsoul 19y ago

If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. I'd like some help interpreting this sentence. Why does the lack of competition make it more likely you'll discover new things? (And what is things referring to?) I assume it means you can attack a problem at a more leisurely pace, so you see solutions you would have missed if you were in a feature-copying war with competitors. But I doubt PG would advocate running your startup leisurely.

Alex3917 19y ago
From No Contest by Alfie Kohn: "Robert L. Helmreich [tested] the relationship between achievement, on the one hand, and such traits as the orientation toward work, mastery (preference for challenging tasks), and competitiveness, on the other. A sample of 103 Ph.D. scientists were rated on these three factors based on a questionnaire. Achievement, meanwhile, was defined in terms of the number of times their work was cited by colleagues. The result was that "the most citations were obtained by those high on the work and mastery but low on the competitiveness scale." This startled Helmreich, who did not expect that competitiveness would have deleterious effect. Could the result be a fluke? He conducted another study, this one involving academic psychologists. The result was the same. He did two more studies, one involving male businessmen, measuring achievement by their salaries, and the other with 1300 male and female undergraduates, using grade point average as the attainment criterion. In both cases he again found a significant negative correlation between competitiveness and achievement. ... But Helmreich did not stop there. As of 1985, he had conducted three more studies. The first compared the standardized achievement tests of fifth- and sixth-graders to their competitiveness. They were negatively correlated. The second examined the relationship between performance of airline pilots and competitiveness. The relationship between the latter and superior performance was negative. The third looked at airline reservation agents and again found a negative correlation between performance and competitiveness. ... Consider the question of artistic creativity. The little research that has been done suggests that competition is just as unhelpful here as it is in promoting creative problem-solving. In one study, seven- to eleven-year-old girls were asked to make "silly" collages, some competing for prizes and some not. Seven artists then independently rated their works on each of 23 dimensions. The result: "Those children who competed for prizes made collages that were significantly less creative than those made by children in the control group." Children in the competitive condition produced works thought to be less spontaneous, less complex, and less varied. ... Consider journalism, a profession that, while no more competitive than many others, is worth exploring by virtue of its unusual visibility to outsiders. The frantic race for news generates terrific levels of anxiety ... on the part of journalists. Can we at least point to better reporting as the result of this competition? Setting reports against one another in a battle for space on the front page or the first block of a television news show probably lowers the quality of journalism in the long run, and so, too, does the contest among news organizations for subscriptions or ratings."

ensignavenger 19y ago

Thanks, Paul! I always enjoy reading your insigts. Some of the best free advice around. You might find that my companies design philosphy (for some reason...) is similiar to yours! www.ensigntech.com

netman21 19y ago

Your point about having a version 1 and iterating quickly based on real world input reminds me of my experience as a mechanical design engineer. The most costly mistakes made in that field resulted from too much design and not enough prototype phases. The typical design process back in the 80's was to meticulously draw every aspect of a component, send it to a machine shop for tooling, get manufactured parts and put them on the test stand. Only then would you discover that the gage was too light, the material was the wrong spec or the welds had to be moved. I introduced the concept of prototype early and often. Actually re-introduced, as this is how most products were engineered in the olden days. Someone would suggest a new gage, weld placement, cross section, and I would don my overalls, head to the shop, cobble up something and demonstrate its feasibility before the draftsmen could decide what size paper to draw it on. When I worked at Chevrolet I took this to the max and prototyped entire vehicles years before the official prototype build phase. When I transitioned to the world of networks and software I was shocked at how little prototyping there is. Website developers would deliver project plans that had two weeks of "QA" built in before the launch date. It was crazy, any major problem uncovered in that two weeks would delay the launch. It is still challenging to get a programmer to demonstrate a prototype early. So, I think you are on to something. Good luck with ARC!

kashif 19y ago

You know PG, you can't discuss Arc beyond a point - the whole discussion gets trivial - not the content but just the fact that there have been so many discussions on the subject that one tends to skip or hurry through it. I think the best response will be your continued work at Arc as opposed to a well written essay.

