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Things Paul Graham is wrong about
- scottkrager 16y ago"5. You don't have to take notes" I agree with that one, I love taking notes at events and conferences. After a one-day conference I'll end up with a few pages of notes, and when I get home I type those into a few actionable items, bam!
- jgershen 16y agoExcept that's not something that PG says, in general. I think that in this case, he was pretty clearly saying "the talk will be online" in an idiomatic manner. In my experience PG errs toward the side of putting too much emphasis on taking notes, honestly. (This is probably because he works better when he takes notes, and he's seen a lot of YC founders forget/ignore his advice when they don't write it down.)
- j_baker 16y agoPersonally, I find notes are a distraction. Every time I try to take notes while someone is talking, I find myself more focused on writing things down than actually trying to comprehend what they're saying.
- jhawk28 16y agoThere have been studies that have found the opposite. If you write things down, you are more focused on writing/reading than actually listening to the speaker. Its the repetition that actually helps you remember, so reading the published notes afterwards or listening to the recording would be best.
- equivalence 16y agoI'm sure many people do benefit from taking notes but I'm convinced that pg most likely wasn't dismissing note taking in general. I think he was more likely to be meaning you don't need to write down every word he says, akin to almost transcribing the talk - well this was my take on it anyway. Basically he was implying that the substance of the talk will appear in a later essay, which it did. To me, with this point in particular, the author of the article appears to be trying to find something (anything?) to take issue with, which in my opinion makes me value his other points a little less favourably.
- csallen 16y ago>> 2. The returns on angel investing are bimodal You're misinterpreting PG's stance here. This only applies this to VCs and super-angels, not to regular angel investors like yourself. VCs and SAs are obligated to have a much larger return on their investments in order to make the funds they raise a success. This is done via one or two big winners, so they're hoping for 1000x. >> 3. Valuations don't matter Similarly, this is aimed at VCs and SAs, not you. And of course you have to interpret the phrase as "Valuations don't matter [within reason]." Clearly you can think of a high enough number where the valuations should begin to matter to these people, but the point is that they're not at those levels right now. >> I have a net negative return because of one spectacular failure (from which I have learned a lot but that's another story). I'd love to read a blog post on that experience, and what made it different from your other successful investments.
- lisper 16y agoThe short version: it was my very first private investment. I decided I should diversify, get out of tech and into something more traditional and relatively safe. So I decided to get into real estate. This was in 2006. You can guess how that turned out.
- Jun8 16y ago+1 not because I agree with everything but we have to have some dissenting voices (event when they're a little simplistic, like this one) to make progress.
- lisper 16y agoThanks.
- poet 16y agoI didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong. Paul is talking about abstracting efficiency away into the compiler and presenting the programmer with a more elegant interface. As an example, Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. Not only in the author completely missing Paul's point (efficiently is unimportant at the axiomatic level), the author is incorrectly applying the essay to business operations instead of programming languages. In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation.
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- kenjackson 16y agoThe ironic thing is one of the things that would help my productivity the most is a compiler that generated ridiculously efficient code. Consistently the hard technical problems are performance problems. Everything else pales in comparison (from a technical perspective).
- jules 16y agoI think most of what you want is entirely possible with current compiler technology. It is unfortunate that most of the effort is currently directed at optimizing hard to reason about low level code.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- silentbicycle 16y ago> Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. The sort of operations commonly done on strings only have a small overlap with list operations, though. I'm all for orthogonality in a language when it's practical, but I'm not sure that one is a good trade-off. Erlang does that, and aside from space issues (on 64-bit, a linked list of character code ints means 16 bytes per char, due to alignment), it's kind of awkward. While using pattern matching on individual chars is nice, in those cases it probably makes more sense to tokenize the strings into atoms/tuples via REs, and then pattern-match on those instead. Binaries can also be used as pseudo-strings, but to me it feels like two half-solutions. (And its shell's printing a list of ints as chars when they're printable 7-bit ASCII characters is a bit odd.) Having atoms (AKA symbols) helps, though. Incidentally, Lua's strings are all immutable atoms. That's practical most of the time, but occasionally a major liability. Lua has the obvious option of just using a different string implementation via userdata when it's a problem, though, so it can make such a daring trade-off. Of course, just saving strings as arrays with a \0 at the end is also pretty brittle.
