The Hundred-Year Language
April 2003
(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)
It's hard to predict what
life will be like in a hundred years.  There are only a few
things we can say with certainty.  We know that everyone will
drive flying cars,
that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings
hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the
time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts.
Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this
picture.  What kind of programming language will they use to
write the software controlling those flying cars?
This is worth thinking about not so
much because we'll actually get to use these languages as because,
if we're lucky, we'll use languages on the path from this
point to that.
I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees,
with dead-ends branching off all over.  We can see this
happening already.
Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any
intellectual descendants.  It is an evolutionary dead-end-- a
Neanderthal language.
I predict a similar fate for Java.  People
sometimes send me mail saying, "How can you say that Java
won't turn out to be a successful language?  It's already
a successful language."  And I admit that it is, if you
measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it
(particularly individual books on it), or by
the number of undergrads who believe they have to
learn it to get a job.  When I say Java won't
turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more
specific:  that Java
will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.
This is just a guess.  I may be wrong.  My point here is not to dis Java,
but to raise the issue of evolutionary
trees and get people asking, where on the tree is language X?
The reason to ask this question isn't just so that
our ghosts can say, in a
hundred years, I told you so.  It's because staying close to
the main branches is a useful heuristic for finding languages that will
be good to program in now.
At any given time, you're probably happiest on
the main branches of an evolutionary tree.
Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals,
it must have sucked to be one.  The
Cro-Magnons would have been constantly coming over and
beating you up and stealing your food.
The reason I want to
know what languages will be like in a hundred years is so that
I know what branch of the tree to bet on now.
The evolution of languages differs from the evolution of species
because branches can converge.  The Fortran branch, for example,
seems to be merging with the descendants
of Algol.  In theory this is possible for species too, but it's
not likely to have happened to any bigger than a cell.
Convergence
is more likely for languages partly because the space of
possibilities is smaller, and partly because mutations
are not random.  Language designers deliberately incorporate
ideas from other languages.
It's especially useful for language designers to think
about where the evolution of programming languages is likely
to lead, because they can steer accordingly.
In that case, "stay on a main branch" becomes more than a
way to choose a good language.
It becomes a heuristic for making the right decisions about
language design.
Any programming language can be divided into
two parts:  some set of fundamental operators that play the role
of axioms, and the rest of the language, which could in principle
be written in terms of these fundamental operators.
I think the fundamental operators are the most important factor in a
language's long term survival.  The rest you can change.  It's
like the rule that in buying a house you should consider
location first of all.  Everything else you can fix later, but you
can't fix the location.
I think it's important not just that the axioms be well chosen,
but that there be few of them.  Mathematicians have always felt
this way about axioms-- the fewer, the better-- and I think they're
onto something.
At the very least, it has to be a useful exercise to look closely
at the core of a language to see if there are any axioms that
could be weeded out.  I've found in my long career as a slob that
cruft breeds cruft, and I've seen this happen in software as
well as under beds and in the corners of rooms.
I have a hunch that
the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages
that have the smallest, cleanest cores.
The more of a language you can write in itself,
the better.
Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what
programming languages will be like in a hundred years.
Will we even be writing programs in a hundred years?  Won't
we just tell computers what we want them to do?
There hasn't been a lot of progress in that department
so far.
My guess is that a hundred years from now people will
still tell computers what to do using programs we would recognize
as such.  There may be tasks that we
solve now by writing programs and which in a hundred years
you won't have to write programs to solve, but I think
there will still be a good deal of
programming of the type that we do today.
It may seem presumptuous to think anyone can predict what
any technology will look like in a hundred years.  But
remember that we already have almost fifty years of history behind us.
Looking forward a hundred years is a graspable idea
when we consider how slowly languages have evolved in the
past fifty.
Languages evolve slowly because they're not really technologies.
Languages are notation.  A program is a formal description of
the problem you want a computer to solve for you.  So the rate
of evolution in programming languages is more like the
rate of evolution in mathematical notation than, say,
transportation or communications.
Mathematical notation does evolve, but not with the giant
leaps you see in technology.
Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years, it seems
safe to predict they will be much faster than
they are now.  If Moore's Law continues to put out, they will be 74
quintillion (73,786,976,294,838,206,464) times faster.  That's kind of
hard to imagine.  And indeed, the most likely prediction in the
speed department may be that Moore's Law will stop working.
Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems
likely to run up against some kind of fundamental limit eventually.
But I have no trouble believing that computers will be very much
faster. Even if they only end up being a paltry million
times faster, that should change the ground rules for programming
languages substantially.  Among other things, there
will be more room for what
would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages
that don't yield very efficient code.
And yet some applications will still demand speed.
Some of the problems we want to solve with
computers are created by computers; for example, the
rate at which you have to process video images depends
on the rate at which another computer can
generate them.  And there is another class of problems
which inherently have an unlimited capacity to soak up cycles:
image rendering, cryptography, simulations.
If some applications can be increasingly inefficient while
others continue to demand all the speed the hardware can
deliver, faster computers will mean that languages have
to cover an ever wider range of efficiencies.  We've seen
this happening already.  Current implementations of some
popular new languages are shockingly wasteful by the
standards of previous decades.
This isn't just something that happens with programming
languages.  It's a general historical trend.  As technologies improve,
each generation can do things that the previous generation
would have considered wasteful.  People thirty years ago would
be astonished at how casually we make long distance phone calls.
People a hundred years ago would be even more astonished that
a package would one day travel from Boston to New York via Memphis.
I can already tell you what's going to happen to all those extra
cycles that faster hardware is going to give us in the
next hundred years.  They're nearly all going to be wasted.
I learned to program when computer power was scarce.
I can remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs
so they would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80.  The
thought of all this stupendously inefficient software
burning up cycles doing the same thing over and over seems
kind of gross to me.  But I think my intuitions here are wrong.  I'm
like someone who grew up poor, and can't bear to spend money
even for something important, like going to the doctor.
Some kinds of waste really are disgusting.  SUVs, for example, would
arguably be gross even if they ran on a fuel which would never
run out and generated no pollution.  SUVs are gross because they're
the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more
masculine.)
But not all waste is bad.  Now that we have the infrastructure
to support it, counting the minutes of your long-distance
calls starts to seem niggling.   If you have the
resources, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as
one kind of thing, no matter where the other person is.
There's good waste, and bad waste.  I'm interested
in good waste-- the kind where, by spending more, we can get
simpler designs.  How will we take advantage of the opportunities
to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware?
The desire for speed is so deeply engrained in us, with
our puny computers, that it will take a conscious effort
to overcome it.  In language design, we should be consciously seeking out
situations where we can trade efficiency for even the
smallest increase in convenience.
Most data structures exist because of speed.  For example,
many languages today have both strings and lists.  Semantically, strings
are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are
characters.  So why do you need a separate data type?
You don't, really.  Strings only
exist for efficiency.  But it's lame to clutter up the semantics
of the language with hacks to make programs run faster.
Having strings in a language seems to be a case of
premature optimization.
If we think of the core of a language as a set of axioms,
surely it's gross to have additional axioms that add no expressive
power, simply for the sake of efficiency.  Efficiency is
important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it.
The right way to solve that problem, I think, is to separate
the meaning of a program from the implementation details.
Instead of having both lists and strings, have just lists,
with some way to give the compiler optimization advice that
will allow it to lay out strings as contiguous bytes if
necessary.
Since speed doesn't matter in most of a program, you won't
ordinarily need to bother with
this sort of micromanagement.
This will be more and more true as computers get faster.
Saying less about implementation should also make programs
more flexible.
Specifications change while a program is being written, and this is not
only inevitable, but desirable.
The word "essay" comes
from the French verb "essayer", which means "to try".
An essay, in the original sense, is something you
write to try to figure something out.  This happens in
software too.  I think some of the best programs were essays,
in the sense that the authors didn't know when they started
exactly what they were trying to write.
Lisp hackers already know about the value of being flexible
with data structures.  We tend to write the first version of
a program so that it does everything with lists.  These
initial versions can be so shockingly inefficient that it
takes a conscious effort not to think about what they're
doing, just as, for me at least, eating a steak requires a
conscious effort not to think where it came from.
What programmers in a hundred years will be looking for, most of
all, is a language where you can throw together an unbelievably
inefficient version 1 of a program with the least possible
effort.  At least, that's how we'd describe it in present-day
terms.  What they'll say is that they want a language that's
easy to program in.
Inefficient software isn't gross.  What's gross is a language
that makes programmers do needless work.  Wasting programmer time
is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time.  This will
become ever more clear as computers get faster.
I think getting rid of strings is already something we
could bear to think about.  We did it in
Arc
, and it seems
to be a win;  some operations that would be awkward to
describe as regular expressions can be described
easily as recursive functions.
How far will this flattening of data structures go?  I can think
of possibilities that shock even me, with my conscientiously broadened
mind.  Will we get rid of arrays, for example?  After all, they're
just a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of
integers.   Will we replace hash tables themselves with lists?
There are more shocking prospects even than that.  The Lisp
that McCarthy described in 1960, for example, didn't
have numbers.  Logically, you don't need to have a separate notion
of numbers, because you can represent them as lists:  the integer
n could be represented as a list of n elements.  You can do math this
way.  It's just unbearably inefficient.
No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in
practice.  In fact, McCarthy's 1960 paper was not, at the time,
intended to be implemented at all.  It was a
theoretical exercise
,
an attempt to create a more elegant alternative to the Turing
Machine.  When someone did, unexpectedly, take this paper and
translate it into a working Lisp interpreter, numbers certainly
weren't represented as lists; they were represented in binary,
as in every other language.
Could a programming language go so far as to get rid of numbers
as a fundamental data type?  I ask this not so much as a serious
question as as a way to play chicken with the future.  It's like
the hypothetical case of an irresistible force meeting an
immovable object-- here, an unimaginably inefficient
