Undergraduation
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
March 2005
(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to
me with questions.)
Recently I've had several emails from computer science
undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not
be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in
college.  But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought
I was one.  I was certainly a hacker, at least.
Hacking
What should you do in college to become a
good hacker
?  There are two
main things you can do: become very good at programming, and learn
a lot about specific, cool problems.  These turn out to be equivalent,
because each drives you to do the other.
The way to be good at programming is to work (a) a lot (b) on hard
problems.  And the way to make yourself work on hard problems is
to work on some very engaging project.
Odds are this project won't be a class assignment.  My friend Robert
learned a lot by writing network software when he was an
undergrad. One of his projects was to connect Harvard to the
Arpanet; it had been one of the original nodes, but by 1984 the
connection had died. [1]  Not only was this
work not for a class, but because he spent all his time on it
and neglected his studies, he was kicked out of
school for a year. [2]  It all evened out in the end, and now he's
a professor at MIT.  But you'll probably be happier if you don't
go to that extreme; it caused him a lot of worry at the time.
Another way to be good at programming is to find other people who
are good at it, and learn what they know.  Programmers tend to sort
themselves into tribes according to the type of work they do and
the tools they use, and some tribes are
smarter
than others.  Look
around you and see what the smart people seem to be working on;
there's usually a reason.
Some of the smartest people around you are professors.  So one way
to find interesting work is to volunteer as a research assistant.
Professors are especially interested in people who can solve tedious
system-administration type problems for them, so that is a way to
get a foot in the door.  What they fear are
flakes and resume padders.  It's all too
common for an assistant to result in a net increase in work.  So
you have to make it clear you'll mean a net decrease.
Don't be put off if they say no.  Rejection is almost always less
personal than the rejectee imagines.  Just move on to the next.
(This applies to dating too.)
Beware, because although most professors are smart, not all of them
work on interesting stuff.  Professors have to publish novel results
to advance their careers, but there is more competition in more
interesting areas of research.  So what less ambitious professors
do is turn out a series of papers whose conclusions are novel because
no one else cares about them.  You're better off avoiding these.
I never worked as a research assistant, so I feel a bit dishonest
recommending that route.  I learned to program by writing stuff of
my own, particularly by trying to reverse-engineer Winograd's
SHRDLU.  I was as obsessed with that program as a mother with a new baby.
Whatever the disadvantages of working by yourself, the advantage
is that the project is all your own.  You never have to compromise
or ask anyone's permission, and if you have a new idea you can just
sit down and start implementing it.
In your own projects you don't have to worry about novelty (as
professors do) or profitability (as businesses do).  All that matters
is how hard the project is technically, and that has no correlation
to the nature of the application.  "Serious" applications like
databases are often trivial and dull technically (if you ever suffer
from insomnia, try reading the technical literature about databases)
while "frivolous" applications like games are often very sophisticated.
I'm sure there are game companies out there working on products
with more intellectual content than the research at the
bottom nine tenths of university CS departments.
If I were in college now I'd probably work on
graphics: a network game, for example, or a tool for 3D animation.
When I was an undergrad there weren't enough cycles around to make
graphics interesting, but it's hard to imagine anything more fun
to work on now.
Math
When I was in college, a lot of the professors believed (or at least
wished) that
computer science
was a branch of math.  This idea was
strongest at Harvard, where there wasn't even a CS major till the
1980s; till then one had to major in applied math.  But it was
nearly as bad at Cornell.  When I told the fearsome Professor Conway
that I was interested in AI (a hot topic then), he told me I should
major in math.  I'm still not sure whether he thought AI required
math, or whether he thought AI was nonsense and that majoring in
something rigorous would cure me of such stupid ambitions.
In fact, the amount of math you need as a hacker is a lot less
than most university departments like to admit.  I don't think you
need much more than high school math plus a few concepts from the
theory of computation.  (You have to know what an n^2 algorithm is
if you want to avoid writing them.) Unless you're planning to write
math applications, of course.  Robotics, for example, is all math.
But while you don't literally need math for most kinds of hacking,
in the sense of knowing 1001 tricks for differentiating formulas,
math is very much worth studying for its own sake.  It's a
valuable source of metaphors for almost any kind of work.[3] I wish
I'd studied more math in college for that reason.
Like a lot of people, I was mathematically abused as a child.  I
learned to think of math as a collection of formulas that were
neither beautiful nor had any relation to my life (despite attempts
to translate them into "word problems"), but had to be memorized
in order to do well on tests.
One of the most valuable things you could do in college would be
to learn what math is really about.  This may not be easy, because
a lot of good mathematicians are bad teachers.  And while there are
many popular books on math, few seem good.  The best I can think
of are W. W. Sawyer's.  And of course Euclid. [4]
Everything
Thomas Huxley said "Try to learn something about everything and
everything about something."  Most universities aim at this
ideal.
But what's everything?  To me it means, all that people
learn in the course of working honestly on hard problems.  All such
work tends to be related, in that ideas and techniques from one
field can often be transplanted successfully to others.  Even others
that seem quite distant.  For example, I write
essays
the same way
I write software: I sit down and blow out a lame version 1 as fast
as I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it.
Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough.  Medieval
alchemists were working on a hard problem, but their approach was
so bogus that there was little
to learn from studying it, except possibly about people's ability
to delude themselves.  Unfortunately the sort of AI I was trying
to learn in college had the same flaw: a very hard problem, blithely
approached with hopelessly inadequate techniques.  Bold?  Closer
to fraudulent.
The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they're so much
influenced by intellectual
fashions
.  If a
physicist met a colleague
from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist
met a colleague from 100 years ago, they'd just get into an
ideological argument.
Yes, of course, you'll learn something by taking a
psychology class.  The point is, you'll learn more by taking
a class in another department.
The worthwhile departments, in my opinion, are math, the hard
sciences, engineering, history (especially economic and social
history, and the history of science), architecture, and the classics.
A survey course in art history may be worthwhile.  Modern literature
is important, but the way to learn about it is just to read.  I
don't know enough about music to say.
You can skip the social sciences, philosophy, and the various
departments created recently in response to political pressures.
Many of these fields talk about important problems, certainly.  But
the way they talk about them is useless.  For example, philosophy
talks, among other things, about our obligations to one another;
but you can learn more about this from a wise grandmother or E. B.
White than from an academic philosopher.
I speak here from experience.  I should probably have been offended
when people laughed at Clinton for saying "It depends on what the
meaning of the word 'is' is."  I took about five classes in college
on what the meaning of "is" is.
Another way to figure out which fields are worth studying is to
create the
dropout graph.
For example, I know many people
who switched from math to computer science because they found math
too hard, and no one who did the opposite.  People don't do hard
things gratuitously; no one will work on a harder problem unless
it is proportionately (or at least log(n)) more rewarding.  So
probably math is more worth studying than computer science.  By
similar comparisons you can make a graph of all the departments in
a university.  At the bottom you'll find the subjects with least
intellectual content.
If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just
gave.
Language courses are an anomaly.  I think they're better considered
as extracurricular activities, like pottery classes.  They'd be far
more useful when combined with some time living in a country where
the language is spoken.  On a whim I studied Arabic as a freshman.
It was a lot of work, and the only lasting benefits were a weird
ability to identify semitic roots and some insights into how people
recognize words.
Studio art and creative writing courses are wildcards.  Usually
you don't get taught much:  you just work (or don't work) on whatever
you want, and then sit around offering "crits" of one another's
creations under the vague supervision of the teacher.  But writing and
art are both very hard problems that (some) people work honestly
at, so they're worth doing, especially if you can find a good
teacher.
Jobs
Of course college students have to think about more than just
learning.  There are also two practical problems to consider: jobs,
and graduate school.
In theory a liberal education is not supposed to supply job training.
