11 ms·

Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

321 points by brianr 15y ago

derwiki 15y ago
Ongoing diagnosis seems simliar to one of the recent X-Prizes: http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/ http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/ And the idea of the X-Prize seems to be mostly in-line with the spirit of Y Combinator. I only last night saw all the current X-Prizes and am pretty impressed.
agumonkey 15y ago
+1 for a more continuous medical system. I'd be curious to see the percentage of deaths caused by delayed diagnostic. Genomics prices are heading down, let's make it easy, fast, and integrative.
endeavor 15y ago
"find the tiny thing that turns into the gigantic idea" I like this, or it at least validates some of my thinking. All of my startup ideas are small and modest, something that will help me and maybe some people like me. But I have no idea where the idea will take me...
- mishmax 15y ago
  "tiny thing -> gigantic idea" + "maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially", could suck us in however to one of PG's 'mistake founders made': "Marginal Niche" (from http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html). So I guess a question is how to distinguish between marginal niche, and something small in a huge market. I guess it's market size and gut feel of potential.
mahmoudimus 15y ago
Thanks for this! Lots of wisdom here. This one particularly rings very true: "Only way to get a product visionary as the CEO of a company is to start it and not get fired." From the same part in the article, "None of the existing players will – not run by product visionaries." Later elaborated on as: "just have to be better than samsung, hp, motorola – not so hard" Doesn't this in itself bring an interesting question? Why is that those companies cannot innovate or have visionaries? Surely, they must. Maybe that's another opportunity though. How to find the visionaries in your company and reward them for doing so?
- a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
  Size makes it impossible. If you've ever worked at a sizable company then you understand this, if not explicitly. The work of an employee becomes more and more to integrate with the machine, and less and less to think independently and innovatively. Follow the procedures. Know what forms are needed. Know who's buyoff is needed for what. Go to the break room when there's donuts celebrating the release of R145.8. The best a large company can hope for is a skunkworks.
larsberg 15y ago
Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done the startup sold for lots of money, big smash-hit video games, part of the i* device releases from day 1, etc. All of the faculty I know really love it as well. Certainly, I hear bad things from the assistant (untenured) faculty, but all of the folks I meet who've made it over the hurdle seem to really love their work and have a lot of fun. Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Or is my circle of friends and programming languages researchers just a bunch of weirdos?
- kmfrk 15y ago
  I think there's something to be said for considering pg's approach for non-American universities outside the top rankings. I get the impression that the best American universities are perfectly fine, and then some.
- shmageggy 15y ago
  That point also struck me as odd considering he later pitches the idea of making a product to abstract away paralellism... a problem that would certainly be out of reach to all but the most educated (read: PhD from a good university).
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  > Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Yes.
  - goldmab 15y ago
    Really? All of them? How do you know?
  - kenrikm 15y ago
    I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the personality of the person.
andrewparker 15y ago
Anyone have a video link? Google came up empty for me
- rbanffy 15y ago
  It will probably show up on blip.tv. It also offers a very good iPod compatible RSS. There is already an excellent collection on http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011 http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011
why-el 15y ago
I think another argument against universities would be the growing expectations they impose on students. The sort of academic inflation we see today, where people are expected to go from bachelors to masters to phds regardless of whether that is relevant to them, or better yet, to the industry they are targeting.
AceJohnny2 15y ago
A nitpick: don’t try to identify a precise thing in the future. better model: columbus. “there’s something west. i’ll sail westward”. I bristle at seeing Colombus propped up as a model. The guy was wrong (he thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, so attempted to sail west as a shorter route to the East Indies), wrong (he discovered the Carribeans, not mainland America), wrong (he still thought he found the East Indies, i.e. south-east asia!). But alas, actual truth carries less rhetorical power than popular myths.
- kennystone 15y ago
  You're missing it dude. Columbus' conclusion was wrong when he started, but he had the right instincts to start sailing. This is what PG is saying - you don't know the future, so start sailing in an interesting direction and maybe you'll find something big.
  - pstuart 15y ago
    Something about a pivot in there too....
  - AceJohnny2 15y ago
    I see your (and PG's) point, and I think he tied it to a terrible example. Basically, Colombus won big despite being wrong on so many aspects. In truth he was just very (incredibly) lucky. Thus I take the point as "do something stupid, you might just get lucky on something unrelated!". But I understand that PG's real point is "trust your instincts, don't listen to the naysayers, but adapt to the circumstances".
    - saraid216 15y ago
      I don't think it should be necessary to be right about a lot of aspects. Going out and discovering how thoroughly wrong you are is a huge achievement.
      - jarek 15y ago
hallnoates 15y ago
> dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). don’t worry about doing something constraining in the short term, because if you don’t succeed in the short term there won’t be a long term Umm, search is just fine thank you. I could not survive without Google currently. The only thing I don't like about them is the lack of good customer support and the way they tend to develop unintuitive things with poor documentation (appengine was hard as hell to develop to, Android is getting better, but still they don't have a Rails-style "get up to speed" doc- they have a long way to go) But search is not their problem or mine. > 2. replace email > inbox is a todo list. No, it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous communication and file transfer. If you're using it as a TODO list, you're doing it wrong. > powerful people are in pain because of email. that’s an opportunity. B.S. Email has survived Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave (cough)... > whatever you build, make it fast. gmail has become painfully slow. Maybe on a Pentium III. It isn't slow for me though. > 3. replace universities Good idea, but won't happen. The problem is any business/institution that gets continuous revenue without having to be accountable. Universities suck because they don't have to provide what they are needed for, they only have to compete with each other. The service the universities should provide is the preparation of its students for the betterment of the world. However, what this means is debatable, and the hippies of the 60s that grew up in an environment where they didn't have to work their asses off (like the teenagers of the depression era) are the ones teaching our kids how to feel better about themselves by building a hut in a 3rd world country. > 4. kill hollywood The studios are the only ones that really know how to produce. Music, T.V. and movies are all about production. The YouTube era won't last forever. It is only a matter of time before they get a full handle on things again. > 5. a new apple Apple is still on top of the consumer market. Solve problems that need solving in the way you feel is best. Don't work hard to be something else. Apple didn't. > 6. bring back the old moore’s law >...it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu. As an analogy, why don't we make Ruby look like 8086 programming? Parallel computing is different- you can't solve problems with the same mentality.
- coffeemug 15y ago
  > inbox is a todo list. No it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous communication and file transfer. If you're using it as a TODO list, you're doing it wrong. That means most business users of e-mail are doing it wrong. Take a sample of heavy e-mail users (managers, sales people, marketing, etc.) and ten out of ten will tell you that they're inundated by e-mail, and that it is a defacto todo list. E-mail is a giant problem for everyone who needs to communicate with a large number of people professionally, and "you're doing it wrong" is not the answer. Using e-mail as a todo list is the path of least resistance, so it's the only viable option for most people right now, and it sucks. It needs to (and will) get fixed. In general, it's easy to go through any list of ideas and dismiss them. All of these ideas seem sensible to me. They're vague by design, many of them will likely take a very different shape, but it's a good list of general directions to explore. TL;DR don't be a cynic, be a builder.
spdy 15y ago
http://streamti.me/ http://streamti.me/ Livestream from PyCon 2012 It gets better every year :)
YooLi 15y ago
Is this available in video format? I can't help but think reading this is taking something out of context or missing information. Quick glance: 1. dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). - Like Google Code Search? That didn't turn out too well. 2. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. - What? I use email to converse with people, not to list what I need to do. Occasionally I will send myself a reminder mail with a list of TODOs, but my email inbox is definitely not a todo list. 5. his friend from apple: there will be no new good stuff post-steve jobs. - Is his friend Tim Cook? Isn't Apple famous for secrecy even inside Apple or do all 9000+ employees in Cupertino know what's in the pipeline? Etc.
- anateus 15y ago
  Going to address only #2: My understanding is that what he means is that even a social totally "conversational" message is a todo item of "read me". Less "frivolous" emails tend to either contains direct action items or imply action items that must be taken. PG wishes that aspect be more explicit in order to gain more control over it.
- patrickod 15y ago
  https://twitter.com/jessenoller/statuses/173365958767935490 https://twitter.com/jessenoller/statuses/173365958767935490 According to Jesse Noller the talks are being recorded
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- kenrikm 15y ago
  I would disagree with #2, At work my email inbox is certainly a todo list. I use IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Forums to converse. Actually 99% of my personal email is companies sending me updates (we got your online payment etc.) It's funny that I read this now, during my lunch hour I was pondering over how email is broken and needs to be replaced I actually came up a few few innovative ideas but there's more to it. I don't however think that our curent Email system will be around forever, instead of a static thing that you receive it will will be more like a feed that can be paused and saved off to different tasks that could theoretically automatically handle the task for you. (FEED: Credit Card Statement just posted - You: Siri pay the bill from account XYZ)
davidkobilnyk 15y ago
I took the part about email being a todo list to mean that, it's inherently a todo list in the sense that it's a list of messages you have to deal with. You don't have to purposefully use it as a todo list for it to effectively be one.
bambax 15y ago
> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow need to store but that you will never respond to (they often come from aptly-named "no reply" addresses; but mailing lists are part of it too) 4. Random stuff (close to spam, but not really): things you have to read because they may be important, but usually aren't Gmail is optimized for #1 and does a good job at it. Lately it started to address #4 by trying to automatically detect "important" email; in my opinion this doesn't work well, but it could eventually work. AFAIK nobody is seriously trying to solve #2 and #3, and in my experience #3 and #4 cause most of the clutter. Which makes #3 the most urgent problem with the highest ROI. What if you could use a special email address for "read-only email" that would receive #3 mail and deal with it: - organize it automatically by sender (or "topic") and period (not by subject / conversation / date: all my utility bills of one year are ONE object and not a dozen different conversations, for example) - save all attachments (that deserve it) as PDFs - notify you only when necessary (not easy) - etc. I've been toying with mailgun today, and it seems building a first version of this isn't out of reach; I'd be very interested to exchange ideas on this subject.
- robfig 15y ago
  My approach to #3 in gmail is to have filters that auto-archive, and then use multiple inboxes to show them under my main inbox email.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  The bigger problem is that right now the whole computer using experience is organized around finding information. Think about it, how many people do you know who have have their browser homepage set to their email, Google, Google News, or some sort of news aggregator? Virtually everyone. Why is this the case? Probably because we've only been able to get this firehouse of information for a relatively short period of time, so it's new and interesting. I think the bigger opportunity is to step back and think about what our homepages will look like in 50 years. Somehow I doubt it will have anything to do with finding basic facts. Finding a better way to organize spam is thinking too small, I think you need to figure out a better way to integrate conversations and information into our broader life goals and daily lives.
AmericanOP 15y ago
I keep hearing how difficult it is to build a standalone email client which integrates with gmail. Does anybody have a link to any good discussions for why it's so hard?
- breckinloggins 15y ago
  - There is no "gmail" API. It either looks like imap/smtp to your app, or pop3/smtp. - POP3 is completely braindead, so moving on... - Imap doesn't natively expose many gmail features. imap doesn't know about "Archiving" and "Labelling", so you have to map those to things like deleting and folders. There's an impedance mismatch. - Exposing a search interface with all the functionality and responsiveness of the web app is painful. Sparrow does it nicely, in my opinion. - You sometimes can't login and don't know why. Sparrow does this badly. Once, Sparrow just started putting red dots on my account and all it said was "authentication failure". I actually had to dig in to Sparrow's (thankfully provided) JSON logs to see that the error message was that "non web clients are locked out on your account". In turn, I had to just KNOW that this meant I had to do Google's unlock captcha. But they don't make that easy to find, I had to google it. Imagine my mom trying to troubleshoot that. I don't think so. - Enabling 3rd party access to gmail via Imap is not a trivial exercise for the non-technically inclined. Even more so if you have two-factor authentication turned on. Imagine my mom trying to set that up. I don't think so. - Imap and SMTP aren't the most trivial of protocols to implement correctly and completely. - Stupid little things. Like, right now if I want to have my Google Voice number ring to Google Chat, I have to have my GMail window open in the browser (someone correct me if there's a better way). If I already have it up just so I can receive phone calls, why do I ALSO want to have a standalone email client open?
  - tdfx 15y ago
    Making/receiving calls in Gmail is the reason I stick with the web client. I don't actually use the chat much, but I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Google Voice's integration with Gmail.
    - pbreit 15y ago
joering2 15y ago
> 2. replace email. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I think what he actually meant is that if you logon to your mailbox, you see threads of stuff to do. Hence, your mailbox with names, subjects and content is really a "todo" for the day/week/etc. I think, in the near future, we humans will be a creating protocols on our own. We will be creating our own protocols and "pushing" data, instead of "pulling" it from the web, like it is right now. In my spare time, I am actually working on a paper covering that. I call it "hapi": Humans with Application Programming Interface. Will be glad to share more when its done.
xxiao 15y ago
waste of my time, frankly
lr 15y ago
6. bring back the old moore’s law I'll have to dig up my BeOS Bible this weekend, but I though the BeOS solved this problem over 15 years ago. I have been floored for years that chip makers keep telling developers to write code to work with multiple CPUs. If those developers are OS developers, then fine. But application developers? No way. This is the job of the OS!
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I'm curious. How did BeOS solve this problem?
  - sounds 15y ago
    BeOS did several things, I'll throw out the obvious one: Separate the UI thread from main() (the thread doing the core app logic). Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads. To the original poster, I'd like to point out that BeOS didn't (and Haiku doesn't) use a different compiler. What pg was saying was that we need a better compiler + language. Right now the programmer must manage every detail of the threads. A few abstractions are available - OpenMP, Apple's Grand Central Dispatch, etc. They don't really make highly parallel implementations though. The field is ripe for disruption. Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language.
