HN Explorer

Ask HN: PG has many essays. What's your favorite one?

32 points by pedrodelfino ↗ HN
I created this account around October 2014.

Nonetheless, I just started to really read HN this year, basically two months ago.

I was reading PG's essays and one of them was about what he has learned from Hacker News. After that, it was clear for me that I needed to have a look (a deeper one).

I am quite new here, but I am in love with HN's culture and content.

It would be cool to see what are the best PG's essays ever in the opinion of HN's community.

I am trying to read all of them and it would be cool to focus on the most popular/classical ones.

33 comments

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japhyr
Good and Bad Procrastination - http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

I love it; it always makes me feel better about putting aside some obligations to work on really meaningful projects. I share this with students sometimes, and it speaks to some of them as well. There's plenty of conversation about finding your passion in the world, but not so much about working hard on your passion.

na85
Haven't read a single one. Frankly I think some members of this community share a preoccupation with pg that borders on being problematic.

Perhaps as a reflex I actively avoid such things now.

>I am quite new here, but I am in love with HN's culture and content.

Granted, HN is a lot better than it was even just a few years ago, but the rose-tinted outlook will pass with time, and you'll see as most of us do that it is a hodgepodge of both gems and utter trash (and everything in between). People here are just as susceptible to groupthink and bias as people elsewhere.

If you love javascript you'll fit right in with said groupthink.

meagain20000
pg has some really good insights. The guy has a lot of experience and has put a lot of it on print. On top of that he is quite a good writer. I don't know if he is right but a lot of what he says seems to make sense.
mojoe
You impelled me to go look up groupthink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

It looks like the main idea behind the groupthink term is that it results in "an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome" due to desire for conformity. I'd recommend that you read some of pg's essays, because I don't think the term "groupthink" applies here. I can't identify any irrational or dysfunctional decision-making behind the community's love of these good pieces of writing. I'd also guess that most HNers like pg's writing because it's good, not because they're trying to conform.

dbpokorny
I like "How to Make Wealth" because he doesn't beat around the bush, he just come out and says that "wealth" is nothing more than an "object of the desire to possess" and if you can do something that increases some else's desire-to-possess something that you have or control, then you are creating wealth.

> Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth

Whether or not you agree with this "metaphysics of wealth" it is a good read because it illustrates some intuition behind economic theory.

tmaly
do things that don't scale
pedrodelfino
I have already read this in particular and is one of my favorites too.
endrebak
What you can't say: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

"Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told."

vox_mollis
Absolutely agree with this, as being his best essay.

The unfortunate fact, however, is that both moderators and participants of pg's own discussion site seem to have never read it, or never taken it to heart. There are definitely things you're not allowed to say here. The notion of open discussion of ideas does not exist.

S4M
> There are definitely things you're not allowed to say here.

Any example? I am genuinely interested.

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vox_mollis
Most recently, you're not allowed to discuss hypothetical police involvement in the death of Ian Murdock.

In the past, you're not allowed to talk about: - Women/minorities in tech - Israel - Brendan Eich - Crime statistics - Immigration

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beeboop
I believe they have said the have automatic point penalties for things involving NSA/mass surveillance (could be remembering that wrong)
eecks
What? Why on earth would they have that?
beeboop
Because it is the moderator's opinion that such content is not very relevant to HN and gets disproportionality upvoted. Basically they disagree with the enthusiasm of privacy advocates.
DanBC
it's very rude to make up bollocks about other people and state it as fact.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8011987#up_8012898

> HN is not "Suppressing" all NSA-related topics.

> Users are flagging these posts. The HN community is divided. Some people think that there are too many NSA stories; others, too few. On any issue where the community is divided, upvotes compete with flags, and stories rise and fall according to the tug of war.

> The HN software adds a small default weight to NSA stories. The purpose of this is obviously not to suppress them. If we were trying to do that, it would be a large weight and not a small one. Instead, it's tuned so that NSA stories can still easily make the front page—and so they do. It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.

beeboop
>It's an attempt to strike a balance between the different segments of the community who strongly disagree with one another about how much NSA is the right amount of NSA.

Because dang is the one who added the weight, the blatant implication here is that dang believes that "the balance" needs to be more towards not having NSA stories overwhelm the front page.

I don't see how you can read what dang wrote and somehow think that he is not suppressing NSA stories. He very clearly states that he is suppressing them, just not to a large degree. Just because he says "we are not suppressing them" before describing their method of suppression does not mean the are not suppressed.

Why is it necessary to strike a balance between the two sides of this conversation? As he states, the NSA stories still make it to the front page. What actual effect does this have? As far as I can tell, it simply makes the stories less visible than they would otherwise be. No amount of linguistic gymnastics is going to make me think this is not a description of suppression.

The amount of doublespeak going on here is baffling. Dang very clearly states that the intention is to lessen the enthusiasm of these topics, and it's being weighted in favor of the pro-NSA side, which is pretty much exactly what I said: Dang disagrees with the enthusiasm of the anti-NSA (pro-privacy) side of the debate.

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fucking_tragedy
Anything related to tech unionization or is critical of the free market has a way of disappearing.
Mz
I suspect that is a misinterpretation of moderating practices here. As long as you aren't doing things like engaging in personal attacks, you are allowed to express yourself pretty freely here. However, they do penalize articles on certain subjects, in part because the discussion of some subjects typically does not go well.

It is sort of like "Yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater is not a protected form of free speech." Putting inflammatory topics with inflammatory titles etc on HN will get it downmodded (or they will change the title to something less inflammatory, etc). That doesn't mean you can't say it. It does mean they want the front page to be dominated by intelligent, meaty discussion, not ranty, fighty, strongly emotional drivel.

When things get downmodded in order to get less attention by removing them from the front page, inevitably, someone says something about how their right to free speech is being impeded or "Why can't we talk about this here?" I have seen the moderator reply to the effect of "You are talking about it still, it just isn't on the front page anymore."

Some people think "right to free speech = right to be on the front page if I get enough upvotes, no matter how much I have violated the guidelines" and will say something nasty about how things are moderated if their desire to be attention whores has been interfered with by the folks who, you know, get paid to run the place as they see fit.

endrebak
There was even a review paper on group differences in genetic markers for cognitive traits posted on HN. How do you get more controversial than that?
eecks
I feel like it is a bit too generic
alain94040
Each essay contains advice that is insightful depending on what stage you, the reader, are at. Did you just discover startups, or did you just present on-stage at Demo Day? Are you struggling with co-founder issues and how to get started, or how to scale to your first 100 employees?

Somone may eventually classify them in a reasonable order. In some sense, this is already what YC's startup guide did: all the advice, sorted in a logical order.

anonfunction
I really like How to Disagree[1] which has this wisdom that I've seen ring true at startups, especially when there is loose terminology and no documented communication.

> More often than not, two people arguing passionately about something are actually arguing about two different things. Sometimes they even agree with one another, but are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize it.

Another great one is Startup = Growth[2] which is great for clarifying the term and setting some expectations to benchmark against.

1. http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

2. http://paulgraham.com/growth.html