But everyone knows this is a bit of a fib.  Hackers at every college
learn practical skills, and not by accident.
What you should learn to get a job depends on the kind you want.
If you want to work in a big company, learn how to hack
Blub
on
Windows.  If you want to work at a cool little company or research
lab, you'll do better to learn Ruby on Linux.  And if you want to
start your own company, which I think will be more and more common,
master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going
to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse.
There is not a direct correlation between the skills you should
learn in college and those you'll use in a job.  You should aim
slightly high in college.
In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even
though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in
the course of a game.  Likewise, if your professors try to make you
learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may
not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world.
They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.
The programs you write in classes differ in three critical ways
from the ones you'll write in the real world: they're small; you
get to start from scratch; and the problem is usually artificial
and predetermined.  In the real world, programs are bigger, tend
to involve existing code, and often require you to figure out what
the problem is before you can solve it.
You don't have to wait to leave (or even enter) college to learn
these skills.  If you want to learn how to deal with existing code,
for example, you can contribute to open-source projects.  The sort
of employer you want to work for will be as impressed by that as
good grades on class assignments.
In existing open-source projects you don't get much practice at
the third skill, deciding what problems to solve.  But there's
nothing to stop you starting new projects of your own.  And  good
employers will be even more impressed
with that.
What sort of problem should you try to solve?  One way to answer
that is to ask what you need as a user.  For example, I stumbled
on a good algorithm for spam filtering because I wanted to stop
getting spam.  Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow
prevented my inbox from filling up.  I tend to use my inbox as a
todo list.  But that's like using a screwdriver to open
bottles; what one really wants is a bottle opener.
Grad School
What about grad school?  Should you go?  And how do you get into a
good one?
In principle, grad school is professional training in research, and
you shouldn't go unless you want to do research as a career.  And
yet half the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research.
I didn't go to grad school to become a professor.  I went because
I wanted to learn more.
So if you're mainly interested in hacking and you go to grad school,
you'll find a lot of other people who are similarly out of their
element.  And if half the people around you are out of their element in the
same way you are, are you really out of your element?
There's a fundamental problem in "computer science," and it surfaces
in situations like this.  No one is sure what "research" is supposed to be.
A lot
of research is hacking that had to be crammed into the form of an
academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication.
So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in grad
school, because very few people are quite at home in computer
science.  The whole field is uncomfortable in its own skin.  So
the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter
you from going to grad school.  Just be warned you'll have to do a lot of stuff
you don't like.
Number one will be your dissertation.  Almost everyone hates their
dissertation by the time they're done with it.  The
process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a cake made out
of whole wheat flour and baked for twelve hours.  Few dissertations
are read with pleasure, especially by their authors.
But thousands before you have suffered through writing a dissertation.
And aside from that, grad school is close to paradise.  Many people
remember it as the happiest time of their lives.  And nearly all
the rest, including me, remember it as a period that would have
been, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation. [5]
The danger with grad school is that you don't see the scary part
upfront.  PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several
years of classes.  So by the time you face the horror of writing a
dissertation, you're already several years in.  If you quit now,
you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won't like that
idea.  When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the
Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out
without the stigma of failure.
On the whole, grad school is probably better than most alternatives.  You meet a
lot of smart people, and your glum procrastination will at least
be a powerful common bond.  And of course you have a PhD at the
end.  I forgot about that. I suppose that's worth something.
The greatest advantage of a PhD (besides being the union card of
academia, of course) may be that it gives you some baseline confidence.
For example, the Honeywell thermostats in my house have the most
atrocious UI.  My mother, who has the same model, diligently spent
a day reading the user's manual to learn how to operate hers.  She
assumed the problem was with her.  But I can think to myself "If
someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this
thermostat, it
must
be badly
designed."
If you still want to go to grad school after this equivocal
recommendation, I can give you solid advice about how to get in.
A lot of my friends are CS professors now, so I have the inside
story about admissions.  It's quite different from college.  At
most colleges, admissions officers decide who gets in.  For PhD
programs, the professors do.  And they try to do
it well, because the people they admit are going to be working for
them.
Apparently only recommendations really matter at the best schools.
Standardized tests count for nothing, and grades for little.  The
essay is mostly an opportunity to disqualify yourself by saying
something stupid.  The only thing professors
trust is recommendations, preferably from people they know. [6]
So if you want to get into a PhD program, the key is to impress
your professors.  And from my friends who are professors I know
what impresses them: not merely trying to impress them.  They're
not impressed by students who get good grades or want to be their
research assistants so they can get into grad school.  They're
impressed by students who get good grades and want to be their
research assistants because they're genuinely interested in the
topic.
So the best thing you can do in college, whether you want to get
into grad school or just be good at hacking, is figure out what you
truly like.  It's hard to trick professors into letting you into
grad school, and impossible to trick problems into letting you solve
them.  College is where faking stops working.  From this point,
unless you want to go work for a big company, which is like reverting
to high school, the only way forward is through doing what you
love
.
Notes
[1] No one seems to have minded, which shows how unimportant
the Arpanet (which became the Internet) was as late as
1984.
[2] This is why, when I became an employer, I didn't care
about GPAs.  In fact, we actively sought out people
who'd failed out of school.  We once put up posters around Harvard
saying "Did you just get kicked out for doing badly in your classes
because you spent all your time working on some project of your
own?  Come work for us!"  We managed to find a kid who had been,
and he was a great hacker.
When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a year, they have to get jobs.
The idea is to show them how awful the real world is, so they'll
understand how lucky they are to be in college.  This plan backfired
with the guy who came to work for us, because he had more fun than
he'd had in school, and made more that year from stock options than
any of his professors did in salary.  So instead of crawling back
repentant at the end of the year, he took another year off and went
to Europe.  He did eventually graduate at about 26.
[3] Eric Raymond says the best metaphors for hackers are
in set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory.
Trevor Blackwell reminds you to take math classes intended for math majors.
"'Math for engineers' classes sucked mightily. In fact any 'x for
engineers' sucks, where x includes math, law, writing and visual
design."
[4] Other highly recommended books:
What is Mathematics?
, by
Courant and Robbins;
Geometry and the Imagination
by Hilbert and
Cohn-Vossen.
And for those interested in graphic design,
Byrne's Euclid
.
[5] If you wanted to have the perfect life, the thing to do would
be to go to grad school, secretly write your dissertation in the
first year or two, and then just enjoy yourself for the next three
years, dribbling out a chapter at a time.  This prospect will make
grad students' mouths water, but I know of no one who's had the
discipline to pull it off.
[6] One professor friend says that 15-20% of the grad students they
admit each year are "long shots."  But what he means by long shots
are people whose applications are perfect in every way, except
that no one on the admissions committee knows the professors who
wrote the recommendations.
So if you want to get into
grad school in the sciences, you need to go to college somewhere with
real research professors.  Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet
to admissions committees, no matter how good you are.
Which implies
a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence:
little liberal arts colleges are doomed.
Most smart
high school kids at least consider going into the sciences, even
if they ultimately choose not to.
Why go to a college that limits their options?
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Alex Lewin, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Eric
Raymond, and several
anonymous CS professors
for reading drafts of this, and to the students whose questions
began it.
More Advice for Undergrads
Joel Spolsky: Advice for Computer Science College Students
Eric Raymond: How to Become a Hacker