    - rbanffy 15y ago
      > Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads. It's an interesting idea. It would be trivial to write boilerplate like this so that when you create a new .c file, it will start with a basic multi-threaded application. I remember seeing some parallel FORTRAN code in the late 80's with things like loops explicitly marked for parallel execution and other tricks. The downside is that debugging mutable state across multiple threads is a bitch. It's not something I would wish to my worst enemy. > Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language. I have been playing with the idea of using Verilog or VHDL to express computer programs... Did nothing, but it would be an interesting thing to test.
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pron 15y ago
Everything here could be summarized under the headline "solve people's annoying, day-to-day problems (in an original manner)". There are some great perspectives here, but I have a (little) problem with the premise of "solve people's annoying problems". I understand that this probably was a business talk to people interested in entrepreneurship, and, certainly this is great advice for people wanting to build a profitable business. But in the end, this is all it is: "how to make lots of money from software? Answer: solve people's annoying problems". In a society where engineers are arguably playing an increasingly important role, I think this outlook is too limited. This perspective is what I would expect in a CPA convention. If engineers are so smart, powerful and essential, is this what you want to inspire them to do? Have them make cooler gadgets, easier "content consumption experience", better to-do lists to make people more "productive" and, lastly, possibly provide better health so that they would live longer to buy more gadgets and "consume" more "content"? If engineers are so smart, powerful and essential, why not inspire them to find ways to alleviate poverty and promote justice, education and equality? Well, you say, this is not a job for engineers. Well, if engineers are expected to think of new ways to book sleeping arrangements or sell clothes, their insight can surely be turned to loftier goals. I don't want to be caught saying anything positive about Facebook, but for better or worse, they have changed the way people around the world communicate with each other, compete with each other, and see themselves as part of society. So, yes, engineers are certainly capable of achieving some great feats. Many lawyers make lots of money. Lots. And probably many of them became lawyers for that purpose. But It's hard for me to imagine - and maybe I'm wrong about this - but it's hard for me to imagine a well known lawyer delivering a keynote speech at a lawyers convention, where his main points are tips for making lots of money. Lawyers may be hypocritical (and they are), but at least many of them separate their business goals from their sources of inspiration. So why should engineers be inspired only by business tips? Is money the main source of inspiration for us? Doctors and lawyers make money, too, but they aspire for - or, at least, are inspired by - more. Even writers, directors and actors aspire for more than making money, or even "delivering content" or providing entertainment. They dream that, perhaps, some of their work might carry some Truth. Give people a new perspective about life, maybe even change people's lives - but not by making them simply more "productive". Peh, productivity - if there ever was a more overrated and servile word. Anyway, we should aspire to do the same. Fellow engineers, do whatever makes you feel good about yourselves. Do whatever you need to make lots and lots and lots - piles - of money. By all means, solve people's annoying problems; that's a great advice. But don't aspire to that. You should dream about solving humanity's serious problems. You should dream of making this a truly better world - in every respect.
Ingaz 15y ago
>6. bring back the old moore’s law I'm not an expert in this field by any means, but I think this idea is not so "frightening". There was rumors in 2006 that AMD tried to develop "Reverse Hyperthreading". No official notes though. Edit: Intel Anaphase: http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1111 http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1111 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555754.1555813&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES416&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=ISCA http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555754.1555813&coll=A...
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binarycrusader 15y ago
I felt Paul's analogies about copying things and selling smells in talking about copyright were a little awkward. They were a response to an audience member that asked how he could justify disparaging the music industry selling copies of music in view of software depending on that model. In fairness, as he stated himself, he wanted to write a proper essay first about it so was attempting to come up with something on the fly. I felt the proper response should have been something more along the lines of: Copyright only exists because society in general recognizes that right. So if society in general no longer believes it is a right, then business models will have to change to reflect that. I personally don't know what the right long-term answer is, but clearly, since you can copy bits for "zero" cost, it's going to be even harder to convince people to pay in the future as they come to that realisation collectively.
ikawe 15y ago
> it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu. most ambitious: do it automatically with a compiler.really hard, but is this really impossible? >if so, prove it if not, the expected value of working on it might be really high. parallel complexity theory: https://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/pct.pdf https://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/pct.pdf