ivankirigin 19y ago

How does this mesh with "don't try to create trends, find and ride them"? That's advice I've heard a lot. The final note about Reddit seems to say the opposite: "The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it". That is probably incorrect. They found a local maxima in the trend for social news before others spotted it. This doesn't really repudiate anything you say in the essay. But people shouldn't get the idea that just because there is resistance, they are doing something good. There needs to be a reason why the critics fail to see the light for you to claim you're working on an overlooked problem. The trick here is that while you're working on it, you don't know if it something that needs to be solved.

pg 19y ago
How does this mesh with "don't try to create trends, find and ride them"? You mean Joe Kraus's advice? That's advice for making money at something before your funding runs out. If burn rate is a factor, you may not be able to survive a contemptuous initial reaction, even if you're right.
- ivankirigin 19y ago
  Yes, I meant Joe Kraus's advice. It's interesting how I took it to mean something different than you did: a bad idea generally, not just if you don't have enough money for it. I suppose you're right and I only found it general advice because it completely applies to my current state in life. Lots of people make that mistake: "this totally applies to me, it must be good advice generally" After the first $10B, once I start working on a space elevator and robotic asteroid mining, I expect the luxury of a contemptuous initial reaction.

petekennedy 19y ago

Excellent article. I've been reading your essays for well over a year now and am always impressed by your insights.

smithfield 19y ago

The bulk of the programming community substitutes "can we?" for "should we?" Your design philosophy is a result of asking the 'should' question. The work of the 'can' question people piles up opportunities for proper application of the 'should' question. This is one way of determining the trolliness of a person or point of view. The troll is incapable of asking the 'should' question. Love your stuff, Paul.

semigeek 19y ago

>> 'Startup funding meant series A rounds: millions of dollars given to a small number of startups founded by people with established credentials after months of serious, businesslike meetings, on terms described in a document a foot thick.' This is a bit of a stretch in my opinion - there has always been companies taking smaller investments; whether seed from a VC, seed from an individual Angel, or borrowing money from family.

corriganjc 19y ago

The Design principles are solid. Thank you for expressing them lucidly. Personally, I am encountering the same forces, and this essay provides useful arguments.

fattybob 19y ago

great words as ever, best place to find feedback is indeed on hits and seeing who reads, not the comments of those that are too lazy to read. As fro slashdot, it used to be my staring portal to the web, but has been replaced by reddit :-)

blahblah 19y ago

I like Arc, but there's just no way that it follows the six principles laid out here. (a) simple solution - yes (b) to overlooked problem - no. It's just a personal spin on Lisp/Scheme. It covers exactly the same territory. (c) that actually needs to be solved - no. Programmers have many good languages to choose from. Arc is a nice little wrapper on top of Lisp to make it pretty, but any undergrad could do the same thing. (d) deliver them as informally as possible - no. You don't write long essays about a language 5+ years before you show a prototype if "informality" is your goal. (e) starting with a very crude version - yes (f) iterating rapidly - no. You could get a master's degree in computer science in the time it took for the minimal prototype of Arc to show up.

konsl 19y ago

This is an interesting take on (b) overlooked problems: A few years ago, Gary Hamel and colleagues analyzed more than a hundred cases of business innovation to learn why some individuals, at certain points in time, are able to see opportunities that are invisible to everyone else. They learned that you need to pay close attention to four things that usually go unnoticed: 1. Unchallenged orthodoxies—the widely held industry beliefs that blind incumbents to new opportunities. 2. Underleveraged competencies—the “invisible” assets and competencies, locked up in moribund businesses, that can be repurposed as new growth platforms. 3. Underappreciated trends—the nascent discontinuities that can be harnessed to reinvigorate old business models and create new ones. 4. Unarticulated needs—the frustrations and inconveniences that customers take for granted, and industry stalwarts have thus far failed to address. original @ http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel/2008/01/innovation_hacker.html http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/hamel/2008/01/innovation_ha...)