When something is fundamentally bogus, it ends up being surrounded by a cloud of subsidiary bogus things. It's like the way you can prove any proposition if you start with contradictory premises.

We should give credit where credit is due, and it sounds like the administration deserves some credit here.

Trying to get an accurate answer out of current AI is like trying to trick a habitual liar into telling the truth. It can be done if you back him into the right kind of corner. Or as we would now say, give him the right prompts.

I talk to the dog, who seems to be listening with the greatest attention, but I know all he's thinking is "I wonder if he will give me a piece of cheese, like that time he did three months ago."

It's worth thinking about what he means by "dumb things." It's clearly a bit of a euphemism. I think he means (a) dangerous things and (b) politically incorrect ones. And (b) may have been a bigger factor than we'd expect now. This was 2017, remember.

We had a dinner party last night. Jessica asked me, as a Christmas present, to dress up, so I did. Later that evening the caterer asked his daughter, who he brings to help him, if I needed anything, and she said I wasn't there. Dressed up I am literally unrecognizable.

I'm not a great judge of character, but fortunately my mistakes are nearly all in the same direction (accepting the bad rather than rejecting the good). So all I need is a second pass by someone with a tighter filter, like Jessica, and the result is close to perfect.

One big difference between talking to AIs and talking to people on Twitter is that AIs usually admit when they're mistaken and correct the error, whereas people on Twitter will do anything to avoid this.

She shot her dog. What more do you need to know?

Helping students come up with good startup ideas is like hooking them up to the deck catapult of an aircraft carrier. If you succeed, they're gone. What are they supposed to do, not work on the idea? And working on a startup is incompatible with being a student.


@nutix_ai I always use m-dashes.

@harsh_dwivedi7 There may be AI startups that are overpriced, but some weird connection to Microsoft via VS Code is not the evidence of it.

These AI-generated spam replies are becoming increasingly common. Will it be possible to fix this problem with filters? Or will they make the Twitter model obsolete? https://t.co/rzQniGM1Zu

@SanejBandgar I've mostly replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up, but I don't use it for any more than that.

@exception1111 I think it's true for many kinds of work. Perhaps not for kinds where perfection is possible.

@XenBH That is one test, what proportion of changes I end up undoing.

On April 28 I started a new essay. By May 2 it felt almost done. I'm still working on it. It's remarkable how much further you can take something from "almost done." People who always write with deadlines must never realize this fundamental fact about writing.

@rippyfied @garrytan That is what a lot of people are wondering now.

@ajxcam @psframes I don't disagree with anything you say. But the decision about whether to include the frame as part of the trompe l'oeil effect should be left to the artist to make, not made later by curators.

@garrytan Weeel, the difference is that inventions like the steam shovel performed just one task that had been done by humans. If you invent something that can perform every task done by humans, the results may be different.


This is even more the case with "not a good look." Someone saying "read the room" can at least pretend they're giving advice about how to convince people. But someone saying "not a good look" is just saying "conform."

@wssnr No, in practice the kind of people who say "read the room" are not people who agree with you but think "now is not the time," but people who disagree and hope to use social pressure to silence you.

@Pontus4Pope For sure. And indeed, the dumber the audience, the further you may have to depart from right in order to persuade them.

@henhaohank You're right about the first two, but "wrong side of history" is reasonable. It assumes that we converge on the truth about historical events, which is not far wrong.

"Read the room" is not advice for being right. It's advice for being popular. So when people give it, they're also implicitly telling us which they think is more important.

@p3shoemaker @markessien IIRC I got that wrong too. That's my "you're wasting my time" look.

@sarah_cone @markessien I was bored too. As with so many other things, to do well you have to care.

@wetarynitup Why it's worth reading important books multiple times: https://t.co/Icj6P7OqHu

@yishan On Jessica's superpowers: https://t.co/wRohkkMngR

@_asadmemon @migueldeicaza Yeah, me neither. It's so lame that Twitter is vulnerable to this kind of blatant manipulation.


@StefanFSchubert The problem used to be much worse. Now there is a new attorney general, a new mayor, and many new supervisors.

I asked some British friends visiting SF what surprised them about it. The drug problem is much less serious than they expected. Public transit works well. The streets are surprisingly empty. Great racial diversity. Every 4th car is a Tesla. Food is very expensive.

@rajatsuri @snowmaker Yeah, I remember being impressed by that.

@snowmaker Adora Cheung was one of the first, if not the first, to do this.  She got a job as a cleaner before she started HomeJoy.

@bscholl Once it's installed you should celebrate by having a conversation at it.

@abarrallen That was the usual age for craftsmen to begin their apprenticeships.

@SpencerHakimian Perhaps by half innocent he means there was consent on his side, at least.

@linamkhan Startups are risky. Sometimes when you keep rolling the dice things turn out well. Sometimes not. But founders should be able to decide for themselves when to stop.

@ViewChester I wasn't surprised they kept quiet initially, but I admit it's a bit surprising they're still quiet now, when everyone else is talking about it. Even Trump is talking about it.

@frankgoertzen @shaunmmaguire Israel hasn't kept international journalists out of Gaza?


@AviationMarlene The addition of rotors must have made the 3210 much more popular than its predecessor.

Jessica dared me to tweet that I lunched upon a heel of bread that I retrieved from the trash. (She said "stale bread" but it wasn't stale. It was still perfectly good. It was also, critically, sitting on *top* of the other stuff; see related Seinfeld episode.)

I forgot this alternative solution to the visible likes problem till someone retweeted it today.

@JonErlichman How big a fraction?

@Jdelahozduran @Chris_arnade It wasn't the cuts.

@matthew_d_green Making money from non-military applications of AI doesn't imply making money from consumers directly using LLMs. Presumably AI will pervade non-military businesses much as software itself has.

@nowaffle Early 2010s?

@krishnanrohit It's common among newly founded startups (and indeed one of the reasons startups work). It's less common among companies with 1000 people like Scale. And openly stating this principle is not (yet) common at any size.

@yacineMTB I have some stock via YC (I have no idea how much), but I didn't invest personally. I wish I had! But Scale's batch was the summer we moved to England, so I didn't meet Alexandr till later.

@Austen There's Fentanyl in New York too. It's the supervisors.


"Everything would be so much better if everyone would just listen to me."

— Jessica

The strange thing is, she's right.

@ArthurB @Noahpinion I think the explanation for that is a very nasty individual being in charge of them. Possibly ultimately Miller. Or some minion of his.

@WillManidis The most dangerous version of all is when the success is due to the tests being somewhat fake. I've seen this a lot in recent grads of elite universities.

@Noahpinion I don't think it's that organized. I think the cruelty is mostly the result of incompetence. Someone has set quotas. Bungling agents randomly grab people to meet them.

@noroboguy No, the investments have been cancelled or delayed. Money that would have been invested hasn't been. Past tense.

@serpunketh That's false. I retweeted something praising his executive order undoing the supersonic ban a few days ago.

@ChShersh When I was in college we were still being told it was irresponsible to program while sitting at a computer. You were supposed to work out all the details on paper first, then merely type your program in. But some of us didn't listen.

@ChShersh This divergence dates to the 1970s if not before. The second type is the original type. It dates from the time when programmers had to write their programs on paper. Then when terminals arrived it became possible to program interactively.

@JoelWish @IDF No, it's because the images are in fact very similar.

@TonyTelsIt @IDF Don't you think it's a bit strange for you to be following me and also to say that nobody knows who I am?


My side of the sink in our bathroom: toothpaste, shaving cream, mouthwash, dental floss. Jessica's side: Snape's classroom.

The sweet spot for present-day AI seems to be projects that were constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text. That's why it works so well for programming. Basically programmers produced valuable text. But there are lots of other projects with this quality.

I talked to a startup today that I'd never have considered an "AI startup" when I funded them in 2021. But it turns out that they're in a domain that was constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text, and now they're absolutely flying.

It's a mistake for startups to treat fundraises as a series of milestones. There's something even more impressive than raising a series whatever: to be making so much that you don't need to. Eventually all companies have to reach this point. The sooner you do, the better.

You can't accurately call something a milestone when the more impressive alternative would be not to hit it.

Jessica's friend's cousin, a random white guy in Minnesota,  had his apartment invaded by ICE with drawn guns. They claimed they had a warrant, but they didn't. They were going door to door in his building.

Now for all his friends and family, ICE raids are no longer just a news story but something that happened to someone they know. This is going to cause a wave of discontent among ordinary Americans.

The reason I can speak out against dumb things isn't so much that I have more insight or moral courage. It's more because I happen to be uniquely insulated from the danger of offending stupid people.

Someone associated with a brand selling cookies, for example, can't publicly attack things that dumb people like. Dumb people buy lots of cookies. But it's safe for me to. If I offend dumb people and they don't apply to YC, that's actually good for YC.

Neither I nor the founder I met with today had eaten yet, so I did office hours in the kitchen while making us lunch. It was just like old times, chopping onions while trying to figure out what their fundraising strategy should be.


