"And yet some applications will still demand speed."
"Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it."
2/3. He claims I said x, then at the end concedes I actually said -x. This latter I "grudgingly conceded?"
It was arguably the single biggest theme of that talk, that the super-angels might have a winning model without getting big hits.
5. I agree note-taking has benefits other than recording things. In fact I've written about the phenomenon before. I just meant that people didn't have to take notes to record what I said.
1. I may well have misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said. But it was not deliberate.
2. I concede that point #5 was unfair. It occurred to me as I was writing and watching the video, and I decided to add it on the spur of the moment. I should have thought about it more carefully. I've added an update to that effect.
I'd much rather have a 10x return in one year than a 100x return in three (or five or ten, which are more typical numbers).
The above is a stupid exaggeration. It only approximates the truth if your average return is more than 3x per year. (Ok, the 10 year example works if your expected safe ROI is 30% per year over 9 years also works, but good luck with that.)
The article was written by someone that has seen a net loss by investing in start ups. Overall this is fairly common for the industry. It's vary easy to see some 10x returns and think you know what you are doing even if you are not really making any money but that's just conformation bias. So while I apologies for using stupid, he is really giving poor advice.
This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said:
This seems like a very common problem on the Internet, perhaps even more so than in the rest of life. Most of the HN comments I disagreed with on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 regarding "How Universities Work," an essay I wrote, concern misreadings.
I think one reason pg says things like, "I don't mean..." in his essays is avoid this kind of thing as much as possible. I'm a grad student in English and assign a couple of his essays to freshmen; the most common disagreements they have are with things not actually said in the essay. A favorite question I ask in class or on their journal entries: "Where do you see that?" The usual answer turns out to be, "nowhere."
A useful technique to head off such misunderstandings is to ask the person who disagrees to pick out a particular sentence or passage they believe is false.
"But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it's Google." [It is your inclusion of this sentence that caused me to characterize your change of heart about it as "grudging."]
"Most data structures exist because of speed. For example, many languages today have both strings and lists. Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization." [Processing strings is a huge part of today's computing landscape. There are premature optimizations to be sure, but efficient string processing isn't one of them IMHO.]
"But it was mysterious to me that the super-angels would quibble about valuations. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big successes, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked than how much you paid for them?" [The implication here is that because picking the right companies matters more, then it doesn't make sense to "quibble" over valuations. But this is a false dichotomy. Picking the right companies matters, of course. But valuation matters as well, and questioning a ~10M valuation for a company that has no revenue is not "quibbling."]
"... jerks who give you lines like "come back to me to fill out the round." [I have no problem with advising founders to avoid wasting time on reluctant investors. I do have a problem with impugning their motives and character.]
If you really want to engage in a debate about this I will hold up my end. But to be perfectly honest, I'd just as soon see this bruhaha fade into obscurity. It has already gotten much more attention that it deserves IMHO.
1. I explained later that expected value is not what matters, but rate of return. (And obviously the sentence
about Google, as phrased, is a joke. Taken literally it would imply every other company had an expected value of zero. If I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.)
2. Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your source code are separate questions.
3. That passage explains my thinking as I was figuring out the part I explained next.
4. There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and character deserve to be impugned. As I said, it's a proper subset of those who invest late.
> If I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.
Not at all. YC gives you incredible leverage to diversify your portfolio, making it that much more likely that you would have a piece of the next Google.
> obviously the sentence about Google, as phrased, is a joke
It's clearly hyperbole, but there's a difference between hyperbole and a joke. You've said many times you believe the outcome of early stage investing is bimodal. In your Startup School talk you even made a point of saying you "did the math" that led you to this conclusion. You said you didn't even start to question this conclusion until you started writing the talk for the last startup school. And this seems to be as close as you get to retreating from that conclusion:
"So I think at least some super-angels are looking for companies that will get bought. That's the only rational explanation for focusing on getting the right valuations, instead of the right companies. And if so they'll be different to deal with than VCs. They'll be tougher on valuations, but more accomodating if you want to sell early."
This is the passage I referred to as "grudging acknowledgement." A non-grudging acknowledgement would have gone something like this: "Because angels do not operate under the same constraints that VC's do, it opens the door to exit strategies that VC's are not able to undertake because of the constraints they operate under. This has the potential to change everything, including the current bi-modal distribution of outcomes, which is caused at least in part by the fact that VC's have to hew to a schedule and can't reinvest proceeds from early exits. So you as founders might be able to provide very nice ROI's for your investors without really dramatic wins, as long as you can add value quickly and reliably." Or something like that.
> Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your source code are separate questions.
Of course surface syntax and internal representations are separate issues. I challenge the claim that "it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster." The semantics of the language determine, for example, whether strings are mutable, whether it's possible to take the CDR of a string, whether taking the Nth element of a string is an O(1) operation or an O(n) operation. "Cluttering up the semantics with hacks to make program run faster" could save you a lot of money, and is therefore not "lame." The chances that it will save you a lot of money is proportional to how successful you are.
> There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and character deserve to be impugned.
OK, but maybe you should draw the distinction a little more specifically, particularly when your audience is a bunch of aspiring first-time founders. It is very easy to interpret what you said as, "Anyone who gives you this line is [very likely to be? almost certain to be?] a jerk."
I have a hunch it was the "assholes" comment that set you off, and led you to going back through a mental list of things he'd said that you disagreed with. For what it's worth, I think the original meaning behind that comment was clear, and that pg is now splitting a really fine hair in defending it.
More broadly, that comment comes across as symptomatic of a peculiar attitude among some startups and programmers towards investors, angels, and other "business" people.
Regardless of the intended meaning, there was no reason to use that word there. It didn't enforce or strengthen any point; putting "investors" in its place does the job just as well.
> I have a hunch it was the "assholes" comment that set you off, and led you to going back through a mental list of things he'd said that you disagreed with.
It was not that comment per se that "set me off", it's more the general trend at YC towards (how shall I put this to not fan the flames?) rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with investors who exhibit reluctance, caution, or selectivity. It's been going on for some time now. I really started to notice it at the last Angel Day. The "asshole" comment was certainly the most egregious example of this, but if it had been an isolated incident I'm pretty sure I would have let it slide.
We want to be looked upon as smart and as having thoughts worth saying. One of the fast ways to do this is to beat another smart person in a rhetorical fight. But smart people are hard to beat in such fights because, being smart, they tend to think correct thoughts. Therefore we have a subconscious motivation to misread them and fight against what they did not say. This is the only way someone without extraordinarily high amounts of expertise and insight can "win" against Paul Graham in his primary domain of thought. There's a real social pressure for people who comment on other people's thoughts to create straw-man lookalikes of the thoughts rather than to address the thoughts themselves.
I know this point is moot anyway, but what would bother me more is the less obvious misreading like "Valuations don't matter.. Would you invest in a YC company at a ten billion dollar valuation?"
If you are under the impression that you a writing for an audience that want to understand what you mean, you can safely assume that you are talking about the realm of common scenarios. If you start feeling like you are writing for critics of this sort, you start to spell things out in a way that is, I think, worse writing.
"why [so-and-so] is wrong" is a great way to get your stuff read, but is so typically devoid of content and full of misunderstanding that i've grown to hate this type of post.
the author clearly seems to misunderstand that PG's "rules" are simply ways to mentally lower the barriers to making something:
1. efficiency doesn't matter...as the author says, it matters later. so then get to work NOW
2. the returns on angel investing are bimodal...again, the simplification is used to motivate early stage startups to look for funding
3. valuations don't matter...the author's counterexample is ridiculous. PG's point is don't obsess if you're worth 14 mill or 16 mill, just get to work
4. investors who don't want to be first movers are assholes...i suppose this is the post the author wanted to write but didn't think it had enough content
5. you don't have to take notes...all PG was saying was: I'm posting this talk online. take notes if it helps you, you can think for yourself
Well said. You basically wrote what I would have attempted to write. Taking statements out of context is like overfitting the data and leads to poor generalization.
I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong. Paul is talking about abstracting efficiency away into the compiler and presenting the programmer with a more elegant interface. As an example, Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. Not only in the author completely missing Paul's point (efficiently is unimportant at the axiomatic level), the author is incorrectly applying the essay to business operations instead of programming languages. In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation.
> Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case.
The sort of operations commonly done on strings only have a small overlap with list operations, though. I'm all for orthogonality in a language when it's practical, but I'm not sure that one is a good trade-off.
Erlang does that, and aside from space issues (on 64-bit, a linked list of character code ints means 16 bytes per char, due to alignment), it's kind of awkward. While using pattern matching on individual chars is nice, in those cases it probably makes more sense to tokenize the strings into atoms/tuples via REs, and then pattern-match on those instead. Binaries can also be used as pseudo-strings, but to me it feels like two half-solutions. (And its shell's printing a list of ints as chars when they're printable 7-bit ASCII characters is a bit odd.) Having atoms (AKA symbols) helps, though.