skmurphy 19y ago
This is a great list and nicely expands "(b) overlooked problems." In his book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" Peter Drucker offered the following observation on the frame of mind need to spot opportunities for innovation. "Innovation requires us to systematically identify changes that have already occurred but whose full effects have not yet been felt, and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires existing companies to abandon rather than defend yesterday." He goes on to suggest seven places to search systematically for opportunities The Unexpected The Incongruous Weak Link In Existing Process Industry Or Market Structure Change Demographics: Size, Age Structure New Zeitgeist: Perception, Mood, Meaning New Knowledge

Mistone 19y ago

the crux of the essay is the process Paul refers to(steps a-e). This model gives me great confidence that we are on the right track, and while we were not able to launch as fast as we would have liked we still see the basic unsolved, overlooked, problem that inspired us to begin. At the same taime its what annoyed me about being passed up last funding round, if this is how they judged ideas, how could they have glossed over us. Oh well, until we are a success they where correct. @pg: thanks for the inspiration and clarity as always

ojbyrne 19y ago

Reddit started out as a blatant copy of digg, which was 6 months old when reddit launched. I think that sort of invalidates large parts of this essay. Some digg copy from Dec. 2004: "What's Digg? Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do." Reddit copy from August 2005: "A source for what's new and popular on the web--customized for you. We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it. All of the content on reddit is from users who are rewarded for good submissions (and punished for bad ones) by their peers. You decide what appears on your front page and simultaneously, which submissions rise to fame or fall into obscurity." And, yes, I realize there was nothing completely original about digg, the idea was originally done by kuro5hin, yadda, yadda, and I actually have plenty of respect for PG and the reddit guys. I'm just saying....

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mroman 19y ago

Thank you for yet another great essay Mr. Graham . . . I think that - in a sense - your essays are programs for human minds.

kizildere 19y ago

Great essay Paul, I especially liked this part: "Don't worry about trying to look corporate, the product is what wins in the long run." This is so true! I consider this one of the top reasons many startups fail but at the same time, this is a result of the paradox of offline vs. online culture as it still holds true that many offline businesses would fail without looking corporate. Its a transition so we'll be fine in a couple years. Do you agree? Basar Kizildere Istanbul, Turkey

steelstonehenge 19y ago

Hi Paul: My father-in-law was an inventor. His one claim to fame was a cheap plastic pulley-like thing you could stick on the bottom of a telephone, and wrap the cord around it. It was called a "Cord Caddy." He made a small...no a medium fortune on this in the early 1970s. I went to a few home trade shows in L.A. with him. The creative energy at these places was palpable. (I even got to meet Ron Popeil there once). You'd go around the booths, see all these incredibly simple....no STUPIDLY simple things all these guys were making fortunes at. I'd mutter at myself, "Heck, anybody can come up with this crap." And then a voice from above thundered down, and slapped me upside the head. My ears are ringing thirty years later. The Voice from above said, "Yes...but you DIDN'T, did you!" That's the secret. ANYONE can come up with stuff...but almost nobody does. The real inventors in this country are a minuscule percentage of the population who actually DO something with their dumb ideas. I have unmitigated respect for Ron Popeil and his ilk, regardless of the obnoxious late night commercials. eric

qwerty 19y ago

IMHO the reason behind the response to Arc is "underwhelming" - because the anticipation has been built for 5 years, but it turns out the implementation is a "just" set of macros. And it certainly don't fit the "iterate rapidly" concept. Now - this is not a criticism of PG's work - on the contrary, I believe his design matches up with his philosophy in On Lisp very well. Looking past how the process, people now actually start to play with the language and make use of it. What I'm mostly interested though - are the learning lessons if PG is willing to share them. Why did it take as long as it had? Is it because this is not his day job, or are there additional design changes or problems that he has to solve along the way, etc. Getting a sense of that will shed light for other aspiring developers. I for one tend to try to shoot for just the right things and have scratched quite a few prototypes so I can go for the perfect one, so would sure love to hear from PG on his experiences.