Incidentally, this also means that startups are relatively safe investments in times of chaos. What you're betting on in a startup is whether the founders are Larry and Sergey or not, and that's almost completely independent of external conditions.

Macroeconomic factors might affect the value of a startup by 2-3x. 5x would be huge. Whereas getting the product right can easily make a difference of 1000x.

Someone asked me if now is a good time to start a startup, with all the uncertainty in the world. The answer is yes, because the dominant factor in the outcome of a startup is whether the founders can discover a great product, not the political or economic environment.

Ugh, can you imagine a worse sign for a country than a sudden decline in demand for machine tools?

Trade wars often turn into real wars. I wonder if this is the point where China blockades Taiwan.

@eastdakota For your explanation to be correct, they'd have to be not merely holding their cards close to their chests, but actively trying to look stupid. Occam's razor says they're not acting.

@eastdakota I don't think this can be the explanation. Such a plan would fall into the category of diabolically clever, and people who were diabolically clever would know that Jan Mayen is part of Norway.

@Noahpinion You have to give him credit for trying at least.

@migueldeicaza I use the alternate strategy: only buy new ones about every 8 years.

@amasad Yes, he thought that was hilarious.


@NathanpmYoung I spent a lot of money and a good deal of time on the last two election cycles.

Which of America's bold new cohort of Republican leaders is bold enough to answer this? https://t.co/ZORjuOS8K2

@aparanjape Air France bailed, and without them there wasn't enough demand to keep the spare parts operation running.

@kandieSWE We have taken many. We're like that ourselves.

@martyamark I think he'd have mostly approved. It's very spare, like the output of a Unix utility.

@t_blom In fact it would be hard for humans to do this — to figure out everything a piece of software can do just by logging in and clicking on things, without even reading the manual or being taught how to use the software by another user.

@aparanjape The Concorde didn't fail commercially. The NYC-London route was profitable.

@thesubmitter_ (But don't expect me to be able to converse. This was 40 years ago and that's one of the only sentences I remember. )

@needtofilm Of course he would, if only because he's one of our models of a good founder.

@t_blom I'll take the other side of that bet. The tree of behaviors would be hard to traverse.


It's so much more interesting focusing on things that are unfashionable, undervalued, overlooked. And there are so many of them! People are great at overlooking.

One of the biggest problems afflicting young writers is the belief that writing has to sound fancy — that it can't just sound like spoken English. Actually the more it sounds like spoken English the better.

Fortunately there's an easy cure for this problem: look at each sentence and ask if you could imagine yourself saying it to a friend. Would you begin a sentence with "furthermore"? No? Then don't do it in your writing either.

One surprising thing I've learned recently is how well made 20th century mechanical watches were. Some watches made in the 1940s are still accurate to a couple seconds a day.

It's strange to think that the people who made these watches never knew just what a good job they did. They knew they did the best they could, but you can never know how well something you made is going to work 80 years from now.

The thing I want to know most about the Venezuelan operation is who's in the Epstein files.

Saying that only entrepreneurs generate wealth is as mistaken as saying that only workers do. In fact founders, managers, employees, and individual craftsmen can all generate wealth. Founders do have the most leverage though.

13 yo and I were delighted to discover on our latest visit to Sports Direct that executioner hats are in fashion again. We each got one. He can't wait to wear his to school. https://t.co/TtkMvufDFY

As well as getting you better stuff, good taste saves you money. Most people have bad taste, so the law of supply and demand means good things tend to be cheaper.

This illustrates an aspect of AI that I hadn't thought about till now: it cuts through bureaucracy. If a big organization is paralyzed by indecision, AI doesn't care. It will happily generate a version 1. And that becomes the starting point, because there is no other version 1.


Yet another thing that only happened because Ronco was behind the scenes making it happen. The idea of a powerful force working behind the scenes sounds sinister, and maybe it usually is, but not always.

@sarmadgulzar He talked about his experiences running Airbnb and how much his current m.o. differed from the advice he'd been given. It was only when I talked to other founders afterward that I realized it was part of a widespread pattern.

I just learned that Brian Chesky would never have given the famous talk that led to "Founder Mode" if Ron Conway hadn't nagged him to attend the event where he gave it. Brian had been thinking of blowing it off but Ron kept sending him texts saying he had to "SUPPORT FOUNDERS!!!"

@clark_aviation Interesting to see an A-6 with livery stolen from a Cessna 172.

@thetimmorgan It's less rare here than just about anywhere else in the world.

@jeremyphoward I've noticed this too. Lots of people I follow talking about Bluesky, but none about Threads.

It has set off my startup spidey-sense. When a whole bunch of otherwise unrelated people are talking about the same thing, it's often a sign of something big happening.

@jeremyphoward Isn't it always that way...

@mhartl The Code of the Woosters

@PavlosProkopeas Wodehouse thought quite well.

@Csingh321 To HMRC, on the other hand, it's as if I never left...


@ccccjjjjeeee That's the norm. Twitter mobs attacking you are usually attacking you for something you didn't actually say.

@davidiach Oddly enough that's a name I know very well. From working on online shopping back in the 90s, if you know what I mean.

@mundanemun Data works. That's what convinced me that climate change is worth worrying about.

Email turns up in my inbox about "Techsylvania." Is it about Pennsylvania, I wonder, or Transylvania? Then I notice the sender's name is Vlad.

@korbencopy @Levi7hart No, not precise enough.

@GabiImmelman Except walking in two different directions at once.

It will go well with the painting he made me buy at auction 4 years ago. https://t.co/kAtDLTmsVw

This table came up at auction recently. I showed an image of it to 12 yo to explain why Victorian design had a bad reputation, and he loved it and made me bid on it. So now we're going to have this thing in our house. https://t.co/caoYwlGACH

@nickcammarata "Delve" is not the worst word. It's slightly tacky, but nothing like as bad as, say, using "pen" as a verb. The only reason it became so famous is that it happened to be used disproportionately often by a recent version of ChatGPT.

@Levi7hart If there is, what is it?


Writing,  Briefly
March 2005
(In the process
of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay about writing.
I usually spend weeks on an essay.  This one took
67 minutes—23
of writing, and
44 of rewriting.)
I think it's far more important to write well than most people
realize.  Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them.
If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out
on most of the ideas writing would have generated.
As for how to write well, here's the short version:
Write a bad version
1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut
out
everything
unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for
bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers
you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to
write about, then write down what you said; expect
80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it,
and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough
to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which
bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines;
mull ideas over for a few days before
writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing
when you think of the first
sentence; if a deadline
forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence
first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly;
use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit
sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble
over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the
paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the
reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time;
when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you
finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate
notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't
feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't
read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are
designed to sound ok on crappy car radios;
if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;
ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone
down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because
an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more
ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them
on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish
surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an
ending, and when one appears, grab it.
Russian Translation
Japanese Translation
Romanian Translation
Spanish Translation
German Translation
Chinese Translation
Hungarian Translation
Catalan Translation
Danish Translation
Arabic Translation


"When I was a child she worked as a schoolteacher, and her school was next to mine, so in the mornings we would walk to school together. I don't know why I remember this — but she'd always walk between me and the sun. So that I could stand in her shadow."

He said if I'd asked him 6 months ago he couldn't have said for sure, but that he was now confident vibe coding was going to stick. And right now is the worst it's ever going to work, so if it works now it will just keep working better.

Vibe coding is here to stay. I'd been worried it might be a fad, but I talked to the founder of an infrastructure company who's in a position to see how well vibe-coded apps are doing, and he said a lot of them are making money.

@apralky And the consequence of not "losing touch" is to become a ruthless liar? That seems unlikely.

@_opencv_ I have no idea if this is an accurate account of something Garry said, but I can imagine startups for which this would be the right advice. It's like telling a startup whose software was too slow in 1995 to hang on for two more cycles of Moore's Law.

@Boavista_Ludwig I would bet on Andy's insights about this kind of thing over anyone's.