implementation meeting unimaginably great resources.
I don't see why not.  The future is pretty long.  If there's
something we can do to decrease the number of axioms in the core
language, that would seem to be the side to bet on as t approaches
infinity.  If the idea still seems unbearable in a hundred years,
maybe it won't in a thousand.
Just to be clear about this, I'm not proposing that all numerical
calculations would actually be carried out using lists.  I'm proposing
that the core language, prior to any additional notations about
implementation, be defined this way.  In practice any program
that wanted to do any amount of math would probably represent
numbers in binary, but this would be an optimization, not part of
the core language semantics.
Another way to burn up cycles is to have many layers of
software between the application and the hardware.  This too is
a trend we see happening already: many recent languages are
compiled into byte code.  Bill Woods once told me that,
as a rule of thumb, each layer of interpretation costs a
factor of 10 in speed.  This extra cost buys you flexibility.
The very first version of Arc was an extreme case of this sort
of multi-level slowness, with corresponding benefits.  It
was a classic "metacircular" interpreter written
on top of Common Lisp, with a definite family resemblance
to the eval function defined in McCarthy's original Lisp paper.
The whole thing was only a couple hundred lines of
code, so it was very easy to understand and change.  The
Common Lisp we used, CLisp, itself runs on top
of a byte code interpreter.  So here we had two levels of
interpretation, one of them (the top one) shockingly inefficient,
and the language was usable.  Barely usable, I admit, but
usable.
Writing software as multiple layers is a powerful technique
even within applications.  Bottom-up programming means writing
a program as a series of layers, each of which serves as a
language for the one above.  This approach tends to yield
smaller, more flexible programs.  It's also the best route to
that holy grail, reusability.  A language is by definition
reusable.  The more
of your application you can push down into a language for writing
that type of application, the more of your software will be
reusable.
Somehow the idea of reusability got attached
to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of
evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free.  But
although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes
it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness.
Consider libraries: they're reusable because they're language,
whether they're written in an object-oriented style or not.
I don't predict the demise of object-oriented programming, by the
way.  Though I don't think it has much to offer good programmers,
except in certain specialized domains, it is irresistible to
large organizations.  Object-oriented programming
offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code.  It lets you accrete
programs as a series of patches.
Large organizations
always tend to develop software this way, and I expect this
to be as true in a hundred years as it is today.
As long as we're talking about the future, we had better
talk about parallel computation, because that's where this
idea seems to live.  That is, no matter when you're talking, parallel
computation seems to be something that is going to happen
in the future.
Will the future ever catch up with it?  People have been
talking about parallel computation as something imminent
for at least 20
years, and it hasn't affected programming practice much so far.
Or hasn't it?  Already
chip designers have to think about it, and so must
people trying to write systems software on multi-cpu computers.
The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will
parallelism go?
In a hundred years will it affect even application programmers?  Or
will it be something that compiler writers think about, but
which is usually invisible in the source code of applications?
One thing that does seem likely is that most opportunities for
parallelism will be wasted.  This is a special case of my more
general prediction that most of the extra computer power we're
given will go to waste.  I expect that, as with the stupendous
speed of the underlying hardware, parallelism will be something
that is available if you ask for it explicitly, but ordinarily
not used.  This implies that the kind of parallelism we have in
a hundred years will not, except in special applications, be
massive parallelism.  I expect for
ordinary programmers it will be more like being able to fork off
processes that all end up running in parallel.
And this will, like asking for specific implementations of data
structures, be something that you do fairly late in the life of a
program, when you try to optimize it.  Version 1s will ordinarily
ignore any advantages to be got from parallel computation, just
as they will ignore advantages to be got from specific representations
of data.
Except in special kinds of applications, parallelism won't
pervade the programs that are written in a hundred years.  It would be
premature optimization if it did.
How many programming languages will there
be in a hundred years?  There seem to be a huge number of new
programming languages lately.  Part of the reason is that
faster hardware has allowed programmers to make different
tradeoffs between speed and convenience, depending on the
application.  If this is a real trend, the hardware we'll
have in a hundred years should only increase it.
And yet there may be only a few widely-used languages in a
hundred years.  Part of the reason I say this
is optimism: it seems that, if you did a really good job,
you could make a language that was ideal for writing a
slow version 1, and yet with the right optimization advice
to the compiler, would also yield very fast code when necessary.
So, since I'm optimistic, I'm going to predict that despite
the huge gap they'll have between acceptable and maximal
efficiency, programmers in a hundred years will have languages
that can span most of it.
As this gap widens, profilers will become increasingly important.
Little attention is paid to profiling now.  Many people still
seem to believe that the way to get fast applications is to
write compilers that generate fast code.  As the gap between
acceptable and maximal performance widens, it will become
increasingly clear that the way to get fast applications is
to have a good guide from one to the other.
When I say there may only be a few languages, I'm not including
domain-specific "little languages".  I think such embedded languages
are a great idea, and I expect them to proliferate.  But I expect
them to be written as thin enough skins that users can see
the general-purpose language underneath.
Who will design the languages of the future?  One of the most exciting
trends in the last ten years has been the rise of open-source
languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby.
Language design is being taken over by hackers.  The results
so far are messy, but encouraging.  There are some stunningly
novel ideas in Perl, for example. Many are stunningly bad, but
that's always true of ambitious efforts.  At its current rate
of mutation, God knows what Perl might evolve into in a hundred
years.
It's not true that those who can't do, teach (some of the best
hackers I know are professors), but it is true that there are a
lot of things that those who teach can't do.
Research
imposes
constraining caste restrictions.  In any academic
field there are topics that are ok to work on and others that
aren't.  Unfortunately the distinction between acceptable and
forbidden topics is usually based on how intellectual
the work sounds when described in research papers, rather than
how important it is for getting good results.  The extreme case
is probably literature; people studying literature rarely
say anything that would be of the slightest use to those
producing it.
Though the situation is better in the sciences,
the overlap between the kind of work you're allowed to do and the
kind of work that yields good languages is distressingly small.
(Olin Shivers has grumbled eloquently
about this.)  For example, types seem to be an inexhaustible source
of research papers, despite the fact that static typing
seems to preclude true macros-- without which, in my opinion, no
language is worth using.
The trend is not merely toward languages being developed
as open-source projects rather than "research", but toward
languages being designed by the application programmers who need
to use them, rather than by compiler writers.  This seems a good
trend and I expect it to continue.
Unlike physics in a hundred years, which is almost necessarily
impossible to predict, I think it may be possible in principle
to design a language now that would appeal to users in a hundred
years.
One way to design a language is to just write down the program
you'd like to be able to write, regardless of whether there
is a compiler that can translate it or hardware that can run it.
When you do this you can assume unlimited resources.  It seems
like we ought to be able to imagine unlimited resources as well
today as in a hundred years.
What program would one like to write?  Whatever is least work.
Except not quite: whatever
would be
least work if your ideas about
programming weren't already influenced by the languages you're
currently used to.  Such influence can be so pervasive that
it takes a great effort to overcome it.  You'd think it would
be obvious to creatures as lazy as us how to express a program
with the least effort.  In fact, our ideas about what's possible
tend to be so
limited
by whatever language we think in  that
easier formulations of programs seem very surprising.  They're
something you have to discover, not something you naturally
sink into.
One helpful trick here
is to use the
length
of the program as an approximation for
how much work it is to write.  Not the length in characters,
of course, but the length in distinct syntactic elements-- basically,
the size of the parse tree.  It may not be quite true that
the shortest program is the least work to write, but it's
close enough that you're better off aiming for the solid
target of brevity than the fuzzy, nearby one of least work.
Then the algorithm for language design becomes: look at a program
and ask, is there any way to write this that's shorter?
In practice, writing programs in an imaginary hundred-year
language will work to varying degrees depending
on how close you are to the core.  Sort routines you can
write now.  But it would be
hard to predict now what kinds of libraries might be needed in
a hundred years.  Presumably many libraries will be for domains that
don't even exist yet.  If SETI@home works, for example, we'll
need libraries for communicating with aliens.  Unless of course
they are sufficiently advanced that they already communicate
in XML.
At the other extreme, I think you might be able to design the
core language today.  In fact, some might argue that it was already
mostly designed in 1958.
If the hundred year language were available today, would we
want to program in it?  One way to answer this question is to
look back.  If present-day programming languages had been available
in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use them?
In some ways, the answer is no.  Languages today assume
infrastructure that didn't exist in 1960.  For example, a language
in which indentation is significant, like Python, would not
work very well on printer terminals.  But putting such problems
aside-- assuming, for example, that programs were all just
written on paper-- would programmers of the 1960s have liked
writing programs in the languages we use now?
I think so.
Some of the less imaginative ones,
who had artifacts of early languages built into their ideas of
what a program was, might have had trouble.  (How can you manipulate
data without doing pointer arithmetic?  How can you implement
flow charts without gotos?)  But I think the smartest programmers
would have had no trouble making the most of present-day
languages, if they'd had them.
If we had the hundred-year language now, it would at least make a
great pseudocode.  What about using it to write software?
Since the hundred-year language
will need to generate fast code for some applications, presumably
it could generate code efficient enough to run acceptably well
on our hardware.  We might have to give more optimization advice
than users in a hundred years, but it still might be a net win.
Now we have two ideas that, if you combine them, suggest interesting
possibilities: (1) the hundred-year language could, in principle, be
designed today, and (2) such a language, if it existed, might be good to
program in today.  When you see these ideas laid out like that,
it's hard not to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language
now?
When you're working on language design, I think it is good to
have such a target and to keep it consciously in mind.  When you
learn to drive, one of the principles they teach you is to
align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted
on the road, but by aiming at some point in the distance.  Even
if all you care about is what happens in the next ten feet, this
is the right answer.  I
think we can and should do the same thing with programming languages.
Notes
I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the first language to embody
the principle that declarations (except those of dynamic variables)
were merely optimization advice,
and would not change the meaning of a correct program.  Common Lisp
seems to have been the first to state this explicitly.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, and Dan Giffin for
reading drafts of this, and to Guido van Rossum, Jeremy Hylton, and the
rest of the Python crew for inviting me to speak at PyCon.
You'll find this essay and 14 others in
Hackers & Painters
.


