matthewagi/paul-graham-original-assistant-sft-qwen3-0.6b huggingface dataset:
Write Simply

I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.

That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.

And the further they'll read. Most readers' energy tends to flag part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end.

There's an Italian dish called _saltimbocca_, which means "leap into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called _saltintesta_: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there.

It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry.

Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry.

And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can use difficult words.

Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way, to conceal the fact that they have [](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hermeneutic+dialectics+hegemonic+modalities)nothing to say. Whereas writing simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.

Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the future will be in much the same position as people from other countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain for a woodworker to build a chair to last.

Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job.

But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated, or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy to me. It seems clumsy.

There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident.

The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and that makes simple writing even simpler.
Novelty and Heresy

If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy.

To discover new things, you have to work on ideas that are good but non-obvious; if an idea is obviously good, other people are probably already working on it. One common way for a good idea to be non-obvious is for it to be hidden in the shadow of some mistaken assumption that people are very attached to. But anything you discover from working on such an idea will tend to contradict the mistaken assumption that was concealing it. And you will thus get a lot of heat from people attached to the mistaken assumption. Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it's probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas.

So it's particularly dangerous for an organization or society to have a culture of pouncing on heresy. When you suppress heresies, you don't just prevent people from contradicting the mistaken assumption you're trying to protect. You also suppress any idea that implies indirectly that it's false.

Every cherished mistaken assumption has a dead zone of unexplored ideas around it. And the more preposterous the assumption, the bigger the dead zone it creates.

There is a positive side to this phenomenon though. If you're looking for new ideas, one way to find them is by [looking for heresies](say.html). When you look at the question this way, the depressingly large dead zones around mistaken assumptions become excitingly large mines of new ideas.
The Top of My Todo List

A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest [regrets of the dying](http://bronnieware.com/regrets-of-the-dying/). Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — _can_ see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.

If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don't be a cog. The 5 regrets paint a portrait of post-industrial man, who shrinks himself into a shape that fits his circumstances, then turns dutifully till he stops.

The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family, suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of mistake, because you make them by default.

I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Ideally you transform your life so it has other defaults. But it may not be possible to do that completely. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably have to be reminded not to make them. So I inverted the 5 regrets, yielding a list of 5 commands

> Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

which I then put at the top of the file I use as a todo list.
Coronavirus and Credibility

I recently saw a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o) of TV journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they seemed, but how daring. How could they feel safe saying such things?

The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said.

An epidemic is different. It falsifies your predictions rapidly and unequivocally.

But epidemics are rare enough that these people clearly didn't realize this was even a possibility. Instead they just continued to use their ordinary m.o., which, as the epidemic has made clear, is to talk confidently about things they don't understand.

An event like this is thus a uniquely powerful way of taking people's measure. As Warren Buffett said, "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked." And the tide has just gone out like never before.

Now that we've seen the results, let's remember what we saw, because this is the most accurate test of credibility we're ever likely to have. I hope.
Lisp for Web-Based Applications

After a link to [Beating the Averages](avg.html) was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA.

[BBN Talk Excerpts (ASCII)](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt?t=1595850613&)
This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California

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%](http://time.com/79572/more-innocent-people-on-death-row-than-estimated-study/) 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.
Being a Noob

When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.

I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to some startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading a book about a topic I don't understand well enough, or visiting some new country where I don't know how things work.

It's not pleasant to feel like a noob. And the word "noob" is certainly not a compliment. And yet today I realized something encouraging about being a noob: the more of a noob you are locally, the less of a noob you are globally.

For example, if you stay in your home country, you'll feel less of a noob than if you move to Farawavia, where everything works differently. And yet you'll know more if you move. So the feeling of being a noob is inversely correlated with actual ignorance.

But if the feeling of being a noob is good for us, why do we dislike it? What evolutionary purpose could such an aversion serve?