In principle there's a third category: companies that should make everything they design, but can't. But there's already a name for those.

Maybe this isn't true of all hard tech startups. But if not it would be an interesting way to classify them: the ones that can and should make everything they design, and the ones that don't need to.

The reason is not just that suppliers can be unreliable. Even if they were perfectly reliable, the cycle time involved in changing the design of a component and getting the new version manufactured and shipped to you would kill your schedule.

Interesting insight from Andy Lapsa of Stoke Space: If you're running a hard tech startup, you should be able to fabricate everything you need yourself. You may choose to farm something out to a supplier, but you shouldn't need to.


This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
November 2016
If you're a California voter, there is an important proposition
on your ballot this year: Proposition 62, which bans the death
penalty.
When I was younger I used to think the debate about the death
penalty was about when it's ok to take a human life.  Is it ok
to kill a killer?
But that is not the issue here.
The real world does not work like the version I was shown on TV growing up.  The police
often arrest the wrong person.
Defendants' lawyers are often incompetent.  And prosecutors
are often motivated more by publicity than justice.
In the real world,
about 4%
of people sentenced to death
are innocent.
So this is not about whether it's ok to kill killers. This
is about whether it's ok to kill innocent people.
A child could answer that one for you.
This year, in California, you have a chance to end this, by
voting yes on Proposition 62. But beware, because there is another
proposition, Proposition 66, whose goal is to make it
easier to execute people. So yes on 62, no on 66.
It's time.


It's strange how much more people are talking now about the bad things Assad did than they did when he was actually doing them.

15 yo returns in mid-afternoon from staying at a friend's house.

15 yo: I'm hungry. I haven't eaten all day.

Jessica: My poor baby! How have you not eaten anything all day?

15 yo: Well, I've only been up for two hours...

I must be following the right people, because every tweet I've seen about drones in New Jersey is about how nothing is actually happening.

@NathanWailes @l_meyer_ @jonatanpallesen @MarioNawfal Ugh, Twitter is such a waste of time. The fact that you replied to the wrong tweet doesn't make it a motte and bailey argument.

In Sam's case I know. I've known him since he was 19. He has always been into cars. If that expensive one cost 1/10 as much, he'd have been delighted.

@NathanWailes @l_meyer_ @jonatanpallesen @MarioNawfal The tweet I was replying to claimed that buying expensive cars is "driven by desire to show off your wealth." You can check for yourself; it's still there.

@CcibChris I missed the joke initially because I was looking for an ejection handle under the seat.

@lefineder You can see what may be a bump from chariots starting at 1500 BC.

@robertskmiles @clairlemon Exactly. It's unpleasant to think about, but not false.

@Noahpinion Lot of suffering in the meantime though...

@serbiaireland I got a book illustrated by him as a present when I was a little kid, and I immediately recognized the style, 50 years later.


Wow, yes, this is an important point from @patio11:

https://t.co/jEvijYDSQB

If business class travelers have a choice of a 10 hour subsonic flight from Seattle to Tokyo or a 5 hour supersonic one at the same price, they're all going to take the 5 hour one. Which means all the business class travelers switch to supersonic.

Ticket prices will be about the same as current business class prices on international flights. How can this be? Because the flights are so much shorter that you don't need lay-flat beds. You can use the seat pitch of domestic first class.

@chris_j_paxton The Concorde was more expensive to operate. And there was way less demand on the Pacific routes in those days.

What most people don't realize about Boom is that if they ship an airliner at all, every airline that flies internationally will have to buy it or be converted against their will into a discount airline, flying tourists subsonically.

@bscholl I didn't think the probability of succeeding was over 50% (when is it ever in a startup?) but I always thought the expected value was high, because you'll make so much if you do.

12 yo and I have a shared fiction in which Grundon and Biffa are rival factions competing to dominate the world. It's been going for about 8 years now. We constantly see signs that one or the other of them is plotting something new.

Prediction: From now on we'll rarely hear the phrase "writer's block." 99% of the people experiencing it will give in after a few days and have AI write them a first draft. And the 1% who are too proud to use AI are probably also too proud to use a phrase like "writer's block."

I only had a little cash on me and I wanted to buy from as many different kids' tables as I could, but after this fine bit of reasoning I just gave them the £5.

@BigMeanInternet I only had a little cash on me and I wanted to buy from as many different kids' tables as I could, in order to encourage them. And of course I gave them the £5 after this.

But I hope you've enjoyed feeling clever and virtuous.


The Venture Capital Squeeze
November 2005
In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves
squeezed from four directions.  They're already stuck with a seller's
market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the
Bubble and still haven't invested.  This by itself is not the end
of the world.  In fact, it's just a more extreme version of the
norm
in the VC business: too much money chasing too few deals.
Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because
it's getting so cheap to start a startup.  The four causes: open
source, which makes software free; Moore's law, which makes hardware
geometrically closer to free; the Web, which makes promotion free
if you're good; and better languages, which make development a lot
cheaper.
When we started our startup in 1995, the first three were our biggest
expenses.  We had to pay $5000 for the Netscape Commerce Server,
the only software that then supported secure http connections.  We
paid $3000 for a server with a 90 MHz processor and 32 meg of
memory.  And we paid a PR firm about $30,000 to promote our launch.
Now you could get all three for nothing.  You can get the software
for free; people throw away computers more powerful than our first
server; and if you make something good you can generate ten times
as much traffic by word of mouth online than our first PR firm got
through the print media.
And of course another big change for the average startup is that
programming languages have improved-- or rather, the
median language
has.  At most startups ten years
ago, software development meant ten programmers writing code in
C++.  Now the same work might be done by one or two using Python
or Ruby.
During the Bubble, a lot of people predicted that startups would
outsource their development to India.  I think a better model for
the future is David Heinemeier Hansson, who outsourced his development
to a more powerful language instead.  A lot of well-known applications
are now, like BaseCamp, written by just one programmer.  And one
guy is more than 10x cheaper than ten, because (a) he won't waste
any time in meetings, and (b) since he's probably a founder, he can
pay himself nothing.
Because starting a startup is so cheap, venture capitalists now
often want to give startups more money than the startups want to
take.  VCs like to invest several million at a time.  But as one
VC told me after a startup he funded would only take about half a
million, "I don't know what we're going to do.  Maybe we'll just
have to give some of it back." Meaning give some of the fund back
to the institutional investors who supplied it, because it wasn't
going to be possible to invest it all.
Into this already bad situation comes the third problem: Sarbanes-Oxley.
Sarbanes-Oxley is a law, passed after the Bubble, that drastically
increases the regulatory burden on public companies. And in addition
to the cost of compliance, which is at least two million dollars a
year, the law introduces frightening legal exposure for corporate
officers.  An experienced CFO I know said flatly: "I would not
want to be CFO of a public company now."
You might think that responsible corporate governance is an area
where you can't go too far.  But you can go too far in any law, and
this remark convinced me that Sarbanes-Oxley must have.  This CFO
is both the smartest and the most upstanding money guy I know.  If
Sarbanes-Oxley deters people like him from being CFOs of public
companies, that's proof enough that it's broken.
Largely because of Sarbanes-Oxley, few startups go public now.  For
all practical purposes, succeeding now equals getting bought.  Which
means VCs are now in the business of finding promising little 2-3
man startups and pumping them up into companies that cost $100
million to acquire.   They didn't mean to be in this business; it's
just what their business has evolved into.
Hence the fourth problem: the acquirers have begun to realize they
can buy wholesale.  Why should they wait for VCs to make the startups
they want more expensive?  Most of what the VCs add, acquirers don't
want anyway.  The acquirers already have brand recognition and HR
departments.  What they really want is the software and the developers,
and that's what the startup is in the early phase: concentrated
software and developers.
Google, typically, seems to have been the first to figure this out.
"Bring us your startups early," said Google's speaker at the
Startup School
.  They're quite
explicit about it: they like to acquire startups at just the point
where they would do a Series A round.  (The Series A round is the
first round of real VC funding; it usually happens in the first
year.) It is a brilliant strategy, and one that other big technology
companies will no doubt try to duplicate.  Unless they want to have
still more of their lunch eaten by Google.
Of course, Google has an advantage in buying startups: a lot of the
people there are rich, or expect to be when their options vest.
Ordinary employees find it very hard to recommend an acquisition;
it's just too annoying to see a bunch of twenty year olds get rich
when you're still working for salary.  Even if it's the right thing
for your company to do.
The Solution(s)
Bad as things look now, there is a way for VCs to save themselves.
They need to do two things, one of which won't surprise them, and
another that will seem an anathema.
Let's start with the obvious one: lobby to get Sarbanes-Oxley
loosened.  This law was created to prevent future Enrons, not to
destroy the IPO market.  Since the IPO market was practically dead
when it passed, few saw what bad effects it would have.  But now
that technology has recovered from the last bust, we can see clearly
what a bottleneck Sarbanes-Oxley has become.
Startups are fragile plants—seedlings, in fact.  These seedlings
are worth protecting, because they grow into the trees of the
economy.  Much of the economy's growth is their growth.  I think
most politicians realize that.  But they don't realize just how
fragile startups are, and how easily they can become collateral
damage of laws meant to fix some other problem.
Still more dangerously, when you destroy startups, they make very
little noise.  If you step on the toes of the coal industry, you'll
hear about it.  But if you inadvertantly squash the startup industry,
all that happens is that the founders of the next Google stay in
grad school instead of starting a company.
My second suggestion will seem shocking to VCs: let founders cash
out partially in the Series A round.  At the moment, when VCs invest
in a startup, all the stock they get is newly issued and all the
money goes to the company.  They could buy some stock directly from
the founders as well.
Most VCs have an almost religious rule against doing this.  They
don't want founders to get a penny till the company is sold or goes
public.  VCs are obsessed with control, and they worry that they'll
have less leverage over the founders if the founders have any money.
This is a dumb plan.  In fact, letting the founders sell a little stock
early would generally be better for the company, because it would
cause the founders' attitudes toward risk to be aligned with the
VCs'.  As things currently work, their attitudes toward risk tend
to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would
prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million,
while the VCs can afford to be "rational" and prefer the latter.
Whatever they say, the reason founders are selling their companies
early instead of doing Series A rounds is that they get paid up
front.  That first million is just worth so much more than the
subsequent ones.  If founders could sell a little stock early,
they'd be happy to take VC money and bet the rest on a bigger
outcome.
So why not let the founders have that first million, or at least
half million?  The VCs would get same number of shares for the
money.  So what if some of the money would go to the
founders instead of the company?
Some VCs will say this is
unthinkable—that they want all their money to be put to work
growing the company.  But the fact is, the huge size of current VC
investments is dictated by the
structure
of VC funds, not the needs of startups.  Often as not these large
investments go to work destroying the company rather than growing
it.
The angel investors who funded our startup let the founders sell
some stock directly to them, and it was a good deal for everyone.
The angels made a huge return on that investment, so they're happy.
And for us founders it blunted the terrifying all-or-nothingness
of a startup, which in its raw form is more a distraction than a
motivator.
If VCs are frightened at the idea of letting founders partially
cash out, let me tell them something still more frightening: you
are now competing directly with Google.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Romanian Translation
Hebrew Translation
Japanese Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