- audionerd 16y agoWhy stop at five??
- lisper 16y agoBecause I agree with Paul on almost everything else. And in fact, I should have stopped at four. (Maybe I should have stopped at zero.)
- ph0rque 16y agoI think you did well to write this article, although if you zoom out one or two levels of abstraction, you would be in agreement on most, if not all points.
- mgrouchy 16y agoSo really the name of this article should be "Five things that Paul Graham and I don't Agree on", not as flashy a title, but probably more accurate.
- klochner 16y agoSo you expected the article to be devoid of opinion?
- hugh3 16y agoI'm pretty sure that "Five things Paul Graham is wrong about" is pretty much the absolute optimal title for an HN linkbait post. The content is hardly important. Five point list plus argumentative assertions plus picking a fight with pg? Absolute memetically engineered brilliance. Congratulations, Mr Rondam, whoever you are.
- dwwoelfel 16y agoA quote from pg: "If you wanted to be that accurate, you could prepend 'I think' to every statement in every essay written. That's implicit, except in proofs." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820952 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820952
- mgrouchy 16y agoGood point. I guess I was nitpicking.
- jgershen 16y agoActually, I think that with the possible exception of #2 (which can be debated extensively) these are not "things that Paul Graham is wrong about". They are "places where Paul Graham used hyperbole to make a point." I disagree with PG on a number of issues, but this post completely missed the point.
- jpwagner 16y ago"why [so-and-so] is wrong" is a great way to get your stuff read, but is so typically devoid of content and full of misunderstanding that i've grown to hate this type of post. the author clearly seems to misunderstand that PG's "rules" are simply ways to mentally lower the barriers to making something: 1. efficiency doesn't matter...as the author says, it matters later. so then get to work NOW 2. the returns on angel investing are bimodal...again, the simplification is used to motivate early stage startups to look for funding 3. valuations don't matter...the author's counterexample is ridiculous. PG's point is don't obsess if you're worth 14 mill or 16 mill, just get to work 4. investors who don't want to be first movers are assholes...i suppose this is the post the author wanted to write but didn't think it had enough content 5. you don't have to take notes...all PG was saying was: I'm posting this talk online. take notes if it helps you, you can think for yourself
- deathflute 16y agoWell said. You basically wrote what I would have attempted to write. Taking statements out of context is like overfitting the data and leads to poor generalization.
- dpavlenkov 16y agoNow I know what to put in the title to get my stuff read.
- chrischen 16y ago> but the act of writing helps you remember what was said. I hate it when people make this assumption because for me this is not true. When I take notes I stop comprehending what is being said because the act of transcribing becomes mechanical. I also write slow so I start to lag behind what's being said. Is there any research for this because I would like to be a test subject and prove them wrong.
- drusenko 16y agoI agree completely with you, and presume that, as in most things, people are different. I've personally found that intensely concentrating on what is said and actively engaging in thinking about it is the most effective way for me to not only remember what is said, but come up with interesting side-thoughts and insights about my own situation in the process. Writing is just mechanical to me and prevents me from properly concentrating on what is said.
- jamesbritt 16y agoI've had the same problem in various situations, most notably my linear algebra class in college. After a few classes I realized that if I took notes I would lose track of what the teacher was saying; I had to shift my attention to the act of writing. he moved so fast that it was a choice of pay attention or take notes. I opted for "pay attention". While I could recall few details I did much better absorbing essential concepts and abstracts. OTOH, at conferences I've been trying to close the laptop and take notes using pen and paper. I get more out of the talks this way, but it works because the information density is lower than my math course. And I don't take a whole lot of notes, but try to jot down key points or things that might help trigger some recall later. I figure I can Google for stuff if all I have are some keywords written down, so I don't have to notate whole sentences.
