Paul Graham Network (n): One or more overlapping groups of people on earth. They’re the Skull & Bones of Silicon Valley, the Freemasons of Geekdom, the apex predators of innovation. They are the most accomplished engineers/entrepreneurs on earth: high energy, deeply social and deeply technical. They do the extraordinary.
Their junior members cut their teeth founding startups and the silverbacks stock the VC funds and angel lists, forever on the hunt for their own kind.
Also see here.
Wow, great speech. Recommend you read all the notes, they’re short and packed up tight. Here’s the part that caught my eye:
instead of getting a degree from an institution, get it from a person. (sorta like phds). this is actually how universities used to work – you’d get certified by someone from the guild.
As noted, educational is going in the opposite direction and so becoming more democratic (less about who you know, etc). Standardized tests are a way of minimizing the damage from a crappy network. In my world, the CFA and CAS exams do this.
But let’s not get caught up in the romance. The best way of being extraordinary will never change: you need to learn from extraordinary people by joining a (the?!) Paul Graham Network.
Yelp reviews of my restaurant, Fior d’ Italia, are a perfect example of the flaws in the Yelp system. The Fior has been around for 125 years and has been successful because of great food and service. But if you look at the Fior Yelp site today, the restaurant has 218 posted reviews averaging 2 1/2 stars, with many terrible one-star reviews.
What you don’t see (unless you look hard for them) are the 115 “filtered reviews,” which average out to a ranking of more than four stars. That is a current problem for the Fior, and in the long term, a problem for Yelp.
Not even a whisper of the incredibly obvious point of Yelp’s policy? They’re accusing you of padding your reviews, bud, and feigning ignorance of this very obvious point makes you look super guilty.
First Italian restaurant in the US, eh? They must be taking tips from the soccer team. (BAM!)
A Barker tour-de-force on negotiating. Here’s a summary list:
The whole thing is pretty short and highly recommended. Think of a negotiation as two parties figuring out what the best course of action is. It’s an immensely gratifying experience when done properly.
Now two posts on startups.
First Steve Blank puts together a fantastic summary of what, exactly a startup is. He asks this question:
When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models? And when do business planning and execution come into play?
Then does this:
One of the things startups have lacked is a definition of who they were. For years we’ve treated startups like they are just smaller versions of a large company. However, we now know that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Within this definition, a startup can be a new venture or it can be a new division or business unit in an existing company.
I just think that’s brilliant. Lots more at the link.
And here’s Jason Cohen drilling home one of those lessons that needs to be drilled constantly (I reproduce a hacked summary below with apologies to Jason):
Almost all founders I encounter are leery about discussing their product plans. Now with the Social Network movie promulgating this fear, I expect it will worsen.
It’s silly, for two reasons.
1. Either you have a defensible competitive advantage, or you don’t.
2. The roadmap is not as useful as you think.
Here is a look at algorithms that group similar sounding words together. Neat idea for searching dirty data.
The manufacturing fetish explained?
A rich and rewarding human life neither comes from nor depends on consumption, even lots of consumption; it comes from producing goods and services of value through the integration of technique with a vision of social and personal meaning. Being fully human is about doing good work that means something.
I haven’t read the pieces Mandel links to. I read the above and thought: ok, the data should be interesting. Then Mead lost me big time:
A consumption-centered society is ultimately a hollow society. It makes people rich in stuff but poor in soul. In its worst aspects, consumer society is a society of bored couch potatoes seeking artificial stimulus and excitement.
No idea what any of that means. How about this from Barker instead?
Great post out there called “Nobody Wants To Learn To Program.”
It’s true of course. Programming is a tool, and tools are defined by the problems they solve. And I see unsolved programming problems all around me. If more people understood what power it had, they would solve those problems for themselves and for me.
But it’s difficult to learn something unless it’s framed by an immediate use. The worst teachers don’t tie their lessons to things that matter. So often in school I felt like a Bedouin in a chainsaw course: WTF am I doing here?*
(That’s what’s so neat about Scott Adams’ idea of a school curriculum built (HA!) around building a house)
Anyway, I only started learning programming when I realized writing macros in excel would make my work life easier. This past year I found a few more uses for it and have massively expanded my programming toolkit.
So now I’m a programming dork, by which I mean that learning about something for its own sake is interesting to me. But ‘regular’ teachers (who are also dorks) teaching beginners from that perspective is ridiculous and boring.
*In that Bedouins (which I know is an incorrect pluralization) live in the desert and there aren’t any trees there and a chainsaw course would be entirely concerned with cutting trees.
I agree with Tyler Cowen too much. But here I go again:
It’s now common that a fire chief has to have a master’s degree. That may sound silly and it would be easy to think that a master’s degree has not very much to do with putting out fires. Still, often it is desired that a firefighter is trained in emergency medical services, anti-terrorism practices, fire science (such as putting out industrial fires), and there is a demand for firefighter who, as they move into leadership roles, can do public speaking, interact with the community, and write grant proposals. A master’s degree is no guarantee of skill in these areas, but suddenly the new requirements don’t sound so crazy.
Some people focus on the signalling benefits of of college. For me college was about integrating into a Charles Murray culture, I think. Much of that is social and to get in the front door of the Charles Murray class you’ve got to have really good communication skills.
I once heard of a series of English proficiency tests at, I think, the FBI (or some similar organization). Most of these were the usual vocabulary and grammar quizzes but the last test was weird: candidates had to watch clips of late night TV monologues and explain why the jokes were funny. Ultimately, communication is about culture.
Tyler didn’t have me in the quote above until the grant writing and public speaking parts. Each of those requires the higher-class communication skills colleges are best at delivering.
While digging through our logs in preparation for our monthly browser stat report, we found 346 visits from a device with a screen resolution of 2048×1536—the exact resolution rumored for the “retina” display in the next-generation iPad. Although a screen resolution by itself isn’t much to go on, a quick search around the Web indicates that there are very few devices in current use that have this same resolution. (There is a $5,000 NEC display for medical use with that resolution.)
Not Unreasonable 