321 points by brianr 15y ago

Ongoing diagnosis seems simliar to one of the recent X-Prizes: http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/ http://www.qualcommtricorderxprize.org/ And the idea of the X-Prize seems to be mostly in-line with the spirit of Y Combinator. I only last night saw all the current X-Prizes and am pretty impressed.

agumonkey 15y ago

+1 for a more continuous medical system. I'd be curious to see the percentage of deaths caused by delayed diagnostic. Genomics prices are heading down, let's make it easy, fast, and integrative.

endeavor 15y ago

"find the tiny thing that turns into the gigantic idea" I like this, or it at least validates some of my thinking. All of my startup ideas are small and modest, something that will help me and maybe some people like me. But I have no idea where the idea will take me...

mishmax 15y ago
"tiny thing -> gigantic idea" + "maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially", could suck us in however to one of PG's 'mistake founders made': "Marginal Niche" (from http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html). So I guess a question is how to distinguish between marginal niche, and something small in a huge market. I guess it's market size and gut feel of potential.

mahmoudimus 15y ago

Thanks for this! Lots of wisdom here. This one particularly rings very true: "Only way to get a product visionary as the CEO of a company is to start it and not get fired." From the same part in the article, "None of the existing players will – not run by product visionaries." Later elaborated on as: "just have to be better than samsung, hp, motorola – not so hard" Doesn't this in itself bring an interesting question? Why is that those companies cannot innovate or have visionaries? Surely, they must. Maybe that's another opportunity though. How to find the visionaries in your company and reward them for doing so?

a_a_r_o_n 15y ago
Size makes it impossible. If you've ever worked at a sizable company then you understand this, if not explicitly. The work of an employee becomes more and more to integrate with the machine, and less and less to think independently and innovatively. Follow the procedures. Know what forms are needed. Know who's buyoff is needed for what. Go to the break room when there's donuts celebrating the release of R145.8. The best a large company can hope for is a skunkworks.

larsberg 15y ago

Curious point: > replace universities > heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors. Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done the startup sold for lots of money, big smash-hit video games, part of the i* device releases from day 1, etc. All of the faculty I know really love it as well. Certainly, I hear bad things from the assistant (untenured) faculty, but all of the folks I meet who've made it over the hurdle seem to really love their work and have a lot of fun. Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Or is my circle of friends and programming languages researchers just a bunch of weirdos?

kmfrk 15y ago
I think there's something to be said for considering pg's approach for non-American universities outside the top rankings. I get the impression that the best American universities are perfectly fine, and then some.
shmageggy 15y ago
That point also struck me as odd considering he later pitches the idea of making a product to abstract away paralellism... a problem that would certainly be out of reach to all but the most educated (read: PhD from a good university).
bluekeybox 15y ago
> Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Yes.
- goldmab 15y ago
  Really? All of them? How do you know?
- kenrikm 15y ago
  I disagree, I have interviewed graduates of both for positions in my team and I have not found that the applicants that came from a prestigious university where inherently better than from a small obscure college. What you get out of your College experience like anything in life it's highly dependent on the personality of the person.

andrewparker 15y ago

Anyone have a video link? Google came up empty for me

rbanffy 15y ago
It will probably show up on blip.tv. It also offers a very good iPod compatible RSS. There is already an excellent collection on http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011 http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011

why-el 15y ago

I think another argument against universities would be the growing expectations they impose on students. The sort of academic inflation we see today, where people are expected to go from bachelors to masters to phds regardless of whether that is relevant to them, or better yet, to the industry they are targeting.

AceJohnny2 15y ago

A nitpick: don’t try to identify a precise thing in the future. better model: columbus. “there’s something west. i’ll sail westward”. I bristle at seeing Colombus propped up as a model. The guy was wrong (he thought the earth was smaller than it actually was, so attempted to sail west as a shorter route to the East Indies), wrong (he discovered the Carribeans, not mainland America), wrong (he still thought he found the East Indies, i.e. south-east asia!). But alas, actual truth carries less rhetorical power than popular myths.

kennystone 15y ago
You're missing it dude. Columbus' conclusion was wrong when he started, but he had the right instincts to start sailing. This is what PG is saying - you don't know the future, so start sailing in an interesting direction and maybe you'll find something big.
- pstuart 15y ago
  Something about a pivot in there too....
- AceJohnny2 15y ago
  I see your (and PG's) point, and I think he tied it to a terrible example. Basically, Colombus won big despite being wrong on so many aspects. In truth he was just very (incredibly) lucky. Thus I take the point as "do something stupid, you might just get lucky on something unrelated!". But I understand that PG's real point is "trust your instincts, don't listen to the naysayers, but adapt to the circumstances".
  - saraid216 15y ago
    I don't think it should be necessary to be right about a lot of aspects. Going out and discovering how thoroughly wrong you are is a huge achievement.
    - jarek 15y ago