GT 19y ago

but Hamming (www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html ) in "Your and your research" says exactly opposite thing: "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" Why both appoaches work?

joshua_steffan 19y ago

Graham, When will you stop ranting about Viaweb? I understand it was your single achievement, but it was essentially a fluke. There were hundreds of startups trying, one of them got lucky. And where's Viaweb now? It was a long time ago, and you should considering moving on with your life. Now, as a self-proclaimed nerd, you know of Gary Gygax? Well, if Viaweb was your D&D, YC is your Lejendary Adventures: a heartbreaking attempt of a spent man to recreate his former success. And just as Gygax died, Arc is your death. You're dead, Paul. You're as dead as that Lisp of yours which you keep rambling about. Even people who leech your money can't keep up with your delusions of Lisp; Reddit, for example, was redone in Python as soon as the mad old grandpa loosened the sack. And that's why Arc is depressing and smells of rot. Rest in peace.

jwolpert 17y ago
Wow! Tough words. For a lot of us, Y Combinator is showing us a way forward during troubled times. Paul is definitely not dead. His name and thinking come up nearly every day among my colleagues across many companies. Funny - even though Paul says he is a hacker, it is his impact on business model innovation that will last.

simg 19y ago

I particularly agree with (a) creating simple solutions but even more so with (c) solving problems that actually need to be solved. It’s amazing how often a complex solution can create more problems than it solves and / or completely miss the underlying problem.

pbazant 19y ago

“Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Your essays are not bad, but there are still parts you can take away. Creating a good design is very time consuming. One spends most of the time searching for the onions. PB

puneetht 19y ago

In the 90's people were saying the same things about perl that are now saying about arc.

puneetht 19y ago

In the 90's people were saying the same things about perl that are now saying about arc.

baristabrian 18y ago

As with everything else that I can remember reading by you, I guess it's the fact that you write the way I'd advise people how to talk to me: don't be pedantic [don't treat me like I'm an idiot or just a "child"], and don't speak as though trying to impress me [don't waste time using big words when small ones will do; don't use many words when a few will do]. I like the way you share ideas and concepts with me, the reader and message receiver. Obviously, Paul, the whole is greater or less than the sum of the parts. You some how manage to make points that others couldn't with many more words. It's how you use the English language. It's how you reason and think. I think. I think you annoy the hell out of insecure little twits whose "authority" they cling to like little kids afraid as hell that somebody (a "bully," perhaps?) is going to pry their "binky" (or toy or some other thingy [sic]) out of their sweaty little hands. Or something like that.

pengo 18y ago

Yes yes yes! Once again the astute Mr Graham slices through conventional thinking. I've received a standard reaction to new ideas all my life. In the early seventies I went looking for a sound system with dual cassettes ... "why would anybody want that?". A few years later I wanted to use VHS cassettes as the basis of a multi-track audio recorder ... "why would anybody want that?" In the early nineties I started writing radio automation software that ran on a standard PC ... "why would anybody want that?" All these things (and many others) eventually had their season. And now when I hear that phrase, my ears prick up because I =know= I'm on to something. ::Leigh

jwolpert 17y ago

Simple, Informal, Crude and Fast: Lessons for many things, not just Web 2.0. Small teams of hackers definitely present the fewest problems with this kind of approach, but if people in large, established organizations in fields from mechanical engineering to life science (with the possible exception of virology...which can take longer than a Y Combinator season just to incubate the test vector) don't start applying this approach, they will be overtaken by fast newcomers when instead they could have fostered and benefited from them. http://thethreepercent.com/2009/05/04/paul-graham-simple-informal-crude-and-fast/ http://thethreepercent.com/2009/05/04/paul-graham-simple-inf...

KINSEY 18y ago

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