@winterrose It's safe.

@OptimoPrincipi TIL caruncle.

@OlegKostour Don't turn your back on it.

@dry_while Close to zero who have custody. When they're toddlers you have to or they'd die.

@oldermonkspirit Having Kids: https://t.co/mqo7WlWJrv

@RealPatternLab Good point. I've noticed that the key to getting candid advice from doctors is to ask e.g. "What would you do if it were your own mother?"

@Sams_Antics Obviously you adjust it for the individual, just as you do if you have multiple kids.

I thought of mentioning this explicitly to forestall this question, but it just seemed so obvious that I couldn't imagine anyone not understanding it.

One of the strangest benefits of having kids is that it makes it much easier to figure out what advice to give people. You just ask "What would I tell my kids?"

@JohnDCook If only you'd get metaphorical spam instead...

@bcalhoun27 Cruel and juvenile tweets need to happen? I don't think so.


What Languages Fix
Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming
languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it
fixes.  The surprising thing is how many, and how well, languages can be
described this way.
Algol:
Assembly language is too low-level.
Pascal:
Algol doesn't have enough data types.
Modula:
Pascal is too wimpy for systems programming.
Simula:
Algol isn't good enough at simulations.
Smalltalk:
Not everything in Simula is an object.
Fortran:
Assembly language is too low-level.
Cobol:
Fortran is scary.
PL/1:
Fortran doesn't have enough data types.
Ada:
Every existing language is missing something.
Basic:
Fortran is scary.
APL:
Fortran isn't good enough at manipulating arrays.
J:
APL requires its own character set.
C:
Assembly language is too low-level.
C++:
C is too low-level.
Java:
C++ is a kludge.  And Microsoft is going to crush us.
C#:
Java is controlled by Sun.
Lisp:
Turing Machines are an awkward way to describe computation.
Scheme:
MacLisp is a kludge.
T:
Scheme has no libraries.
Common Lisp:
There are too many dialects of Lisp.
Dylan:
Scheme has no libraries, and Lisp syntax is scary.
Perl:
Shell scripts/awk/sed are not enough like programming languages.
Python:
Perl is a kludge.
Ruby:
Perl is a kludge, and Lisp syntax is scary.
Prolog:
Programming is not enough like logic.
Japanese Translation
French Translation
Portuguese Translation


@SpencerHakimian Many apparently prestigious disciplines are actually jokes, but no one tells you because the people in the other disciplines preserve a diplomatic silence about this.

@BoyanSlat Surprising things about...

Writing: The degree to which good writing is rewriting.

Lisp: How useful it is to be able to write programs that write programs.

Startups: The best way to get startup ideas is by accident — by working on projects that aren't meant to be companies.

@larvlars @gantzbe We should look away as children die?

@gantzbe Meanwhile in Gaza babies starve: https://t.co/u0M16psHME

@OdeToAbabil I am disappointed in most US politicians and most US journalists. The politicians I'm not surprised by. I already knew many were captured by AIPAC. But the journalists have really let us down.

@m_ousep Write a lot.

Haaretz on the Gaza Famine:

"His mother tells al-Farra that she tried to breastfeed him but didn't have enough milk. When formula became too expensive, she started to feed him starch dissolved in water." https://t.co/0nGXti71d8

@ahistoryinart And John Koch, though arguably he was painting fancy domestic life.

Founder mode vs manager mode made visible in logos. Cracker Barrel is just the latest instance. https://t.co/xWsHluycuK

@ahistoryinart There was not a lot of competition. 1954 was about the low point for depicting such a thing.


An interesting insight from inside Twitter:

@Spin0zasGod They do seem to love it, but efficient is the last word I'd use to describe their random raids.

@academic_la Here's something that may make the attacks easier to bear: think about how many of the accounts attacking you are fake.

Shutting up people like you is the main raison d'etre of these fake accounts. You can't let them succeed.

@CAsimulation10 @razibkhan Any country that makes the effort to can have a million fake accounts with blue checks for $8m per month. It would be slack of these countries not to.

This still happens.

@ilyasu You never know till you start writing.

@winterrose It's very unprofitable though.

@razibkhan Things aren't as bad as they seem. A lot of these are fake accounts run by Russia and Israel.

@CyberneticSeman I talk about what's happening. Under Trump most of what's happening is bad.

@foodi Don't be too dismayed. A large percentage of these accounts are fake ones run by countries that want to influence US politics.


@michael_nielsen I've known multiple people on "gardening leave" here, which is what waiting out a noncompete is called. I never knew anyone doing that in California. The good thing is they don't seem to be more than a few months.

@TrungTPhan They don't realize that Harvard will still blatantly discriminate against them, and that the only difference is that it will leave more of a trail.

@ali_moiz If I were into them.

@RokosBasilica @andreslaley Bad design is dated the moment it's produced. It just takes a while for most people to notice.

@johnfielding001 That is a well kept house.

@MohdJawads I have several. That's a book there have been many editions of.

@Chris_arnade Almost never intentionally. I buy books to read. But if a book I want turns out to be rare or a first edition, I don't worry about the price.

@LouisLebbos @jesslivingston I had to promise before I even put them there.

@jbbolton No currently manufactured car is better than an old Defender.

@denniskovalev Oooh. I don't have any but I can imagine.