hallnoates 15y ago

> dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). don’t worry about doing something constraining in the short term, because if you don’t succeed in the short term there won’t be a long term Umm, search is just fine thank you. I could not survive without Google currently. The only thing I don't like about them is the lack of good customer support and the way they tend to develop unintuitive things with poor documentation (appengine was hard as hell to develop to, Android is getting better, but still they don't have a Rails-style "get up to speed" doc- they have a long way to go) But search is not their problem or mine. > 2. replace email > inbox is a todo list. No, it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous communication and file transfer. If you're using it as a TODO list, you're doing it wrong. > powerful people are in pain because of email. that’s an opportunity. B.S. Email has survived Facebook, Twitter, Google Wave (cough)... > whatever you build, make it fast. gmail has become painfully slow. Maybe on a Pentium III. It isn't slow for me though. > 3. replace universities Good idea, but won't happen. The problem is any business/institution that gets continuous revenue without having to be accountable. Universities suck because they don't have to provide what they are needed for, they only have to compete with each other. The service the universities should provide is the preparation of its students for the betterment of the world. However, what this means is debatable, and the hippies of the 60s that grew up in an environment where they didn't have to work their asses off (like the teenagers of the depression era) are the ones teaching our kids how to feel better about themselves by building a hut in a 3rd world country. > 4. kill hollywood The studios are the only ones that really know how to produce. Music, T.V. and movies are all about production. The YouTube era won't last forever. It is only a matter of time before they get a full handle on things again. > 5. a new apple Apple is still on top of the consumer market. Solve problems that need solving in the way you feel is best. Don't work hard to be something else. Apple didn't. > 6. bring back the old moore’s law >...it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu. As an analogy, why don't we make Ruby look like 8086 programming? Parallel computing is different- you can't solve problems with the same mentality.

coffeemug 15y ago
> inbox is a todo list. No it isn't. It's a method of asynchronous communication and file transfer. If you're using it as a TODO list, you're doing it wrong. That means most business users of e-mail are doing it wrong. Take a sample of heavy e-mail users (managers, sales people, marketing, etc.) and ten out of ten will tell you that they're inundated by e-mail, and that it is a defacto todo list. E-mail is a giant problem for everyone who needs to communicate with a large number of people professionally, and "you're doing it wrong" is not the answer. Using e-mail as a todo list is the path of least resistance, so it's the only viable option for most people right now, and it sucks. It needs to (and will) get fixed. In general, it's easy to go through any list of ideas and dismiss them. All of these ideas seem sensible to me. They're vague by design, many of them will likely take a very different shape, but it's a good list of general directions to explore. TL;DR don't be a cynic, be a builder.

spdy 15y ago

http://streamti.me/ http://streamti.me/ Livestream from PyCon 2012 It gets better every year :)

YooLi 15y ago

Is this available in video format? I can't help but think reading this is taking something out of context or missing information. Quick glance: 1. dinosaur egg – make a search engine that all the hackers use. (top 10,000). - Like Google Code Search? That didn't turn out too well. 2. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it. - What? I use email to converse with people, not to list what I need to do. Occasionally I will send myself a reminder mail with a list of TODOs, but my email inbox is definitely not a todo list. 5. his friend from apple: there will be no new good stuff post-steve jobs. - Is his friend Tim Cook? Isn't Apple famous for secrecy even inside Apple or do all 9000+ employees in Cupertino know what's in the pipeline? Etc.

anateus 15y ago
Going to address only #2: My understanding is that what he means is that even a social totally "conversational" message is a todo item of "read me". Less "frivolous" emails tend to either contains direct action items or imply action items that must be taken. PG wishes that aspect be more explicit in order to gain more control over it.
patrickod 15y ago
https://twitter.com/jessenoller/statuses/173365958767935490 https://twitter.com/jessenoller/statuses/173365958767935490 According to Jesse Noller the talks are being recorded
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kenrikm 15y ago
I would disagree with #2, At work my email inbox is certainly a todo list. I use IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Forums to converse. Actually 99% of my personal email is companies sending me updates (we got your online payment etc.) It's funny that I read this now, during my lunch hour I was pondering over how email is broken and needs to be replaced I actually came up a few few innovative ideas but there's more to it. I don't however think that our curent Email system will be around forever, instead of a static thing that you receive it will will be more like a feed that can be paused and saved off to different tasks that could theoretically automatically handle the task for you. (FEED: Credit Card Statement just posted - You: Siri pay the bill from account XYZ)

davidkobilnyk 15y ago

I took the part about email being a todo list to mean that, it's inherently a todo list in the sense that it's a list of messages you have to deal with. You don't have to purposefully use it as a todo list for it to effectively be one.