- lmkg 16y agoThere's a difference between taking notes and transcribing, and people who benefit from and proselytize taking notes tend to be very far from the transcribing end of the spectrum. People who are the most effective note-takers tend to synthesize what they're hearing and only write down key points. While the synthesized notes are smaller and therefore faster to write, the real benefit comes from the act of synthesis itself. It forces a level of understanding that the listener wouldn't be forced to attain were it not for taking the notes. Sadly, there's very little emphasis on what it means to take good notes, or how to go about doing it. I suspect that good note-takers don't even realize that there's a difference between notes and transcripts, so when they promote note-taking as a study tool they neglect to mention a critical step. You probably could become a good note-taker with some practice, and would benefit from it, but if you're not still in school I doubt it would be worth your time.
- pg 16y agoThis seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said: 1. A couple quotes from the essay in which he claims I said efficiency doesn't matter (http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html): "And yet some applications will still demand speed." "Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it." 2/3. He claims I said x, then at the end concedes I actually said -x. This latter I "grudgingly conceded?" It was arguably the single biggest theme of that talk, that the super-angels might have a winning model without getting big hits. 4. I said assholes are an instance of people who invest late, not that the two are identical. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670) 5. I agree note-taking has benefits other than recording things. In fact I've written about the phenomenon before. I just meant that people didn't have to take notes to record what I said.
- lisper 16y agoCouple of things for the record: 1. I may well have misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said. But it was not deliberate. 2. I concede that point #5 was unfair. It occurred to me as I was writing and watching the video, and I decided to add it on the spur of the moment. I should have thought about it more carefully. I've added an update to that effect.
- Retric 16y agoI'd much rather have a 10x return in one year than a 100x return in three (or five or ten, which are more typical numbers). The above is a stupid exaggeration. It only approximates the truth if your average return is more than 3x per year. (Ok, the 10 year example works if your expected safe ROI is 30% per year over 9 years also works, but good luck with that.)
- Retric 16y agoThe article was written by someone that has seen a net loss by investing in start ups. Overall this is fairly common for the industry. It's vary easy to see some 10x returns and think you know what you are doing even if you are not really making any money but that's just conformation bias. So while I apologies for using stupid, he is really giving poor advice.
- zachbeane 16y agoSee also: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- byrneseyeview 16y agoThe last round of YC companies was getting $10M valuations, an order of magnitude over a few years ago, under the valuations-don't-matter mantra. Are these the valuations that they're getting from YC, or from investors post-YC? If post-YC, couldn't this be due largely to more of the companies being Ramen Profitable? If they raise money after four months rather than three, they've been growing (perhaps at an exponential rate) for 33% longer.
- drusenko 16y agoIt's a false comparison. No companies in my round (W07) or before that I'm aware of got anywhere near as low as $1M valuations... For the $500-800k raised that is still popular, "OK" was a $2M pre valuation and "amazing" would have been $5M. The $10M valuations today for $500-800k (if there are any) are definitely in the "amazing" range, so it's somewhere around a 2x increase. That could definitely be explained by a more mature set of companies, or companies attacking larger problems.
- jimbokun 16y agoOr better YC brand recognition?
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoBut if you take "Paul Graham" out of the article, and say "5 things that are wrong", then its pretty much correct. So perhaps the point was to debunk "misinterpretations" of these statements. Unfortunately done as a personal commentary.
- hasenj 16y agoI have my own list of things I disagree with PG about, none of them was on this list. Every one can make such a list, and if they did, then everything PG ever said will end up on somebody's list.
- tlrobinson 16y ago"Taking notes serves not only to make a non-volatile record of what was said, but the act of writing helps you remember what was said" Maybe I was just a bad note taker, but whenever I took notes in college I always ended up focusing more on writing the notes than paying attention to what was being said and thinking critically about it.
- andreshb 16y agoHappened to me too, I gave up on taking notes very early on. Whenever I did take notes, I never went back to them. Plus, everything else was found in the books/literature/online
- misterm 16y agoI think Paul is wrong about further stratifying the Lisp community.
- qeorge 16y ago#3 seems particularly pedantic. I thought pg's argument was pretty clear: Angel investing is like betting on long shots. You're arguing with the bookie over whether the odds should be 95-to-1 or 100-to-1, when you should be worrying about whether the horse can win the race at all.
- yoak 16y agoSeriously, note-taking? I aspire to reach the point where my statement about whether or not my audience should take notes is one of the top five things I'm wrong about.
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- bhiggins 16y agohe's also wrong about when to use continuations