Post-Medium Publishing
September 2009
Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that
consumers won't pay for content anymore.  At least, that's how they
see it.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers
weren't really selling it either.  If the content was what they
were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always
depended mostly on the format?  Why didn't better content cost more?
[
1
]
A copy of
Time
costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page.
The Economist
costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page.  Better
journalism is actually slightly cheaper.
Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium
was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.  Book
publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing
and distributing books.  They treat the words printed in the book
the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on
its fabrics.
Economically, the print media are in the business of marking up
paper.  We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and
saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and
you're describing their business model.  The reason they make less
money now is that people don't need as much paper.
A few months ago I ran into a friend in a cafe.  I had a copy of
the
New York Times
, which I still occasionally buy on weekends.  As
I was leaving I offered it to him, as I've done countless times
before in the same situation.  But this time something new happened.
I felt that sheepish feeling you get when you offer someone something
worthless.  "Do you, er, want a printout of yesterday's news?" I
asked.  (He didn't.)
Now that the medium is evaporating, publishers have nothing left
to sell.  Some seem to think they're going to sell content—that
they were always in the content business, really.  But they weren't,
and it's unclear whether anyone could be.
Selling
There have always been people in the business of selling information,
but that has historically been a distinct business from publishing.
And the business of selling information to consumers has always
been a marginal one.  When I was a kid there were people who used
to sell newsletters containing stock tips, printed on colored paper
that made them hard for the copiers of the day to reproduce.  That
is a different world, both culturally and economically, from the
one publishers currently inhabit.
People will pay for information they think they can make money from.
That's why they paid for those stock tip newsletters, and why
companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence
Unit reports.  But will people pay for information otherwise?
History offers little encouragement.
If audiences were willing to pay more for better content, why wasn't
anyone already selling it to them?  There was no reason you couldn't
have done that in the era of physical media.  So were the print
media and the music labels simply overlooking this opportunity?  Or
is it, rather, nonexistent?
What about iTunes?  Doesn't that show people will pay for content?
Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store.  Apple
controls the default path onto the iPod.  They offer a convenient
list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit
card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention.
Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them
stuff.  You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then
you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to
work.  Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around
it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.
The situation is much the same with digital books.  Whoever controls
the device sets the terms.  It's in their interest for content to
be as cheap as possible, and since they own the channel, there's a
lot they can do to drive prices down.  Prices will fall even further
once writers realize they don't need publishers.  Getting a book
printed and distributed is a daunting prospect for a writer, but
most can upload a file.
Is software a counterexample?  People pay a lot for desktop software,
and that's just information.  True, but I don't think publishers
can learn much from software.  Software companies can charge a lot
because (a) many of the customers are businesses, who get in
trouble
if they use pirated versions, and (b) though in form merely
information, software is treated by both maker and purchaser as a
different type of thing from a song or an article.   A Photoshop
user needs Photoshop in a way that no one needs a particular song
or article.
That's why there's a separate word, "content," for information
that's not software.  Software is a different business.  Software
and content blur together in some of the most lightweight software,
like casual games.  But those are usually free.   To make money the
way software companies do, publishers would have to become software
companies, and being publishers gives them no particular head start
in that domain.
[
2
]
The most promising countertrend is the premium cable channel.  People
still pay for those.  But broadcasting isn't publishing: you're not
selling a copy of something.  That's one reason the movie business
hasn't seen their revenues decline the way the news and music
businesses have.  They only have one foot in publishing.
To the extent the movie business can avoid becoming publishers,
they may avoid publishing's problems.  But there are limits to how
well they'll be able to do that.  Once publishing—giving people
copies—becomes the most natural way of distributing your content,
it probably doesn't work to stick to old forms of distribution just
because you make more that way.  If free copies of your content are
available online, then you're competing with publishing's form of
distribution, and that's just as bad as being a publisher.
Apparently some people in the music business hope to retroactively
convert it away from publishing, by getting listeners to pay for
subscriptions.  It seems unlikely that will work if they're just
streaming the same files you can get as mp3s.
Next
What happens to publishing if you can't sell content?  You have two
choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find
ways to embody it in things people will pay for.
The first is probably the future of most current media.
Give music
away
and make money from concerts and t-shirts.  Publish articles
for free and make money from one of a dozen permutations of
advertising.  Both publishers and investors are down on advertising
at the moment, but it has more potential than they realize.
I'm not claiming that potential will be realized by the existing
players.  The
optimal
ways to make money from the written word
probably require different words written by different people.
It's harder to say what will happen to movies.  They could evolve
into ads.  Or they could return to their roots and make going to
the theater a treat.  If they made the experience good enough,
audiences might start to prefer it to watching pirated movies at
home.
[
3
]
Or maybe the movie business will dry up, and the people
working in it will go to work for game developers.
I don't know how big embodying information in physical form will
be.  It may be surprisingly large; people overvalue
physical stuff
.
There should remain some market for printed books, at least.
I can see the evolution of book publishing in the books on my
shelves.  Clearly at some point in the 1960s the big publishing
houses started to ask: how cheaply can we make books before people
refuse to buy them?  The answer turned out to be one step short of
phonebooks.  As long as it isn't floppy, consumers still perceive
it as a book.
That worked as long as buying printed books was the only way to
read them.  If printed books are optional, publishers will have to
work harder to entice people to buy them.  There should be some
market, but it's hard to foresee how big, because its size will
depend not on macro trends like the amount people read, but on the
ingenuity of individual publishers.
[
4
]
Some magazines may thrive by focusing on the magazine as a physical
object.  Fashion magazines could be made lush in a way that would
be hard to match digitally, at least for a while.  But this is
probably not an option for most magazines.
I don't know exactly what the future will look like, but I'm not
too worried about it.  This sort of change tends to create as many
good things as it kills.  Indeed, the really interesting question is not
what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.
The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't
know
what new forms will appear.  But though I can't predict
specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them.  When
you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give
people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're
probably looking at a winner.  And when you see something that's
merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some
existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser.
Notes
[
1
]
I don't like the word "content" and tried for a while to avoid
using it, but I have to admit there's no other word that means the
right thing.  "Information" is too general.
Ironically, the main reason I don't like "content" is the thesis
of this essay.  The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but
economically that's how both publishers and audiences treat it.
Content is information you don't need.
[
2
]
Some types of publishers would be at a disadvantage trying
to enter the software business.  Record labels, for example, would
probably find it more natural to expand into casinos than software,
because the kind of people who run them would be more at home at
the mafia end of the business spectrum than the don't-be-evil end.
[
3
]
I never watch movies in theaters anymore.  The tipping point
for me was the ads they show first.
[
4
]
Unfortunately, making physically nice books will only be a
niche within a niche.  Publishers are more likely to resort to
expedients like selling autographed copies, or editions with the
buyer's picture on the cover.
Thanks
to Michael Arrington, Trevor Blackwell, Steven Levy, Robert
Morris, and Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this.


The Founder Visa
April 2009
I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one.  The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a policy that would cost nothing: establish a new class of visa for
startup founders
.
The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley.  It's that we won't let the people who want to start them into the country.
Letting just 10,000 startup founders into the country each year could have a visible effect on the economy.  If we assume 4 people per startup, which is probably an overestimate, that's 2500 new companies.
Each year.
They wouldn't all grow as big as Google, but out of 2500 some would come close.
By definition these 10,000 founders wouldn't be taking jobs from Americans: it could be part of the terms of the visa that they couldn't work for existing companies, only new ones they'd founded.  In fact they'd cause there to be
more jobs for Americans, because the companies they started would hire more employees as they grew.
The tricky part might seem to be how one defined a startup. But that could be solved quite easily: let the market decide.  Startup investors work hard to find the best startups.  The government could not do better than to piggyback on their expertise, and use investment by recognized startup investors as the test of whether a company was a real startup.
How would the government decide who's a startup investor?  The same way they decide what counts as a university for student visas. We'll establish our own accreditation procedure. We know who one another are.
10,000 people is a drop in the bucket by immigration standards, but would represent a huge increase in the pool of startup founders.  I think this would have such a visible effect on the economy that it would make the legislator who introduced the bill famous.  The only way to know for sure would be to try it, and that would cost practically nothing.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, Greg Mcadoo, Aydin Senkut, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this.
Related:
The United States of Entrepreneurs
About Half of VC-Backed Company Founders are Immigrants


Incidentally, I mean problems in the sense of problems you have personally, not problems in the sense of things to work on. If you want to treat it as part of your identity to work on curing some disease, go ahead!

@kkyezaaa The explanation is that it's less work.

@digital_ma326 Not just leftism but extremism in general. Both sides do it.

This is an instance of a more general rule: Don't make things part of your identity. But fixable problems are especially bad to do this with.

https://t.co/UHMSaVtmhZ

@antiantioedipe I wouldn't take it that far. For example AA seems to get good results by encouraging alcoholics to call themselves that.

One of the most dangerous things you can do is to treat a fixable problem as part of your identity. Then you'll never fix it.

@KintuLabs Beware, this is a classic tarpit idea. The reason it doesn't exist is not because no one has thought of it before. People think of it constantly. Which is not to say it's impossible. But before you try it, you have to be able to say why everyone else has failed.

