Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator on HackerTube: recommended by 7 Hacker News commenters across 7 separate months, 2012–2023.
talk · evergreen
Paul Graham's keynote at PyCon 2012, in which he talks about startup ideas and what kinds of companies are likely to matter in the future. He discusses ideas such as a better email client and a search engine for hackers, and argues for looking back at the present from the future.
HN commenters return to it as a worldview-shaping talk whose predictions about technology and startup ideas turned out to be prescient.
“It was the talk that brought about the biggest change in the way I think about the world, my ambitions.”
14 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
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.
in “Ask HN: Who is “ahead of his/her time” nowadays?” · View on HN
▶ 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.
in “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?” · View on 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
in “Jessica Livingston on the Accidental Origin of Y Combinator” · View on HN
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
in “Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip” · View on HN
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
in “What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?” · View on HN
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
in “Why US Healthcare sucks and how I’m trying to change it” · View on HN
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
in “How App.net Can Change Everything” · View on HN
> 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
in “ChatGPT killer: Google-owned, UK-born AI startup Deepmind is working on a rival” · View on HN
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
in “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?” · View on HN
did this idea spark from PG's old talk on new ideas ▶ this video ? One of them is literally "search engine for developers/hackers"
in “Show HN: DontBeEvil.rip: Search, for developers (API, expressions, CLI)” · View on HN
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
in “Startup Ideas” · View on HN
>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
in “What happened, Gmail?” · View on HN
PG talks about this idea of looking back at the present from the future in this video [1]. Applying this technique to the way power on the internet is distributed, it seems ridiculous to me that Governments have massive surveillance capabilities on its citizens, big corporations exploit customer data at the expense of customers, and that the internet is used as a tool to control political dissidents. So this is something that will eventually change for the better. As the OP points out, transparency and oversight are the short term solutions. If the present is any indication, implementing these effectively with cooperation from Governments and corporations around the world will likely remain a pipe dream. The OP also mentions reducing power differences as a long term solution. IMO, one of the best ways to do that would be to educate the masses about the mentioned problems and how it affects everyone involved. Once a sufficiently large population cares enough about the problems at hand, change should not be far away. [1] ▶ this video
in “Power in the Age of the Feudal Internet” · View on HN
I wonder if those with [Tourette Syndrome]( ▶ this video ) fit into 'accents'. While one can understand someone with Tourette Syndrome, it's very distracting to the discourse at hand.
in “Founders' Accents” · View on HN