Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator

I always believed paulg was way ahead of his time. - LISP over C++/Java - The first ever web app in Viaweb - The first ever startup accelerator - Check this talk from 2012: ▶ this video a lot of today's most impressive cos Superhuman, Lambda School, Netflix happen to emerge mysteriously from the talk as is.

▶ this video This was the first time I watched pg give a talk. It was the talk that brought about the biggest change in the way I think about the world, my ambitions. The talk was the beginning, reading more about pg, I came across his essays and then HN.

I find these stories helpful on a lot of levels, and they provide great insight into problem solving, technology, and you end up learning a large amount about why things are the way they are when people recount how they got started. E.g Anthony Casalena is young by non-tech standards and I still find it totally foreign that when he started squarespace he bought 2 physical dedicated servers and hooked them up in New York at pier 1 hosting, he needed to own the physical boxes and have 2 for redundancy. I am not doing a startup but have found these talks particular insightful generally. I am looking for some more Inspirational ones if anyone knows any great founders or leaders with inspirational stories, or particularly good interviews. Here are some I have found particularly good: [0]Ashton Kutcher, Startup School ===================== I listed this first because it is most likely to get dismissed. Give it a chance. He starts off shaky and it is really a great Meta look at how people are out of their element, but really come back, win the crowd and provide insight when it is unexpected. [1]Kevin Rose, Foundation ================= He has done 43 interviews with very prominent tech leaders for his foundation series. Some of them are Elon Musk, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Ben Horowitz, etc. [2]Paul Graham, Pycon 08' ================== This is one of the most interesting things I have seen in a long time. He makes predictions, and talks about technology climate and infrastructure. To r

Yep. I like his talk at Pycon in 08, where he talks about building a better email client[0] but it is also noted in your link. Thanks, I switched back from mobile and meant to post it. Incidentally, if anyone has seen his Pycon talk, one of his ideas is "Bring Back the Old More's Law", and if you are curious it is ~2-3 minutes here[1]. I have always been wondering what he means when he says a "sufficiently smart compiler is a byword for impossible" is this an AI reference or a deeper computer science theory that I am missing. Always been really curious. [0] ▶ this video [1] ▶ this video

This seems to me a clarification of the strategy PG proposed during a talk at PyCon 2012 and an essay called "frighteningly ambitious startup ideas". It is a great way to think about and frame how to judge startup ideas. Mainly centering around high potential technology, overlooked ideas and opportunities that these startups can take advantage of. My question becomes, and it seems PGs, how can you do this without the value of hindsight. One one hand, you could sit and reason why startup x or your startup idea is the Microsoft in this scenario. But you can also easily delude yourself. Pebble, IMO, is shaping up alot like early Apple did. They are entering a competitive industry with a new product, facing a goliath and have a huge emphasis on their design & focus on developer. Which makes me believe history will repeat itself. That if we have the Apple for wearables, there should be, or soon, a Microsoft for wearables. Just a thought, would love any point for/against. For reference: link ▶ this video

For those that haven't seen or read Paul Graham's bit on ongoing diagnosis: link (#7) Or if you prefer to watch it from 2012's PyCon: ▶ this video

I think much of the push back to App.net comes from not understanding the context in which Dalton et al. is building the platform. Frankly, it wasn't until Dalton linked to PG's write-up of his PyCon talk that I really began to understand what his intentions were. The write-up: link The video: ▶ this video

> You can tell they've tried to be conservative with the AI-driven "People Also Ask" feature which quotes a snippet of source text, and I still see completely wrong answers every so often. All well and good but that doesn't explain why it wasn't Google that came up with Copilot? Paul Graham predicted that a Google Search competitor would target hackers (a dinosaur egg he called it; and building Search in the image of Unix : "give you the right answers fast "), which is exactly how it is playing out with OpenAI + GitHub + Microsoft. ▶ this video / ▶ this video

I cool a wafer scale with a liquid that boils at 43 C and immersing the wafer in this liquid. The bubbles (cavitation) of the boiling liquid should not damage the surface layers of the wafer, of course. This boiling liquid is further cooled by water and a sonic heat pump moving the heat into a water tank where the stored heat is used for showers or cooking [1]. Given 45 trillion transistors (45x10e12) times 3 femtojoule (3x10e-15) to switch each transistor at 1 Ghz (10e9) you get 1.000.000 joules/sec = 1 megawatt. These are ball-park numbers, back of the envelope calculations. In reality I make full physics simulations and electrical SPICE simulations of the entire wafer on a supercomputer aka on the wafer scale integration FPGA prototypes and the wafer supercomputer itself. The EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software tools we write ourselves in Smalltalk and Ometa, and these also need our own supercomputer to run on. Of course the feedback loops are Bret Victor style visualizers [3][2]. Apple Silicon or this small company demonstrate that only with custom EDA tools can you design ultra-low power transistors to prevent our wafer to melt. The FPGA prototype is a few thousand Cyclone 10 or Polarfire FPGA's with a few terabytes/sec memory bandwidth or a cluster of Mac Studio Ultra's networked together in a Slim Fly network that can double as a neighbourhood solar smart grid [5]. You need a dinosaur egg to design a dinosaur, or is is it the other way around? [6] A TDP (Therma

did this idea spark from PG's old talk on new ideas ▶ this video ? One of them is literally "search engine for developers/hackers"

Reminds me of this video of Paul Graham, where he says that startup ideas like a beautiful woman to a nerd, "if you got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me"! [see 3:00 onwards ish in video] ▶ this video

>Email was meant to be kept simple, [...] instead of trying to come up with a new email, stop breaking the current one, and keep using it. The "email was meant to be kept simple" can't be stated in isolation. Many suffering recipients of email see the outside world stuffing their inbox as making "email complicated" . They can't control how others misuse email. Paul Graham explained that email has become overwhelming for him and his peers.[1] What's your recommendation for their pain points with the current email system? [1] from 7m29s to 11m50s: ▶ this video