@proales @snowmaker The personalized attention happens in the office hours, not the talks. It's always been that way.

@asemota Thank you! But this whole controversy has been so confused that that I suspect a lot of the people liking and replying to this tweet don't realize that.

@Uhperry Wow, that is a dramatic improvement.


Be Good
April 2008
(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)
About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the
phrase that became our motto: Make something people want.  We've
learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still
the one I'd pick.
Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the
business model, at least at first.  Not because making money is
unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something
great.
A couple weeks ago I realized that if you put those two ideas
together, you get something surprising.  Make something people want.
Don't worry too much about making money.  What you've got is a
description of a charity.
When you get an unexpected result like this, it could either be a
bug or a new discovery.  Either businesses aren't supposed to be
like charities, and we've proven by reductio ad absurdum that one
or both of the principles we began with is false.  Or we have a new
idea.
I suspect it's the latter, because as soon as this thought occurred
to me, a whole bunch of other things fell into place.
Examples
For example, Craigslist.  It's not a charity, but they run it like
one.  And they're astoundingly successful.  When you scan down the
list of most popular web sites, the number of employees at Craigslist
looks like a misprint. Their revenues aren't as high as they could
be, but most startups would be happy to trade places with them.
In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get upwind
of their opponents.  If you're upwind, you decide when and if to
engage the other ship.  Craigslist is effectively upwind of enormous
revenues.  They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make more,
but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to
force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times
as much on sales as on development.
[
1
]
I'm not saying startups should aim to end up like Craigslist.
They're a product of unusual circumstances.  But they're a good
model for the early phases.
Google looked a lot like a charity in the beginning. They didn't
have ads for over a year.  At year 1, Google was indistinguishable
from a nonprofit.  If a nonprofit or government organization had
started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit
of what they'd have produced.
Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it would be a
good idea to have a web-based email service with good spam filtering.
I wasn't thinking of it as a company.  I just wanted to keep people
from getting spammed.  But as I thought more about this project, I
realized it would probably have to be a company.  It would cost
something to run, and it would be a pain to fund with grants and
donations.
That was a surprising realization.  Companies often claim to be
benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely
benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it.  But if
someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now.  There was a window
of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big
email services had terrible filters.  If someone had launched a
new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.
Notice the pattern here?  From either direction we get to the same
spot.  If you start from successful startups, you find they often
behaved like nonprofits.  And if you start from ideas for nonprofits,
you find they'd often make good startups.
Power
How wide is this territory?  Would all good nonprofits be good
companies?  Possibly not.  What makes Google so valuable is that
their users have money.  If you make people with money love you,
you can probably get some of it.  But could you also base a successful
startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money?
Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an
unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?
I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be
surprised how far it would go.  For example, people who apply to Y
Combinator don't generally have much money, and yet we can profit
by helping them, because with our help they could make money.  Maybe
the situation is similar with malaria.  Maybe an organization that
helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting
growth.
I'm not proposing this is a serious idea.  I don't know anything
about malaria.  But I've been kicking ideas around long enough to
know when I come across a powerful one.
One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what
point you'd bet against it.  The thought of betting against benevolence
is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically
impossible.  You're just asking to be made a fool of, because these
are such powerful forces.
[
2
]
For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied
to Internet startups.  Obviously it worked for Google, but what
about Microsoft?  Surely Microsoft isn't benevolent?  But when I
think back to the beginning, they were.  Compared to IBM they were
like Robin Hood.  When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they
were going to make money selling hardware at high prices.  But by
gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market
to any manufacturer.  Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people
got to have computers who couldn't otherwise have afforded them.
It's the sort of thing you'd expect Google to do.
Microsoft isn't so benevolent now.  Now when one thinks of what
Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with
F.
[
3
]
And yet it doesn't seem to pay.
Their stock price has been flat for years.  Back when they were
Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's.  Could there be
a connection?
You can see how there would be.  When you're small, you can't bully
customers, so you have to charm them.  Whereas when you're big you
can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier
than satisfying them.  You grow big by being nice, but you can stay
big by being mean.
You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and
then all your victims escape.  So "Don't be evil" may be the most
valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn
out to be an elixir of corporate youth.  I'm sure they find it
constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them
from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and
IBM.
The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other
company.  Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil."  The catch is that
people will hold you to it.  So I don't think you're going to see
record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.
Morale
There's a lot of external evidence that benevolence works.  But how
does it work?  One advantage of investing in a large number of
startups is that you get a lot of data about how they work.  From
what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways:
it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them,
and above all, it helps them be decisive.
Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important
that morale alone is almost enough to determine success.  Startups
are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're
going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed.  The
problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you
unhappy, but that it makes you
stop working
.  So the downhills
of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than
the uphills.  If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work
harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if
feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically
guarantees you'll fail.
Here's where benevolence comes in.  If you feel you're really helping
people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup
is doomed.  Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence.
The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them.
So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day,
you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi.  You've made
something you need to take care of.
Blogger is a famous example of a startup that went through really
low lows and survived.  At one point they ran out of money and
everyone left. Evan Williams came in to work the next day, and there
was no one but him.  What kept him going?  Partly that users needed
him.  He was hosting thousands of people's blogs. He couldn't just
let the site die.
There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important
may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in.
Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out
what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable
information.
The added confidence that comes from trying to help people can
also help you with investors. One of the founders of
Chatterous
told
me recently that he and his cofounder had decided that this service
was something the world needed, so they were going to keep working
on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live
in their parents' basements.
Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought
about them.  They still met with them, but they weren't going to
die if they didn't get their money.  And you know what?  The investors
got a lot more interested.  They could sense that the Chatterouses
were going to do this startup with or without them.
If you're really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you
become very hard to kill.  And practically all startups, even the
most successful, come close to death at some point.  So if doing
good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder
to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by
not choosing a more selfish project.
Help
Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want
to help you.  This too seems to be an inborn trait in humans.
One of the startups we've funded,
Octopart
, is currently locked in
a classic battle of good versus evil.  They're a search site for
industrial components.  A lot of people need to search for components,
and before Octopart there was no good way to do it.  That, it turned
out, was no coincidence.
Octopart built the right way to search for components.  Users like
it and they've been growing rapidly.  And yet for most of Octopart's
life, the biggest distributor, Digi-Key, has been trying to force
them take their prices off the site.  Octopart is sending them
customers for free, and yet Digi-Key is trying to make that traffic
stop.  Why?  Because their current business model depends on
overcharging people who have incomplete information about prices.
They don't want search to work.
The Octoparts are the nicest guys in the world.  They dropped out
of the PhD program in physics at Berkeley to do this.  They just
wanted to fix a problem they encountered in their research.  Imagine
how much time you could save the world's engineers if they could
do searches online.  So when I hear that a big, evil company is
trying to stop them in order to keep search broken, it makes me
really want to help them. It makes me spend more time on the Octoparts
than I do with most of the other startups we've funded.  It just
made me spend several minutes telling you how great they are.  Why?
Because they're good guys and they're trying to help the world.
If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors,
customers, other companies, and potential employees.  In the long
term the most important may be the potential employees.  I think
everyone knows now that
good hackers
are much better than mediocre
ones.  If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as
Google has, you have a big advantage.  And the very best hackers
tend to be idealistic.  They're not desperate for a job.  They can
work wherever they want.  So most want to work on things that will
make the world better.
Compass
But the most important advantage of being good is that it acts as
a compass.  One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you
have so many choices.  There are just two or three of you, and a
thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users.  You can hold
onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if
anything can.  Follow it and it will take you through everything
you need to do.
It's even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to
convince investors to give you money.  If you're a good salesman,
you could try to just talk them into it.  But the more reliable
route is to convince them through your users: if you make something
users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially,
and that will convince any investor.
Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions
in complex situations because it's stateless.  It's like telling
the truth.  The trouble with lying is that you have to remember
everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict
yourself.  If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything,
and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen
fast.
For example, Y Combinator has now invested in 80 startups, 57 of
which are still alive.  (The rest have died or merged or been
acquired.)  When you're trying to advise 57 startups, it turns out
you have to have a stateless algorithm.  You can't have ulterior
motives when you have 57 things going on at once, because you can't
remember them.  So our rule is just to do whatever's best for the
founders.  Not because we're particularly benevolent, but because
it's the only algorithm that works on that scale.
When you write something telling people to be good, you seem to be
claiming to be good yourself.  So I want to say explicitly that I
am not a particularly good person.  When I was a kid I was firmly
in the camp of bad.  The way adults used the word good, it seemed
to be synonymous with quiet, so I grew up very suspicious of it.
You know how there are some people whose names come up in conversation
and everyone says "He's
such
a great guy?"  People never say
that about me.  The best I get is "he means well."  I am not claiming
to be good.  At best I speak good as a second language.
So I'm not suggesting you be good in the usual sanctimonious way.
I'm suggesting it because it works.  It will work not just as a
statement of "values," but as a guide to strategy,
and even a design spec for software.  Don't just not be evil.  Be
good.
Notes
[
1
] Fifty years ago
it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay
dividends.  Now many tech companies don't.  The markets seem to
have figured out how to value potential dividends.  Maybe that isn't
the last step in this evolution.  Maybe markets will eventually get
comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least
some of them consistently make money.)
I realize this sounds like the stuff one used to hear about the
"new economy" during the Bubble.  Believe me, I was not drinking
that kool-aid at the time.  But I'm convinced there were some
good
ideas
buried in Bubble thinking.  For example, it's ok to focus on
growth instead of profits—but only if the growth is genuine.
You can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme.   But a company
with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and eventually markets learn
how to value valuable things.
[
2
] The idea of starting
a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because
the kind of people who currently make that their explicit goal don't
usually do a very good job.
It's one of the standard career paths of trustafarians to start
some vaguely benevolent business.  The problem with most of them
is that they either have a bogus political agenda or are feebly
executed.  The trustafarians' ancestors didn't get rich by preserving
their traditional culture; maybe people in Bolivia don't want to
either.  And starting an organic farm, though it's at least
straightforwardly benevolent, doesn't help people on the scale that
Google does.
Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently
accountable.  They act as if having good intentions were enough to
guarantee good effects.
[
3
] Users dislike their
new operating system so much that they're starting petitions to
save the old one.  And the old one was nothing special.  The hackers
within Microsoft must know in their hearts that if the company
really cared about users they'd just advise them to switch to OSX.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston,
and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation
German Translation