Incidentally, Lua's strings are all immutable atoms. That's practical most of the time, but occasionally a major liability. Lua has the obvious option of just using a different string implementation via userdata when it's a problem, though, so it can make such a daring trade-off.
Of course, just saving strings as arrays with a \0 at the end is also pretty brittle.
From what little I've used Haskell, the strings-as-list paradigm was exceptionally useful.
A lot of people also complain about the performance of strings in Haskell, so this is right where the tradeoff is today. Tomorrow it won't likely be an issue.
A really smart compiler should be able to optimize most of the inefficiency away; I'd bank on compilers improving fast enough to make seemingly inefficient things cost much less.
If I'm designing a language today for the future, I'd err on the side of usefulness.
The problem with "sufficiently smart compilers" is that they can make reasoning accurately about performance difficult. James Hague has a good post about that, "On Being Sufficiently Smart" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html).
Lua does almost no optimization at compile time* (in part so it can compile data dumps rapidly) but I find it easy to predict the performance trade-offs in various implementation choices. In a roundabout way, it still ends up easy to tune.
Still, usefulness and performance are only indirectly related. I think that was PG's original point.
* Yet oddly it ends up quite a bit faster than Python, and there's also LuaJIT.
That's a great article. Which raises the question, do you want predictable performance, or better expected performance with occasional inexplicably slow outliers? Is it impossible to have both with high level languages? Can it be made configurable?
> From what little I've used Haskell, the strings-as-list paradigm was exceptionally useful.
It's useful from a convenience of programming point of view. The preferred underlying implementation is now something more sophisticated than a linked list of characters. See Data.ByteString. The programmer does not need to care much, though.
I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong.
THAT statement is dead wrong. Or at least, in dead opposition to my approach to learning. If someone says five things, and four are wrong but the last one teaches me something new or gives me a new perspective on something I already know...
Reading the four things cost me maybe two mintes. The last one cost me thirty seconds to read, plus another couple of minutes to savour. The total investment is maybe ten minutes and I learned something.
Of course, if I skip everyone who seems to be wrong right off the bat I'll avoid some situations where all five are wrong. But I have something to help me out with that: The post is on HN and some other nice people are voting it up. So something must be right, why don't I navigate into the cave, around the pit of vipers, past the deadfall, and onto the intellectual treasure?
And in fact, I read past your first statement and liked the rest. See how that works?
It's most certainly not the approach I take to learning. It is, however, the approach I take towards the conical "I disagree with Paul Graham" blog posts. Why? Because everyone's a critic. If the critic in question doesn't demonstrate a general understanding of the subject matter I do not invest my time. In this case, it was a misreading of an essay, but it really could be anything. I apply this approach to critics of all kinds. Do I apply this approach to published essayists or programmers with well known software? Not usually, because getting published or becoming well known is a sort of vetting in itself. But a vetting process is certainly necessary for blog posts on criticism or some random repository on Github. There just isn't enough time in the day to dive into things that don't have a solid foundation. Why would I read a 5000 line Ruby program whose initial functions are written poorly? At best I'll end with one or two nice tricks and a large headache.
Hey, I only disagreed with you so vehemently as a rhetorical device, to mirror your own statement:-)
Your strategy for filtering information obviously works for you, and my guess is that if you missed something good, it'll come back to you later when someone you respects says "Hey, I know Raganwald is usually a waste of time, but did you see X?"
So... Rock on! And yes, I enjoyed reading your comment and the reply to my thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to post.
> In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation
You know, people love to say this, but in every company I've worked at (sample size 3), past the first year or so of operations, programming language / framework speed actually was a very significant concern for the business.
This may be self-selection; scaling and performance are two of my areas of specialization. However, whenever I'm on the job market, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of companies trying to hire people to help them handle their performance and scaling problems.
It seems like you misunderstand my comment. The idea I'm getting at is that it's usually something else besides the programming that is the bottleneck, not that bottlenecks don't exist. You're going to hit architectural and database issues long before you hit Ruby's GC in most applications.
I understand your comment, and I disagree with it. Most specifically, I disagree with the "long before" part of it. In my experience, code performance has been roughly as important as architectural and database issues. You will have to deal with all of them, and on roughly the same time scale.
"Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case."
Instead of "strings represented as lists", I think it is more useful to say "strings and lists implementing a common interface." For example, in Clojure, it is perfectly fine to treat a string as a sequence.
I think most of what you want is entirely possible with current compiler technology. It is unfortunate that most of the effort is currently directed at optimizing hard to reason about low level code.
> but the act of writing helps you remember what was said.