Let's try this. Blecharczyk. (I got it right the first time!)

@nikitabier @Ankx6 @ReheSamay @MrBeast Launch fast and iterate is like developing software in a REPL or painting alla prima with oil paint.

@Ankx6 @ReheSamay @MrBeast FWIW, this is some kind of scam. I'm not participating in this, and I expect none of these other people are either.

@TomLondon6 I've thought this too. It's a sad thing to realize it can still happen today. I would not have thought that.

@hassan_abu34434 It's helpful but not essential.

@JacksonSaifu It wasn't me. That's one reason I specified a tech CEO.

@ilamparithi_ja @ikirigin @paultoo @stephenfry I would love that myself. He's a great hero of mine. I met him once and it was one of the only times in my adult life that I fanboyed someone famous.

"The Democratic elite don't like most voters, and those voters can tell."

— well-known tech CEO who didn't want to be named

@eshear No one is responsible. It's just a common failure mode.

@staskulesh @ahistoryinart Horrifying.


@cremieuxrecueil I always made a point of saying 5' 11 3/4", though alas I'm an inch shorter now.

The problem with the ILA is not that they're Luddites. It's that they're mafia.

"You may know elves as tall, wise beings or as hardworking toy-makers. This is elf propaganda. In reality elves are small, idle, frivolous creatures."

— from 12 yo's latest story

@IonaItalia You were mistaken before you even posted this. She's already dead.

@jefferinc The difference is that the child in Norway didn't need to.

@jungpionier_ No. She was already dead.

@stopachka @instant_db Great logo by the way.

In Gaza, 10 year old children are making wills.

@cremieuxrecueil I made a point of giving Carter credit for deregulation in "How People Get Rich Now." https://t.co/OwoujhUyRX

@BTCGandalf You're assuming he never readjusted the split. I don't know if he did or not, but that's not something you can assume with this guy.


@KTmBoyle Holding grudges is a double-edged sword, because it costs you too. So I think you want to be very careful about when you do this, and only do it occasionally.

When I discover I've forgotten to hold a grudge, I'm usually pleased rather than annoyed.

@Scholars_Stage Just today I tweeted a graph claiming there were 327 school shootings a year in the US in 2021. Turned out the source was using a very broad definition of "school shooting," and that there were actually 2 in the usual sense of the phrase.

@bobhopewtf @harjtaggar That's an interesting idea and may well be true, but I don't know enough about how things work in big companies to write about it.

@3ameam @harjtaggar Interesting. I wonder if this is why Slack itself always had a super-woke culture. They were their own first victims.

@tommycollison W. A. Sinclair's Introduction to Philosophy, which despite its generic title is wonderfully heretical.

@bksnav @cremieuxrecueil You can't simultaneously optimize two different things.

@themiddlerage42 @sama Hmmm, I hope not.

@andreslaley @sama I'd choose SF. The misgovernment there isn't so bad that it outweighs the advantage of having so many peers nearby. Plus it's getting better as the bad politicians get voted out.

@cremieuxrecueil Probably more accurate to say a larger strawberry.

I'm going to delete this. These numbers are not school shootings in the sense of someone going to a school to kill kids, but all shootings that occur on school property or trips. Which is still bad but not what people usually mean by "school shootings".


@LeonardChoong Many. Marxist governments too.

@adityaanupkumar Because thinking of something as part of your identity is extremely powerful. It will motivate you when nothing else can.

@harjtaggar These employee mobs also needed one other ingredient to function: Slack, or something like it. Imagine how hard it would be to organize a mob if you had to go cube to cube recruiting people. It would be so obvious you weren't working.

Before I read the text, I thought this was going to be a video of Elizabeth Holmes pushing someone off a dock.

@Ljungman Sports teaches it when done right, as it does at our kids' school.

@sama Curiosity and ambition will ensure they do, unless misgovernment gets in the way. That's the lesson from history at any rate.

@oniros I think you'd want to include things like being hard-working and honest. Also being ambitious, if that's your thing.

@StasOlenchenko @MacaesBruno You don't have a powerful lobby in the US. That's what drives these decisions, not principle.

@DaivikGoel For example, it's usually a mistake, especially if you're young, to consider yourself "nontechnical" because you haven't yet learned how to program. Imagine if people did this with literacy.

@michael_nielsen Depictions of heaven in paintings of the Last Judgement have this problem too.


@waitbutwhy Are you sure these revolutions actually did suck for people at the time? Nomads had to abandon those who couldn't walk, and kill children born too close to their siblings. And the people who went to work in factories during the Industrial Revolution were leaving something worse.

@AlanRMacLeod That and "tragic mishap."