I think the answer is that there are two sources of feeling like a noob: being stupid, and doing something novel. Our dislike of feeling like a noob is our brain telling us "Come on, come on, figure this out." Which was the right thing to be thinking for most of human history. The life of hunter-gatherers was complex, but it didn't change as much as life does now. They didn't suddenly have to figure out what to do about cryptocurrency. So it made sense to be biased toward competence at existing problems over the discovery of new ones. It made sense for humans to dislike the feeling of being a noob, just as, in a world where food was scarce, it made sense for them to dislike the feeling of being hungry.

Now that too much food is more of a problem than too little, our dislike of feeling hungry leads us astray. And I think our dislike of feeling like a noob does too.

Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.
The Hardware Renaissance

One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that weren't.

They've faced resistance from investors of course. Investors have a deep-seated bias against hardware. But investors' opinions are a trailing indicator. The best founders are better at seeing the future than the best investors, because the best founders are making it.

There is no one single force driving this trend. Hardware [does well](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/pebble-smartwatch-tops-out-at-10-million-on-kickstarter/) on crowdfunding sites. The spread of [tablets](http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html) makes it possible to build new things [controlled by](http://lockitron.com) and even [incorporating](http://doublerobotics.com) them. [Electric motors](http://www.boostedboards.com/) have improved. Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted. It's getting more straightforward to get things manufactured. Arduinos, 3D printing, laser cutters, and more accessible CNC milling are making hardware easier to prototype. Retailers are less of a bottleneck as customers increasingly buy online.

One question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool. It always was cool. Physical things are great. They just haven't been as great a way to start a [rapidly growing](growth.html) business as software. But that rule may not be permanent. It's not even that old; it only dates from about 1990. Maybe the advantage of software will turn out to have been temporary. Hackers love to build hardware, and customers love to buy it. So if the ease of shipping hardware even approached the ease of shipping software, we'd see a lot more hardware startups.

It wouldn't be the first time something was a bad idea till it wasn't. And it wouldn't be the first time investors learned that lesson from founders.

So if you want to work on hardware, don't be deterred from doing it because you worry investors will discriminate against you. And in particular, don't be deterred from [applying](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html) to Y Combinator with a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in hardware startups.

We know there's room for the [next Steve Jobs](ambitious.html). But there's almost certainly also room for the first <Your Name Here>.

**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Cann, Sanjay Dastoor, Paul Gerhardt, Cameron Robertson, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.

[A Hardware Renaissance while �Software Eats the World�?](http://mantellavp.com/a-hardware-renaissance-while-software-eats-the-world/)
If Lisp is So Great

If Lisp is so great, why don't more people use it? I was asked this question by a student in the audience at a talk I gave recently. Not for the first time, either.

In languages, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. Why does John Grisham (_King of Torts_ sales rank, 44) outsell Jane Austen (_Pride and Prejudice_ sales rank, 6191)? Would even Grisham claim that it's because he's a better writer?

Here's the first sentence of _Pride and Prejudice:_

> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged?" Long words for the first sentence of a love story.

Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. Its syntax, or lack of syntax, makes it look completely [unlike](https://sep.yimg.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/acl2.lisp?t=1595850613&) the languages most people are used to. Before I learned Lisp, I was afraid of it too. I recently came across a notebook from 1983 in which I'd written:

> I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

Fortunately, I was 19 at the time and not too resistant to learning new things. I was so ignorant that learning almost anything meant learning new things.

People frightened by Lisp make up other reasons for not using it. The standard excuse, back when C was the default language, was that Lisp was too slow. Now that Lisp dialects are among the [faster](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=nestedloop&lang=all&sort=cpu) languages available, that excuse has gone away. Now the standard excuse is openly circular: that other languages are more popular.

(Beware of such reasoning. It gets you Windows.)

Popularity is always self-perpetuating, but it's especially so in programming languages. More libraries get written for popular languages, which makes them still more popular. Programs often have to work with existing programs, and this is easier if they're written in the same language, so languages spread from program to program like a virus. And managers prefer popular languages, because they give them more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced.

Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they [aren't](icad.html) all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead.
The Founder Visa

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](http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13216037&fsrc=rss)

[About Half of VC-Backed Company Founders are Immigrants](http://venturebeat.com/2006/11/15/note-to-washington-about-half-of-vc-backed-company-founders-are-immigrants)