Apple's Mistake
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
November 2009
I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process
is broken.  Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters
that it's broken.
The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with
programmers more than anything else they've ever done.
Their reputation with programmers used to be great.
It used to be the most common complaint you heard
about Apple was that their fans admired them too uncritically.
The App Store has changed that.  Now a lot of programmers
have started to see Apple as evil.
How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they
lost over the App Store?  A third?  Half?  And that's just so far.
The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.
* * *
How did Apple get into this mess?  Their fundamental problem is
that they don't understand software.
They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through
iTunes.  Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to
reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed,
reluctantly.  But this model doesn't work for software.  It doesn't
work for an intermediary to own the user.  The software business
learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed
that although the words "software" and "publisher" fit together,
the underlying concepts don't.  Software isn't like music or books.
It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary
between developer and user.   And yet that's what Apple is trying
to be with the App Store: a software publisher.  And a particularly
overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced
house style.
If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now
that software development has evolved from a small number of big
releases to a constant stream of small ones.  But Apple doesn't
understand that either.  Their model of product development derives
from hardware.  They work on something till they think it's finished,
then they release it.  You have to do that with hardware, but because
software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution.
The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and
iterate.  Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays
each time you release a new version.
Apparently Apple's attitude is that developers should be more careful
when they submit a new version to the App Store.  They would say
that.  But powerful as they are, they're not powerful enough to
turn back the evolution of technology.  Programmers don't use
launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness.  They use it because it
yields the best results.  By obstructing that process, Apple is
making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple
would.
How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in
OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had
to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month
and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?
By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what
they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App
Store tends to be an old and buggy one.  One developer told me:
As a result of their process, the App Store is full of half-baked
  applications. I make a new version almost every day that I release
  to beta users. The version on the App Store feels old and crappy.
  I'm sure that a lot of developers feel this way: One emotion is
  "I'm not really proud about what's in the App Store", and it's
  combined with the emotion "Really, it's Apple's fault."
Another wrote:
I believe that they think their approval process helps users by
  ensuring quality.  In reality, bugs like ours get through all the
  time and then it can take 4-8 weeks to get that bug fix approved,
  leaving users to think that iPhone apps sometimes just don't work.
  Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms
  that have immediate approval processes.
Actually I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all the
complaints about App Store approvals are not a serious problem.
They must hear developers complaining.  But partners and suppliers
are always complaining.  It would be a bad sign if they weren't;
it would mean you were being too easy on them.  Meanwhile the iPhone
is selling better than ever.  So why do they need to fix anything?
They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because
they make such great hardware.  I just bought a new 27" iMac a
couple days ago.  It's fabulous.  The screen's too shiny, and the
disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't
make yourself care.
So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings.
I felt the way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a
bad human rights record.  That was new.  In the past when I bought
things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure.  Oh boy!  They make
such great stuff.  This time it felt like a Faustian bargain.  They
make such great stuff, but they're such assholes.  Do I really want
to support this company?
* * *
Should Apple care what people like me think?  What difference does
it make if they alienate a small minority of their users?
There are a couple reasons they should care.  One is that these
users are the people they want as employees.  If your company seems
evil, the best programmers won't work for you.  That hurt Microsoft
a lot starting in the 90s.  Programmers started to feel sheepish
about working there.  It seemed like selling out.  When people from
Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where
they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having
gone over to the dark side.  But the real problem for Microsoft
wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired.  It was the
people they never got.  And you know who got them?  Google and
Apple.  If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance.
And it's largely because they got more of the best people that
Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today.
Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals?  Partly
because they can afford to be.  The best programmers can work
wherever they want.  They don't have to work for a company they
have qualms about.
But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil
begets stupidity.  An organization that wins by exercising power
starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work.  And it's
not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas
aren't the ones that win.  I think the reason Google embraced "Don't
be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world
as to inoculate themselves against arrogance.
[
1
]
That has worked for Google so far.  They've become more
bureaucratic, but otherwise they seem to have held true to their
original principles. With Apple that seems less the case.  When you
look at the famous
1984 ad
now, it's easier to imagine Apple as the
dictator on the screen than the woman with the hammer.
[
2
]
In fact, if you read the dictator's speech it sounds uncannily like a
prophecy of the App Store.
We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts.
We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of
  pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests
  of contradictory and confusing truths.
The other reason Apple should care what programmers think of them
is that when you sell a platform, developers make or break you.  If
anyone should know this, Apple should.  VisiCalc made the Apple II.
And programmers build applications for the platforms they use.  Most
applications—most startups, probably—grow out of personal projects.
Apple itself did.  Apple made microcomputers because that's what
Steve Wozniak wanted for himself.  He couldn't have afforded a
minicomputer.
[
3
]
Microsoft likewise started out making interpreters
for little microcomputers because
Bill Gates and Paul Allen were interested in using them.  It's a
rare startup that doesn't build something the founders use.
The main reason there are so many iPhone apps is that so many programmers
have iPhones.  They may know, because they read it in an article,
that Blackberry has such and such market share.  But in practice
it's as if RIM didn't exist. If they're going to build something,
they want to be able to use it themselves, and that means building
an iPhone app.
So programmers continue to develop iPhone apps, even though Apple
continues to maltreat them.  They're like someone stuck in an abusive
relationship.  They're so attracted to the iPhone that they can't
leave.  But they're looking for a way out.  One wrote:
While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, the control they
  place on the App Store does not give me the drive to develop
  applications as I would like. In fact I don't intend to make any
  more iPhone applications unless absolutely necessary.
[
4
]
Can anything break this cycle?  No device I've seen so far could.
Palm and RIM haven't a hope.  The only credible contender is Android.
But Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it, not
the way Apple cares about the iPhone.  Apple cares about the iPhone
the way Google cares about search.
* * *
Is the future of handheld devices one locked down by Apple?  It's
a worrying prospect.  It would be a bummer to have another grim
monoculture like we had in the 1990s.  In 1995, writing software
for end users was effectively identical with writing Windows
applications.  Our horror at that prospect was the single biggest
thing that drove us to start building
web apps
.
At least we know now what it would take to break Apple's lock.
You'd have to get iPhones out of programmers' hands.  If programmers
used some other device for mobile web access, they'd start to develop
apps for that instead.
How could you make a device programmers liked better than the iPhone?
It's unlikely you could make something better designed.  Apple
leaves no room there.  So this alternative device probably couldn't
win on general appeal.  It would have to win by virtue of some
appeal it had to programmers specifically.
One way to appeal to programmers is with software.  If you
could think of an application programmers had to have, but that
would be impossible in the circumscribed world of the iPhone,
you could presumably get them to switch.
That would definitely happen if programmers started to use handhelds
as development machines—if handhelds displaced laptops the
way laptops displaced desktops.  You need more control of a development
machine than Apple will let you have over an iPhone.
Could anyone make a device that you'd carry around in your pocket
like a phone, and yet would also work as a development machine?
It's hard to imagine what it would look like.  But I've learned
never to say never about technology.  A phone-sized device that
would work as a development machine is no more miraculous by present
standards than the iPhone itself would have seemed by the standards
of 1995.
My current development machine is a MacBook Air, which I use with
an external monitor and keyboard in my office, and by itself when
traveling.  If there was a version half the size I'd prefer it.
That still wouldn't be small enough to carry around everywhere like
a phone, but we're within a factor of 4 or so.  Surely that gap is
bridgeable.  In fact, let's make it an
RFS
. Wanted:
Woman with hammer.
Notes
[
1
]
When Google adopted "Don't be evil," they were still so small
that no one would have expected them to be, yet.
[
2
]
The dictator in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally;
it's IBM.  IBM seemed a lot more frightening in those days, but
they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now.
[
3
]
He couldn't even afford a
monitor
.  That's why the Apple
I used a TV as a monitor.
[
4
]
Several people I talked to mentioned how much they liked the
iPhone SDK.  The problem is not Apple's products but their policies.
Fortunately policies are software; Apple can change them instantly
if they want to.  Handy that, isn't it?
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Ross Boucher,
James Bracy, Gabor Cselle,
Patrick Collison, Jason Freedman, John Gruber, Joe Hewitt, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Teng Siong Ong, Nikhil Pandit, Savraj Singh, and Jared Tame for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation


@nw3 I'm on the board.

@whyvert I suspect what you're seeing is the relative pull of London and northern cities like Manchester. I can easily believe that London already had the advantage in 1892.

@ArdaTors No. IIRC the record is around 50-60%.

@typesfast This sentence sounds wonderful. I wish it were true. But among other things it implies that someone who reads no books won't change, which seems obviously false.

@eishanlawrence5 Find a cofounder. You'll encourage one another. And it's something you want in a startup anyway.

@whyvert Is this graph saying that people started to move south in about 1940?

@SaidAitmbarek They're so effective. They make things happen.

I met a founder in the current YC batch who discovered Collison installation for himself by studying the Collisons' story (instead of by reading about it in my essays). He has already signed up about 10% of the batch.

@whyvert It's simply the same phenomenon that created the Rust Belt. Ambitious people moved away as a result, but their  moving was a result of economic decline, not the cause of it.

@will_the_ai_guy There's no new trend. The founders matter most, as they always have.


When To Do What You Love
September 2024
There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your
passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple
yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but
the border between should and shouldn't is very complicated. The
only way to give a general answer is to trace it.
When people talk about this question, there's always an implicit
"instead of." All other things being equal, why wouldn't you work
on what interests you the most? So even raising the question implies
that all other things aren't equal, and that you have to choose
between working on what interests you the most and something else,
like what pays the best.
And indeed if your main goal is to make money, you can't usually
afford to work on what interests you the most. People pay you for
doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious
exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you
love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot
to play it.
Of course the odds are against you in a case like football, because
so many other people like playing it too. This is not to say you
shouldn't try though. It depends how much ability you have and how
hard you're willing to work.
The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like
something that pays well and that few other people like. For example,
it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company.
He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved
writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed,
but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.
There are even some people who have a genuine intellectual interest
in making money. This is distinct from mere greed. They just can't
help noticing when something is mispriced, and can't help doing
something about it. It's like a puzzle for them.
[
1
]
In fact there's an edge case here so spectacular that it turns all
the preceding advice on its head. If you want to make a really
huge
amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars
— it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the
most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing
this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is
to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent
way to discover
startup ideas
.
Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the
founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began
that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas
tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were
consciously looking for ways to make money. Whereas if you're young
and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would
be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to
be built.
So there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you
don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most
interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't
usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're
young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested
in becomes a good idea again.
What if you're not sure what you want? What if you're attracted to
the idea of making money and more attracted to some kinds of work
than others, but neither attraction predominates? How do you break
ties?
The key here is to understand that such ties are only apparent.
When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and
making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of
yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the
options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path
to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually
suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't
know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really
like, or how well you could do them.
[
2
]
In a way this ignorance is excusable. It's often hard to predict
these things, and no one even tells you that you need to. If you're
ambitious you're told you should go to college, and this is good
advice so far as it goes, but that's where it usually ends. No one
tells you how to figure out what to work on, or how hard this can
be.
What do you do in the face of uncertainty? Get more certainty. And
probably the best way to do that is to try working on things you're
interested in. That will get you more information about how interested
you are in them, how good you are at them, and how much scope they
offer for ambition.
Don't wait. Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what
to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You
don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often
you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring
out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve,
the sooner you start, the better.
One useful trick for judging different kinds of work is to look at
who your colleagues will be. You'll become like whoever you work
with. Do you want to become like these people?
Indeed, the difference in character between different kinds of work
is magnified by the fact that everyone else is facing the same
decisions as you. If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well
it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the
same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it
seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely
interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are
genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring.
[
3
]
The other thing you do in the face of uncertainty is to make choices
that are uncertainty-proof. The less sure you are about what to do,
the more important it is to choose options that give you more options
in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether
to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is
upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch
later from math to economics than from economics to math.
There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you should
work on what interests you the most: if you want to do
great work
.
This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is
a necessary one.
There's a lot of selection bias in advice about whether to "follow
your passion," and this is the reason. Most such advice comes from
people who are famously successful, and if you ask someone who's
famously successful how to do what they did, most will tell you
that you have to work on what you're most interested in. And this
is in fact true.
That doesn't mean it's the right advice for everyone. Not everyone
can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated
question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most
becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort
of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.
Notes
[
1
]
These examples show why it's a mistake to assume that economic
inequality must be evidence of some kind of brokenness or unfairness.
It's obvious that different people have different interests, and
that some interests yield far more money than others, so how can
it not be obvious that some people will end up much richer than
others? In a world where some people like to write enterprise
software and others like to make studio pottery, economic inequality
is the natural outcome.
[
2
]
Difficulty choosing between interests is a different matter.
That's not always due to ignorance. It's often intrinsically
difficult. I still have trouble doing it.
[
3
]
You can't always take people at their word on this. Since
it's more prestigious to work on things you're interested in than
to be driven by money, people who are driven mainly by money will
often claim to be more interested in their work than they actually
are. One way to test such claims is by doing the following thought
experiment: if their work didn't pay well, would they take day jobs
doing something else in order to do it in their spare time? Lots
of mathematicians and scientists and engineers would. Historically
lots
have
. But I don't think as many investment bankers would.
This thought experiment is also useful for distinguishing between
university departments.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit,
Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of
this.


@franciscojarceo It's a waste of time to engage with either kind. So I prefer the right-wing ones because they don't tempt you to.

@metapills @ahistoryinart Are you thinking of a camera obscura?

On the whole I prefer the right-wing trolls. The left-wing trolls used to construct quite clever accusations that I wasted a lot of time refuting. The right-wing ones basically just call you names, and you block them.

Back on pre-Elon Twitter, I used to get attacked mostly by left-wing trolls. Now it's more right-wing ones. The two types are quite different. The left-wing trolls were nastier, but smarter. The right-wing ones are just blunt instruments.

@metapills @ahistoryinart Not in this case. I've used one myself, and what it gets you is the lines, not the tones. Think Ingres drawings.

@gmiller @micsolana @balajis I have some idea what they did or didn't do. I'm not immediate friends with any, but some are friends of friends. The story I hear is that the simplest explanation is the true one. Biden stubbornly insisted on running, even though many people thought he was too old.

@codexeditor @ahistoryinart In a sense it was.

@ahistoryinart This is done from a photo. You can see this clearly if you convert it to black and white. https://t.co/49Ge9xVYbA

Report of a conversation with Terence Tao when he was seven. (via @cremieuxrecueil) https://t.co/RZVEovvGdD

@balajis Incidentally, it would be easier for readers to follow this conversation if you replied by replying, instead of replying by quote-tweeting me.


@gaieges Surprisingly, no. In fact it's in the most boring industry you could imagine. They were just impressed by the CEO.

@nusmark_dhruv @Mahmut_Jomaa Don't assume it's warm in SF in the summer.

@nusmark_dhruv @Mahmut_Jomaa We come back for most batches. Always the summer batch. It depends on school holidays.

@Mahmut_Jomaa I retired from running YC but I've never stopped doing office hours with founders.

@grok @selfamar That's actually a decent summary so far as it goes.

@amaldorai You can compress all these into one life now.

@cortescap He would know better than to treat that as a signal.

@aref_vc My guess is not the idea but the personality of the CEO, who seems just unstoppable.