@jessegenet Our younger son tried to hack the shopping list when he was 5.

https://t.co/xJQFBmqGCO

@nartmadi Everyone I know in SV calls it Twitter. You sound like a reporter if you call it X.

@yuris Jessica and I go to see the Stones in concert every time we can, and we are usually the youngest people we can see in the audience.

@ahistoryinart He was so good, and good in a unique, quiet way.

@SenMarkKelly I used to support the idea of banning members of Congress from trading stocks, but there appears to be a flaw in it. What if their spouse is a professional investor? Are they supposed to end their career if their spouse gets elected?

@thekevinmcp Post. Elon seems to want everything to happen on Twitter. But it can't, so trying too hard to keep everyone here just makes Twitter less valuable.

@fro_thy People shouldn't need to remember workarounds like this. The algorithm should work right without workarounds.

It sucks that Twitter will bury this important result because she included a link, and users will get served some dumb meme instead. Please, please stop deprioritizing links. Everyone wants it.


@octavianslash There are a lot of things you can see based on social media videos that aren't true.

Arguably the White House correspondents got us Trump. If they'd reported Biden's decline earlier, the other Democrats would have pushed him not to run, and there would have been an opportunity for a more charismatic candidate than Kamala Harris to arise.

@ns123abc Why does his email mention the same account number?

@eastdakota @Cloudflare It's important to read and write a lot, but you don't need to take classes in a particular department to do this. Every intelligent person should do it as a matter of course.

@eastdakota @Cloudflare I write reasonably well too, and I only took one English class in college. It was so bogus that I refused ever to take another.

@mmay3r According to Google, agency is about 40% heritable, vs 70-80% for intelligence. ChatGPT says 40-50% for agency and 50-80% for intelligence. (That last range for intelligence is rather wide. Presumably ChatGPT wants to err on the low side because it's a controversial topic.)

@Jackson25962755 @clairlemon If you think that's bad, wait till you hear about books.

@PeteMorgenstern The right-wing trolls are less stressful, because they're stupider. They mostly just call you names instead of cooking up ingeniously false attacks. But for the same reason they also make the place feel past its prime, which is depressing.

@ns123abc Is this a phish?

@hnshah I've always loved working at times other people were partying, but it never felt as dramatic as this. The most exciting thing was simply the quiet, and above all the confidence that no one was going to interrupt me.


@cremieuxrecueil No, do you have more years' data?

@Noahpinion That has always been the big flaw in Tolkien's imitators. He had a deep feeling for medieval history from decades of studying it, but most of his imitators' work felt like people from the local shopping mall dressed up in elf suits.

@aryalpranays @Niklas_Sikorra You also encountered whatever device you used to tweet this, and that device has access to Replit.

@charlesk8n Not consciously, but if such a person applied they'd be accepted.

@Rob_Hoffman_ Startup space is not like the Earth's surface. There are far fewer small hills to get stuck at the top of. Which means you can safely just climb upward without much planning.

@Rob_Hoffman_ The best example is climbing up hills on the Earth's surface. If you just mindlessly climbed upward from a random point, you wouldn't end up on the top of Everest, but on some small hill. That's a local maximum.

@CMcgarraugh It's harder with hardware, but it's best to do hardware in a way that makes it more possible. I.e. try to make hardware development more like software development.

@pirwot That they're probably mistaken, and that there's probably a way to grow out of it (meaning it's not actually a local maximum).

@Niklas_Sikorra The most important lesson about growth is that the way to get it is to make something users love so much they tell their friends, rather than by some "growth hack" like clever marketing or partnerships.

@MazMHussain I don't think they're that clever. I think they just go after whoever is denounced to them. Presumably some big donor was outraged at the Columbia protests and handed them a list of targets compiled by activists.


@TolkienWonder They look like the Beatles.

@HuntsmanNichole It's more than that. It actually operates in reverse.

@adequacity That would be surprising. IIRC he doesn't talk a lot about math.

"It came in at 4.5 pages but can be slimmed down a bit. My wife and I are leaving for the hospital in 30 minutes to go have our second child (what a week), but I will take a look at your reply as soon as I can."

— Bill Clerico after I suggested he write about fire prevention

@simonsarris This is an office. It's deliberately spartan. The rest of the house looks very, very different.

(And incidentally, I deliberately use different color lights. Why is it good for all the light in a room to be the same? How *can* it be if the room has windows?)

Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson are very upset. https://t.co/mnuHlGJwN8

@devonzuegel We tried to create one out of two small houses in California. It turns out that a courtyard house really needs to be a C or an O rather than a [].

@ytounn @cremieuxrecueil Are you joking?

@skdh Strangely enough this was my original impulse for publishing a bunch of essays in Hackers and Painters. Anything printed in a book that sells more than a few hundred copies lasts forever.

@cremieuxrecueil There's something to what you say, but imagine the limit case. People can do anything and call it a joke.


@brandon_xyzw @ycombinator That was a mistake (I don't have a LinkedIn account myself) and this is now optional.

Ragged right is ok on computer screens and for shorter things, but when a book is set this way there are only two explanations: the designer is trying to look cool, or the designer doesn't read much. Though of course these are not mutually exclusive.

@jjh It's a perfect representation of *itself*, which is what you need in this case.

@jjh You can get the same effect by analyzing the performance of the startups that only just get in.

@sricharan10g It doesn't need to. Potential founders who are still in school already know about YC.

I tried this experiment and Grok did a decent job. I've seen illustrations by humans that were further off. https://t.co/gsFnvp4hbX

@simonsarris Opportunity cost. Would Einstein have been better off taking some time away from his work on physics in order to make himself more attractive?

At first glance I thought this was a model of a particularly complicated protein.

@ramiabih @garrytan The number of good startups that will apply is fairly predictable because the overall numbers are so huge at this point.

@dbroockman And the reason was that he was too old, and not paying enough attention to detail.


@Itsjoeco That's one to frame and hang on the wall.

@debracleaver All politicians are somewhat charismatic compared to normal people. But it wasn't enough for her merely to be somewhat charismatic. To win she had to be more charismatic than Trump.

@clintbetts I had to look up what this was about, but it was in fact bullshit.

@parakeetnebula That's neither entirely true, nor the interesting point here. The interesting point is that Trump is probably the press corps' fault.

@provisionalidea The reason is not what you're assuming. It's because if there are dangers to be encountered along the way, I want them to be encountered by responsible people who will be candid about what happened.

@SpencrGreenberg It may be dangerous to develop AGI, but it's more dangerous to let it be developed by the Wuhan Institute of AI.

@DropSiteNews Thank God for one picture of kids from Gaza that's not of kids who are now dead.

@amasad To be fair there probably weren't that many bits of data being transmitted by papers in an MBA program anyway.

@J3FFR0G3RS In every presidential election since 1968, with the possible exception of 2020, the more charismatic candidate has won.

https://t.co/yF5TXJlxs8

@J3FFR0G3RS He was way more charismatic than Hillary.


@garrytan That's actually true. Startups are provably the most effective way to get that rich, and the best way to make more successful startups is to help them (a) en masse (b) at the very beginning.

@ellipticurve You seem to have no idea how forest fires are fought. You don't stand there pointing a hose at it. Most of the work is cutting firelines.

ICE literally arrested firefighters in the process of fighting a fire. If a dystopian comedy included this scenario, people would dismiss it as unrealistic. https://t.co/SAfTCWiz6P

@DrNeilStone Imagine being in that narrow band of people who look at this and say "That's just a rainbow, not a real chemtrail."

@TejasCh73138030 @SenMarkKelly @WFP Bots are (currently) easy to distinguish. They don't have the variety that real users have. And in particular they all parrot a handful of current talking points.

@SenMarkKelly @WFP I see you're getting a lot of replies from fake accounts. Don't let them influence you. This is the norm for Twitter posts about this topic.

@Ihmzf You get used to it. You start to read it automatically just like you read current typefaces.

@m_aidenm This was said by Paul Arceneaux, not me.

@MohWalidGagi Addison's was among the best. As much as anyone, he invented modern diction.