I hate it when people make this assumption because for me this is not true. When I take notes I stop comprehending what is being said because the act of transcribing becomes mechanical. I also write slow so I start to lag behind what's being said. Is there any research for this because I would like to be a test subject and prove them wrong.
There's a difference between taking notes and transcribing, and people who benefit from and proselytize taking notes tend to be very far from the transcribing end of the spectrum. People who are the most effective note-takers tend to synthesize what they're hearing and only write down key points. While the synthesized notes are smaller and therefore faster to write, the real benefit comes from the act of synthesis itself. It forces a level of understanding that the listener wouldn't be forced to attain were it not for taking the notes.
Sadly, there's very little emphasis on what it means to take good notes, or how to go about doing it. I suspect that good note-takers don't even realize that there's a difference between notes and transcripts, so when they promote note-taking as a study tool they neglect to mention a critical step. You probably could become a good note-taker with some practice, and would benefit from it, but if you're not still in school I doubt it would be worth your time.
You're right there is a difference. But I have a problem taking in what I'm hearing unless I repeat it in my head a few times. I don't have enough real time computational power to physically write the stuff down and process what I'm hearing.
When I was forced to take notes I never actually transcribed, but in effect what I wrote down was practically transcribing because I could not keep the processing in real time to write down only the important points.
The best way to take notes is to not do it during the class. Pay full attention only to the teacher/speaker during the class/lecture and make a conscious attempt to remember everything they said. Immediately following, get together with 3-5 like-minded friends and attempt to as a group write the entire lecture from start to finish from memory. If no one can remember something, skip it.
It takes a few weeks/months to develop your focus, attention span, and memory enough to be able to get near 100% short-term retention, but you start to see benefits almost immediately. And the long-term benefits to your memory and focus can't be understated.
Also, it's really interesting how many other people are expressing that they never took notes in college. I was famous for it in my college (my advisor wrote a paragraph about it in grad school recommendations), whereas I always thought it was common sense, seeing other people who spent the whole class scribbling, but didn't really understand a bit of what was actually taught.
I think this kind of approach can only work in certain situations and modes of teaching. For biology or anything that requires more memorization than conceptualization, I think it is key to have a running tab of the topics/key points. This is especially key for fast speaking lecturers or topics that you are just being introduced to. I think your approach is really helpful in topics that are more conceptual. Math, CS, and logic are much better learned with full concentration.
That said, I think pre-studying and post-studying immediately before or after class is really, really helpful - regardless whether notes are taken. The only challenge is that it takes much more time and a lot of effort. This is another clear example of the relationship between effort and reward.
I preferred to scribble in the margins of my notebook during lectures; not words or likenesses of anything in particular, but kind of Hugh Macleod-ish pattern scribbles[1]. Some teachers really hated that I wasn't looking up at them and thought I was being super disrespectful, which didn't make sense to me since I was asking questions that clearly indicated I was paying attention.
Ah yes, I learned to do this as well with certain professors. I always found the ME professors were impressed after the first lecture and could tell I was paying attention. But with some others, it was a different story.
I agree completely with you, and presume that, as in most things, people are different.
I've personally found that intensely concentrating on what is said and actively engaging in thinking about it is the most effective way for me to not only remember what is said, but come up with interesting side-thoughts and insights about my own situation in the process.
Writing is just mechanical to me and prevents me from properly concentrating on what is said.
I've had the same problem in various situations, most notably my linear algebra class in college. After a few classes I realized that if I took notes I would lose track of what the teacher was saying; I had to shift my attention to the act of writing. he moved so fast that it was a choice of pay attention or take notes. I opted for "pay attention". While I could recall few details I did much better absorbing essential concepts and abstracts.
OTOH, at conferences I've been trying to close the laptop and take notes using pen and paper. I get more out of the talks this way, but it works because the information density is lower than my math course.
And I don't take a whole lot of notes, but try to jot down key points or things that might help trigger some recall later. I figure I can Google for stuff if all I have are some keywords written down, so I don't have to notate whole sentences.
Yeah the key for me is to think about what's being said and question it or relate it to things I know. Integrate it into the knowledge network with as many links as possible. "Yes, of course, because...", or "Hmm, but doesn't this implication of this contradict the implications of this other thing"?
This way I have a path to the new information from old information, and I'm unlikely to forget it. For me at least, atoms of information are much harder to remember than connections. And they're much less useful, too.
Actually, I think that with the possible exception of #2 (which can be debated extensively) these are not "things that Paul Graham is wrong about". They are "places where Paul Graham used hyperbole to make a point."