bambax 15y ago

> inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I see these categories of email 1. Email from people you know that you're likely to respond to, and which therefore lead to "conversations" 2. Reminders and "things to do" that you need to act upon; once you have acted upon it you usually update the status of the task by mailing back 3. Read-only email: email sent by corporations that you somehow need to store but that you will never respond to (they often come from aptly-named "no reply" addresses; but mailing lists are part of it too) 4. Random stuff (close to spam, but not really): things you have to read because they may be important, but usually aren't Gmail is optimized for #1 and does a good job at it. Lately it started to address #4 by trying to automatically detect "important" email; in my opinion this doesn't work well, but it could eventually work. AFAIK nobody is seriously trying to solve #2 and #3, and in my experience #3 and #4 cause most of the clutter. Which makes #3 the most urgent problem with the highest ROI. What if you could use a special email address for "read-only email" that would receive #3 mail and deal with it: - organize it automatically by sender (or "topic") and period (not by subject / conversation / date: all my utility bills of one year are ONE object and not a dozen different conversations, for example) - save all attachments (that deserve it) as PDFs - notify you only when necessary (not easy) - etc. I've been toying with mailgun today, and it seems building a first version of this isn't out of reach; I'd be very interested to exchange ideas on this subject.

robfig 15y ago
My approach to #3 in gmail is to have filters that auto-archive, and then use multiple inboxes to show them under my main inbox email.
Alex3917 15y ago
The bigger problem is that right now the whole computer using experience is organized around finding information. Think about it, how many people do you know who have have their browser homepage set to their email, Google, Google News, or some sort of news aggregator? Virtually everyone. Why is this the case? Probably because we've only been able to get this firehouse of information for a relatively short period of time, so it's new and interesting. I think the bigger opportunity is to step back and think about what our homepages will look like in 50 years. Somehow I doubt it will have anything to do with finding basic facts. Finding a better way to organize spam is thinking too small, I think you need to figure out a better way to integrate conversations and information into our broader life goals and daily lives.

AmericanOP 15y ago

I keep hearing how difficult it is to build a standalone email client which integrates with gmail. Does anybody have a link to any good discussions for why it's so hard?

breckinloggins 15y ago
- There is no "gmail" API. It either looks like imap/smtp to your app, or pop3/smtp. - POP3 is completely braindead, so moving on... - Imap doesn't natively expose many gmail features. imap doesn't know about "Archiving" and "Labelling", so you have to map those to things like deleting and folders. There's an impedance mismatch. - Exposing a search interface with all the functionality and responsiveness of the web app is painful. Sparrow does it nicely, in my opinion. - You sometimes can't login and don't know why. Sparrow does this badly. Once, Sparrow just started putting red dots on my account and all it said was "authentication failure". I actually had to dig in to Sparrow's (thankfully provided) JSON logs to see that the error message was that "non web clients are locked out on your account". In turn, I had to just KNOW that this meant I had to do Google's unlock captcha. But they don't make that easy to find, I had to google it. Imagine my mom trying to troubleshoot that. I don't think so. - Enabling 3rd party access to gmail via Imap is not a trivial exercise for the non-technically inclined. Even more so if you have two-factor authentication turned on. Imagine my mom trying to set that up. I don't think so. - Imap and SMTP aren't the most trivial of protocols to implement correctly and completely. - Stupid little things. Like, right now if I want to have my Google Voice number ring to Google Chat, I have to have my GMail window open in the browser (someone correct me if there's a better way). If I already have it up just so I can receive phone calls, why do I ALSO want to have a standalone email client open?
- tdfx 15y ago
  Making/receiving calls in Gmail is the reason I stick with the web client. I don't actually use the chat much, but I'm a huge fan of the simplicity of Google Voice's integration with Gmail.
  - pbreit 15y ago

joering2 15y ago

> 2. replace email. inbox is a todo list. email is the protocol for putting stuff on it I think what he actually meant is that if you logon to your mailbox, you see threads of stuff to do. Hence, your mailbox with names, subjects and content is really a "todo" for the day/week/etc. I think, in the near future, we humans will be a creating protocols on our own. We will be creating our own protocols and "pushing" data, instead of "pulling" it from the web, like it is right now. In my spare time, I am actually working on a paper covering that. I call it "hapi": Humans with Application Programming Interface. Will be glad to share more when its done.

xxiao 15y ago

waste of my time, frankly

lr 15y ago

6. bring back the old moore’s law I'll have to dig up my BeOS Bible this weekend, but I though the BeOS solved this problem over 15 years ago. I have been floored for years that chip makers keep telling developers to write code to work with multiple CPUs. If those developers are OS developers, then fine. But application developers? No way. This is the job of the OS!