Usually it's more convenient to read modern reprints of old books, but I'm really enjoying the 1721 edition of Addison's works. It's very cleanly printed. https://t.co/M0vNGfvlg1


Crazy New Ideas
May 2021
There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly.
If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person
proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant
to say "That will never work."
Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the
history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone
proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then
it gradually takes over the world.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely
dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain
experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they
know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway.
That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep
domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.
[
1
]
Such ideas are not merely unsafe to dismiss, but disproportionately
likely to be interesting. When the average person proposes an
implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their
incompetence. But when a reasonable domain expert does it, the
situation is reversed. There's something like an efficient market
here: on average the ideas that seem craziest will, if correct,
have the biggest effect. So if you can eliminate the theory that
the person proposing an implausible-sounding idea is incompetent,
its implausibility switches from evidence that it's boring to
evidence that it's exciting.
[
2
]
Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be.
They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently
high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you
bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by
reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.
The reason is that everyone is too conservative. The word "paradigm"
is overused, but this is a case where it's warranted. Everyone is
too much in the grip of the current paradigm. Even the people who
have the new ideas undervalue them initially. Which means that
before they reach the stage of proposing them publicly, they've
already subjected them to an excessively strict filter.
[
3
]
The wise response to such an idea is not to make statements, but
to ask questions, because there's a real mystery here. Why has this
smart and reasonable person proposed an idea that seems so wrong?
Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be. If you're the
one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means
there's a hole in your model of the world. But even if they're
mistaken, it should be interesting to learn why. A trap that an
expert falls into is one you have to worry about too.
This all seems pretty obvious. And yet there are clearly a lot of
people who don't share my fear of dismissing new ideas. Why do they
do it? Why risk looking like a jerk now and a fool later, instead
of just reserving judgement?
One reason they do it is envy. If you propose a radical new idea
and it succeeds, your reputation (and perhaps also your wealth)
will increase proportionally. Some people would be envious if that
happened, and this potential envy propagates back into a conviction
that you must be wrong.
Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way
to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually
seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is a
full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating
attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those
who don't understand this asymmetry.
This phenomenon is exacerbated by the difference between how those
working on new ideas and those attacking them are rewarded. The
rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value of the
outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has a 10%
chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x better.
Whereas the rewards for attacking new ideas are roughly constant;
such attacks seem roughly equally clever regardless of the target.
People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested interest
in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example, that some of
Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen. People build whole careers
on some ideas. When someone claims they're false or obsolete, they
feel threatened.
The lowest form of dismissal is mere factionalism: to automatically
dismiss any idea associated with the opposing faction. The lowest
form of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it.
But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas
is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the
sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm. It doesn't just affect
the way we think; it is the Lego blocks we build thoughts out of.
Popping out of the current paradigm is something only a few people
can do. And even they usually have to suppress their intuitions at
first, like a pilot flying through cloud who has to trust his
instruments over his sense of balance.
[
4
]
Paradigms don't just define our present thinking. They also vacuum
up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for
new ideas impossibly high. The current paradigm seems so perfect
to us, its offspring, that we imagine it must have been accepted
completely as soon as it was discovered — that whatever the church thought
of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as
soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it. Copernicus
published the heliocentric model in 1532, but it wasn't till the
mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion
shifted in its favor.
[
5
]
Few understand how feeble new ideas look when they first appear.
So if you want to have new ideas yourself, one of the most valuable
things you can do is to learn what they look like when they're born.
Read about how new ideas happened, and try to get yourself into the
heads of people at the time. How did things look to them, when the
new idea was only half-finished, and even the person who had it was
only half-convinced it was right?
But you don't have to stop at history. You can observe big new ideas
being born all around you right now. Just look for a reasonable
domain expert proposing something that sounds wrong.
If you're nice, as well as wise, you won't merely resist attacking
such people, but encourage them. Having new ideas is a lonely
business. Only those who've tried it know how lonely. These people
need your help. And if you help them, you'll probably learn something
in the process.
Notes
[
1
]
This domain expertise could be in another field. Indeed,
such crossovers tend to be particularly promising.
[
2
]
I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math,
engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example,
crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though
arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose
them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain experts
in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to get
legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts upon.
Perhaps no one could be.
[
3
]
This sense of "paradigm" was defined by Thomas Kuhn in his
Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, but I also recommend his
Copernican Revolution
, where you can see him at work developing the
idea.
[
4
]
This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may have
an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always flying on
instruments.
[
5
]
Hall, Rupert.
From Galileo to Newton.
Collins, 1963. This
book is particularly good at getting into contemporaries' heads.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Suhail Doshi, Daniel
Gackle, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


@ThomasThorbur11 @DartsJey I know about the term's history. But it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.

@monty_teaches @DartsJey Here you go: https://t.co/jvOj5AyYT5

@GinnyMcDonald8 Also true.

@DartsJey No, wokeness means something more specific than opposing injustice. It was one particular phenomenon that began on US college campuses in the late 1980s.

@Shayan86 Is @Melissa_in_CA a regular source of misinformation?

@AliJrl It originated within US universities.

@joshpacini How do you mean, Josh?

@snboyle An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

I remember well the feeling that there was an army of people waiting to pounce if you mentioned certain topics, even obliquely. And it wasn't in my imagination. You could tweet this and reporters would email you about it:

https://t.co/sGRjLyepXR

Wokeness will seem such a joke in retrospect that many people won't believe it was ever a serious problem. Even many of the participants will forget. But it really was a big problem.


I'm not a Democratic insider but I know people who if not insiders themselves are definitely close friends with them. And those in a position to know what's going on have gone silent, which means they've been sworn to secrecy, which means a rebellion is happening.

Prediction: Biden won't be the Democratic nominee. I don't have any recent inside information, which as I'll explain, is one reason I think so.

How Hugo van der Goes worked, as seen from an unfinished painting. A perfect leg sticking out from a drawing. (via @PP_Rubens) https://t.co/4fX9TipT0v

@abledoc You're mistaken. It's decorative art. It's not a step forward from representational art, as some people might have claimed at the time, but it's not worthless either. A wall looks better with it on it.

@tlbtlbtlb I was surprised you didn't lead with that.

@peterboghossian There are a lot of people who believe they'd have been in the fourth group (based on how Naziism looks to Americans in 2020) but actually would have been in the first (if they'd been Germans in 1930).

@peterboghossian I divide people into four buckets: the ones who'd have been avid Nazis, the ones who'd have made an outward show of orthodoxy to advance their careers, the ones who'd have kept their heads down, and the ones who'd have spoken out against Naziism.

@ahistoryinart You've somehow got a blurry image of it. I found this sharper one: https://t.co/BEDzy80X7Y

I sent this print to be framed. The framer couldn't tell which way was up, so he made two guesses, neither of which was right. (I couldn't tell either. I had to look it up.) https://t.co/9EObKQXLvp

@Andr3jH In practice it usually looks more like this: https://t.co/6xfR9yLmyz


@staysaasy True, I probably haven't written this much.

@GGGHHHHHH1111 I predict it will happen exactly a year after he turned 13.

13 yo has now dictated 83,663 words of the trilogy he began when he was 9.

@DanMcKenziePSS They could all have been freed if Netanyahu had agreed to a cease-fire a year ago. https://t.co/exiOTSlcJr

@garfield628 They tried that in the beginning, but there's much less danger now that it's the majority position.

https://t.co/hbFYQXCZtN

@hightechdavid Because you're not paying attention?

@SitiXen @ZaidJilani Because Netanyahu is:

"When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing..."

@ChShersh Plus s-expressions buy you true macros, which would be worth having even if you were on the fence about using them for source code.

@ChShersh Nearly all Lisp programmers have been in both groups, unless their first language was a dialect of Lisp. I found s-expressions strange at the very beginning, but now I greatly prefer them. Languages with syntax seem gross, like Victorian architecture.

The New York Times on Netanyahu:

"He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing."

It's over a year later, and children are still being killed every day. https://t.co/w4gVhBg6XD