Keynote: Paul Graham, YCombinator

What Hacker News said

Strong rec vonklaus · 2015-11 · on “Jessica Livingston on the Accidental Origin of Y Combinator”

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 inspirationa

Strong rec anondon · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

[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.

Strong rec rahulchhabra07 · 2019-12 · on “Ask HN: Who is “ahead of his/her time” nowadays?”

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.

Recommends andrew_simone · 2012-08 · on “How App.net Can Change Everything”

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]

Recommends laCour · 2013-10 · on “Why US Healthcare sucks and how I’m trying to change it”

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]

Recommends yatoomy · 2015-02 · on “What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?”

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 pro

Recommends on_ · 2015-09 · on “Dropbox has open-sourced Zulip”

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]

Cites fnord123 · 2013-09 · on “Founders' Accents”

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.