@el_errouze FWIW I don't think many of the really awful ones are from Silicon Valley. They're mostly either fake accounts or MAGA types, which are very rare in SV.

@maxcan Do you not feel any pity for this boy, Max?


@xWayfinder @SoVeryBritish Jessica would be very excited if I sounded like Colin Firth. But I grew up in America so I sound American, and still do after 8 years here. It would be affected to acquire an English accent.

@WillManidis Bill Gates doesn't go for museums and islands. Instead he focuses on "boring" things like global health. But the Gates Foundation has saved tens of millions of lives, and frankly that seems more impressive to me than building art museums.

@Cloudtheboi @RoKhanna Actual businesses don't do that.

@MacaesBruno Apparently there were tunnels every 30 feet.

@ThomasSowell There's never enough of anything people *pay for*. But this is a kind of tautology, because the price of anything there's enough of will sink to zero.

@RoKhanna You're wrong here. TikTok doesn't care about content creators. It could have avoided going dark simply by selling itself, as any company controlled by a normal board of directors would do in this situation. The fact that they didn't proves they're controlled by someone else.

You know you're interested in medieval history when you see a picture like this and your attention shifts to the field patterns underneath.

@garrytan FWIW taste can definitely be cultivated. But I'm very happy with humans having a monopoly on agency.

@jim_bisenius If so it would have been a good strategy for the CEO to say it.

@PennyRed An aggressively performative focus on social justice.


@StefanFSchubert They're also wrong about the high taxes. The reason Sweden's tech industry is so successful is more likely to be its *low* capital gains rate.

https://t.co/xbWtTR60dH

Humans arrived in Hawaii and New Zealand at about the same time they arrived in Iceland. https://t.co/GkVeGUwDd7

@ProfPHansen @noelTbrewer @findalen @henrik_ullum @HGJ2001 @JLIMD @videnskabdk @Rosewind2007 @MetteLineThorup @journalistendk @stinuslindgreen Can you estimate how many people will die due to that negative media coverage?

@wnmeyer McMansions don't house more people. They're just more pretentious.

@eyeslasho To be fair the last sentence is true.

"No one will notice in a couple weeks."

— Jessica every time I get a haircut

@DeenaGarzik I'm talking about the most expensive 18th century objects, like country houses and the paintings and furniture in them.

@Indian_Bronson Have you ever heard it used in spoken English in America? I haven't in decades, possibly in my life, except as a deliberately retro usage.

@DeenaGarzik Frills cost even more in the 18th century and yet 18th century things were mostly simpler.

@deeznuts The original search url allowed people to get their own tweets into the results.


@Itsjoeco The federal government is never good at graphic design.

@cremieuxrecueil Was this number influenced by the fact that people without kids were more likely to move to New Mexico?

@McCormickProf It's funny to think that in 100 years there will probably still be a bunch of these institutions, all founded at about the same time, but only domain experts will know that the reason was wokeness.

@Liv_Boeree Does your ability to control your facial expression ever help you as an interviewer?

@levie You are always very positive, but this is a new high water mark for you.

If you were born after 1980 you'd find it hard to believe the authority that papers of record like the NYT and Washington Post used to have. Partly because there were few alternative sources of news, but also because they took their responsibility as papers of record seriously.

@l_meyer_ @jonatanpallesen @MarioNawfal I wrote two sentences. Which one is false?

@rez0__ @MarioNawfal Counterexample: the majority of guys I went to high school with.

@jonatanpallesen @MarioNawfal Some good things are inherently expensive. If you like such things, it's not necessarily because they're expensive; it could be because they're good.

@PlutusCosmos Big European companies were once startups too. Just in 1847.


@axionisfuture Yes, it feels like someone's house.

@zekramu You can still differentiate yourself by writing better.

I finally went to visit OpenAI's new building. It's the nicest office I've ever seen. So many different shaped spaces, and such good color. Whoever was in charge of this did a really good job.

@Austen You have to become ruler of France.

@market_news0 @NamecheapCEO They were already established. And it's not their name.

@SpencerHakimian The one that the term was invented to discredit: that Oswald didn't act alone.

@NamecheapCEO In fact if a startup buys a very expensive name — e.g. the most common English word for what they do — they tend to read as a lame company that hopes to seem legit by spending a ton on their name instead of by making something great.

@NamecheapCEO A startup doesn't need what you'd consider the best possible name. It just needs a name that's good enough. "Google" is not a great name. We think highly of it because we associate it with an impressive company.

@varunram I tried but Procter & Gamble just beat me to it.

@samuelcdike It's possible to have a good domain name, so why not?


@akshatsaraf_ @forgebitz For sure yes.

@mmkalmmkal @forgebitz It's only 3 months.

@lacker @tylercowen I.e. they're tested on filters, not recipients, because filters are the harder part.

@IndraVahan @forgebitz The best founders are smart and ambitious. Smart and ambitious founders want to visit SV. So locating a YC somewhere else means it selects for the opposite qualities.

@unsoldwill @forgebitz I don't think they like startups at the moment.

"For every one ton of carbon dioxide that the rich countries stopped emitting in the last 15 or 17 years, developing countries have added five."

"We’ve gotten conditioned to think about climate as an emissions-reduction problem, which is actually a small part of it." https://t.co/JlF96yvCKT

@AP Nice passive voice there.

@elonmusk That's what I'm saying. Making cutlery towers isn't evidence that someone's on drugs. You could take an identical video of me at a dinner.

@brucem_real @gazanotice Yes, very disappointing, and it's happening every day.

@forgebitz It's not necessary to. YC accepts founders from all over the world, and it benefits them to experience Silicon Valley (and raise money from SV investors), even if they later return to their home countries.


This is a very revealing quote from Billy Bragg. If you're independent-minded (https://t.co/ogMaJHrydF),  you often find yourself on the same side of an issue as people you dislike. So if he's shocked by that idea, it shows he's not. https://t.co/DDYlNsHMtz

I'm told there are over 3000 people on the waiting list for my talk on Tuesday, and the venue only holds 180. Since we don't want to disappoint anyone, I'm going to give another talk later this year at a bigger venue.

@run13713 @Kulshekhar @engineers_feed Noora Health is the most effective I know: https://t.co/T5UtgtfCgM

@LandsknechtPike Believe it or not I had been wondering about that...

@Kulshekhar @engineers_feed I have a rough idea of child mortality rates because it's one of the biggest things I donate to fixing, but I had to look up this specific number.

@KuroiKumanoashi @engineers_feed The first thing that came to my mind was the number of P. G. Wodehouse books.

@engineers_feed The number of people who survive to age 21. About 93% currently do, so this would completely fix child mortality.

@serpunketh Are you sure?

@Jawad4PF It wasn't a question of winning or losing against him, just how many pieces he would spot you.

One of Jessica's favorite pictures: my high school chess club. I'm standing on the left. One of these guys went on to become a professional chess player. (The one looking at the board instead of the camera.) https://t.co/oCdaPQBisR


There is something Californian about his body language. It looks like he's saying "Don't touch me dude." (I know she's not a dude, but in serious Californian idiom it's a gender-neutral term.)

@tungnguyen IIRC he invented the phrase.

@tracewoodgrains I explained it here: https://t.co/3P73gG19Gs

@AAkerstein @justinvincent Yes, although I suppose morally donate ought to come earlier.

@aryanagxl Writing an essay.

The holidays are the best time for working. Everyone who usually interrupts you isn't.

Oops, spoke too soon. (He's good on ancient warfare though.)

https://t.co/cNehryEs4v

@KenRoth Man, Palau has such decided opinions on all these details.

@FastTradeKing How do you expect me to guess from just six words?

@mattyglesias Till I saw what you were retweeting I thought this was advice for the Democrats, and I was agreeing with it.


@pitdesi Another strange thing about that image is TWA's abortive attempt to put their own brand on the jets they bought. That didn't last long.

"Yes, Israel is committing war crimes."

— former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert https://t.co/s5ZeqJpAoa

@HeinrichKuttler @GavinWax They'd be on the path to citizenship at least.

@latinedisce Imagine having children and half of them dying before age 5.

@BizthonOfficial I never said that. Why do you make up this stuff when it's so easy to find actual quotes?

@dimitrioskonst @garrytan In this club what they meant by entrepreneurship was starting startups.

@Truthlovingguy @garrytan I would skip learning how to type onto punch cards.

@poppercharnley @garrytan No, definitely not. You can learn to code quite well in less than a year, and 27 is close to peak founder age.

@agaton @garrytan That's a stupid idea. If the companies work, the founders instantly stop being students.

@robertskmiles I spent about 30 seconds wondering if this was some deep point about the periodic table...