rbanffy 15y ago
I'm curious. How did BeOS solve this problem?
- sounds 15y ago
  BeOS did several things, I'll throw out the obvious one: Separate the UI thread from main() (the thread doing the core app logic). Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads. To the original poster, I'd like to point out that BeOS didn't (and Haiku doesn't) use a different compiler. What pg was saying was that we need a better compiler + language. Right now the programmer must manage every detail of the threads. A few abstractions are available - OpenMP, Apple's Grand Central Dispatch, etc. They don't really make highly parallel implementations though. The field is ripe for disruption. Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language.
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    > Yes, many OS's suggest spinning up a worker thread, but by default an app is single-threaded. The default in BeOS is 2 threads. It's an interesting idea. It would be trivial to write boilerplate like this so that when you create a new .c file, it will start with a basic multi-threaded application. I remember seeing some parallel FORTRAN code in the late 80's with things like loops explicitly marked for parallel execution and other tricks. The downside is that debugging mutable state across multiple threads is a bitch. It's not something I would wish to my worst enemy. > Look at Verilog/VHDL for an example of a fully parallelized language. I have been playing with the idea of using Verilog or VHDL to express computer programs... Did nothing, but it would be an interesting thing to test.

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pron 15y ago

Everything here could be summarized under the headline "solve people's annoying, day-to-day problems (in an original manner)". There are some great perspectives here, but I have a (little) problem with the premise of "solve people's annoying problems". I understand that this probably was a business talk to people interested in entrepreneurship, and, certainly this is great advice for people wanting to build a profitable business. But in the end, this is all it is: "how to make lots of money from software? Answer: solve people's annoying problems". In a society where engineers are arguably playing an increasingly important role, I think this outlook is too limited. This perspective is what I would expect in a CPA convention. If engineers are so smart, powerful and essential, is this what you want to inspire them to do? Have them make cooler gadgets, easier "content consumption experience", better to-do lists to make people more "productive" and, lastly, possibly provide better health so that they would live longer to buy more gadgets and "consume" more "content"? If engineers are so smart, powerful and essential, why not inspire them to find ways to alleviate poverty and promote justice, education and equality? Well, you say, this is not a job for engineers. Well, if engineers are expected to think of new ways to book sleeping arrangements or sell clothes, their insight can surely be turned to loftier goals. I don't want to be caught saying anything positive about Facebook, but for better or worse, they have changed the way people around the world communicate with each other, compete with each other, and see themselves as part of society. So, yes, engineers are certainly capable of achieving some great feats. Many lawyers make lots of money. Lots. And probably many of them became lawyers for that purpose. But It's hard for me to imagine - and maybe I'm wrong about this - but it's hard for me to imagine a well known lawyer delivering a keynote speech at a lawyers convention, where his main points are tips for making lots of money. Lawyers may be hypocritical (and they are), but at least many of them separate their business goals from their sources of inspiration. So why should engineers be inspired only by business tips? Is money the main source of inspiration for us? Doctors and lawyers make money, too, but they aspire for - or, at least, are inspired by - more. Even writers, directors and actors aspire for more than making money, or even "delivering content" or providing entertainment. They dream that, perhaps, some of their work might carry some Truth. Give people a new perspective about life, maybe even change people's lives - but not by making them simply more "productive". Peh, productivity - if there ever was a more overrated and servile word. Anyway, we should aspire to do the same. Fellow engineers, do whatever makes you feel good about yourselves. Do whatever you need to make lots and lots and lots - piles - of money. By all means, solve people's annoying problems; that's a great advice. But don't aspire to that. You should dream about solving humanity's serious problems. You should dream of making this a truly better world - in every respect.

Ingaz 15y ago

>6. bring back the old moore’s law I'm not an expert in this field by any means, but I think this idea is not so "frightening". There was rumors in 2006 that AMD tried to develop "Reverse Hyperthreading". No official notes though. Edit: Intel Anaphase: http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1111 http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1111 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555754.1555813&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&type=series&idx=SERIES416&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=ISCA http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1555754.1555813&coll=A...

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binarycrusader 15y ago

I felt Paul's analogies about copying things and selling smells in talking about copyright were a little awkward. They were a response to an audience member that asked how he could justify disparaging the music industry selling copies of music in view of software depending on that model. In fairness, as he stated himself, he wanted to write a proper essay first about it so was attempting to come up with something on the fly. I felt the proper response should have been something more along the lines of: Copyright only exists because society in general recognizes that right. So if society in general no longer believes it is a right, then business models will have to change to reflect that. I personally don't know what the right long-term answer is, but clearly, since you can copy bits for "zero" cost, it's going to be even harder to convince people to pay in the future as they come to that realisation collectively.

ikawe 15y ago

> it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu. most ambitious: do it automatically with a compiler.really hard, but is this really impossible? >if so, prove it if not, the expected value of working on it might be really high. parallel complexity theory: https://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/pct.pdf https://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/pct.pdf