I disagree with PG on a number of issues, but this post completely missed the point.
The last round of YC companies was getting $10M valuations, an order of magnitude over a few years ago, under the valuations-don't-matter mantra.
Are these the valuations that they're getting from YC, or from investors post-YC? If post-YC, couldn't this be due largely to more of the companies being Ramen Profitable? If they raise money after four months rather than three, they've been growing (perhaps at an exponential rate) for 33% longer.
I'm pretty sure that "Five things Paul Graham is wrong about" is pretty much the absolute optimal title for an HN linkbait post. The content is hardly important.
Five point list plus argumentative assertions plus picking a fight with pg? Absolute memetically engineered brilliance. Congratulations, Mr Rondam, whoever you are.
I agree with that one, I love taking notes at events and conferences. After a one-day conference I'll end up with a few pages of notes, and when I get home I type those into a few actionable items, bam!
There have been studies that have found the opposite. If you write things down, you are more focused on writing/reading than actually listening to the speaker. Its the repetition that actually helps you remember, so reading the published notes afterwards or listening to the recording would be best.
Except that's not something that PG says, in general. I think that in this case, he was pretty clearly saying "the talk will be online" in an idiomatic manner.
In my experience PG errs toward the side of putting too much emphasis on taking notes, honestly. (This is probably because he works better when he takes notes, and he's seen a lot of YC founders forget/ignore his advice when they don't write it down.)
I'm sure many people do benefit from taking notes but I'm convinced that pg most likely wasn't dismissing note taking in general. I think he was more likely to be meaning you don't need to write down every word he says, akin to almost transcribing the talk - well this was my take on it anyway. Basically he was implying that the substance of the talk will appear in a later essay, which it did. To me, with this point in particular, the author of the article appears to be trying to find something (anything?) to take issue with, which in my opinion makes me value his other points a little less favourably.
Personally, I find notes are a distraction. Every time I try to take notes while someone is talking, I find myself more focused on writing things down than actually trying to comprehend what they're saying.
+1 not because I agree with everything but we have to have some dissenting voices (event when they're a little simplistic, like this one) to make progress.
You're misinterpreting PG's stance here. This only applies this to VCs and super-angels, not to regular angel investors like yourself. VCs and SAs are obligated to have a much larger return on their investments in order to make the funds they raise a success. This is done via one or two big winners, so they're hoping for 1000x.
>> 3. Valuations don't matter
Similarly, this is aimed at VCs and SAs, not you. And of course you have to interpret the phrase as "Valuations don't matter [within reason]." Clearly you can think of a high enough number where the valuations should begin to matter to these people, but the point is that they're not at those levels right now.
>> I have a net negative return because of one spectacular failure (from which I have learned a lot but that's another story).
I'd love to read a blog post on that experience, and what made it different from your other successful investments.
The short version: it was my very first private investment. I decided I should diversify, get out of tech and into something more traditional and relatively safe. So I decided to get into real estate. This was in 2006. You can guess how that turned out.
Seriously, note-taking? I aspire to reach the point where my statement about whether or not my audience should take notes is one of the top five things I'm wrong about.
I think you did well to write this article, although if you zoom out one or two levels of abstraction, you would be in agreement on most, if not all points.
"Taking notes serves not only to make a non-volatile record of what was said, but the act of writing helps you remember what was said"
Maybe I was just a bad note taker, but whenever I took notes in college I always ended up focusing more on writing the notes than paying attention to what was being said and thinking critically about it.
Happened to me too, I gave up on taking notes very early on. Whenever I did take notes, I never went back to them. Plus, everything else was found in the books/literature/online
#3 seems particularly pedantic. I thought pg's argument was pretty clear:
Angel investing is like betting on long shots. You're arguing with the bookie over whether the odds should be 95-to-1 or 100-to-1, when you should be worrying about whether the horse can win the race at all.
I have my own list of things I disagree with PG about, none of them was on this list.
Every one can make such a list, and if they did, then everything PG ever said will end up on somebody's list.
1. A couple quotes from the essay in which he claims I said efficiency doesn't matter (http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html):
"And yet some applications will still demand speed."
"Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it."
2/3. He claims I said x, then at the end concedes I actually said -x. This latter I "grudgingly conceded?" It was arguably the single biggest theme of that talk, that the super-angels might have a winning model without getting big hits.
4. I said assholes are an instance of people who invest late, not that the two are identical. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670)
5. I agree note-taking has benefits other than recording things. In fact I've written about the phenomenon before. I just meant that people didn't have to take notes to record what I said.