Top all-time · #2
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Paul Graham
Personal blog · paulgraham.comstartupsbusiness
Paul Graham's personal blog at paulgraham.com covers startups and business. Since 2006, 5,106 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10,633 times, most often “The Submarine”. It has a working feed you can follow.
10,633mentions?
4recommend?
5,106HN people?
2006–2026first – last linked?
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it, 4 are critical?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Graham's essays for ideas on startups, disagreement, wealth and hacker culture, such as the disagreement hierarchy, Blub and schlep blindness.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Calls the essays 'an interesting take' and 'a good article', says one 'explains a lot', and tells readers to read Blub.
- Criticised for · 4 comments
- Calls the wealth essays a 'hype' piece, 'PG-tier p0rn', and 'misleading and wrong'; says the gap essay's author may fool himself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Submarine447 people · 581 mentions · first linked 2007-04-04
- Beating the Averages (2001)308 people · 361 mentions · first linked 2007-04-03
- What You Can't Say (2004)218 people · 292 mentions · first linked 2007-07-14
- How to Disagree207 people · 253 mentions · first linked 2008-03-29
- The Submarine (2005)166 people · 192 mentions · first linked 2007-05-25
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009)149 people · 155 mentions · first linked 2009-07-23
- Do Things that Don't Scale128 people · 137 mentions · first linked 2013-07-14
- How To Make Wealth (2004)124 people · 146 mentions · first linked 2007-03-17
- Startup = Growth121 people · 143 mentions · first linked 2012-09-26
- Why Nerds are Unpopular (2003)119 people · 138 mentions · first linked 2007-04-22
What Hacker News says?
Hey dude. I understand things might be running a bit emotional for everyone right now. You might find it interesting that PG has written tangentially on this topic a few years ago. Might be an interesting take, given the distance in space/time. http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html http://www.paulgraham.com/patentpledge.html
Comment linking /patentpledge.html
on “Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project”Submitted Having Kids as a story · 1992 points
HN discussionI had the exact same reaction, and even briefly panic'd that that might be the case. I saw some DMs come in, and I was like "he's going to give some reasonable explanation, isn't he?" But those DMs were other people. I got silence. And I spent all day pondering what the hell had just happened. You're right. This is the first time I've ever posted someone's DMs without their consent. And yet for the life of me, I can…
Comment linking /mean.html
on “Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project”Submitted Jessica Livingston as a story · 1740 points
HN discussionWell, if it makes you lads feel any better, we're not the only ones who feel this way Paul Graham has been pushing for someone to disrupt web search on and off for at least the last 10 years: http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html (he tweeted about it more recently, but I couldn't dig it up since I'm not much of a tweet man)
Comment linking /ambitious.html
on “Google Search Is Dying”Submitted The Lesson to Unlearn as a story · 1333 points
HN discussionpg wrote about this in a rather uncharacteristically short essay titled Schelp Blindness [0] where he specifically says that hackers ignore obvious problems [1] because they are... erm... blind. Excerpts: > No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll…
Comment linking /growth.html
on “I Sell Onions on the Internet”Submitted Founder Mode as a story · 1330 points
HN discussionLife is short http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
Comment linking /vb.html
on “Paul Allen has died”Submitted What I Didn't Say as a story · 1289 points
HN discussion> Still, after finishing the article, I'm impressed by not just the the number visualizations, but by their legibility and smoothness I think the author probably had to try a lot of things before hitting on such a well-balanced set of visualizations: not too much detail, not too little, not too many degrees of freedom, not too few, usable on hand computers, usable on laptops. But I think that if you gave someone the…
Comment linking /lesson.html
on “Gears”- pg · 2019-10-12
Submitted Show HN: Bel as a story · 1288 points
HN discussion >To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs. This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline th…
Comment linking /say.html
on “Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private”Submitted Do Things that Don't Scale as a story · 1275 points
HN discussion> Oh wow, this is so juvenile. Please try to elevate the debate. See [1]. You're at DH0 right now. > They're not truth, they're are nothing more than models. The truth can fit a plethora of models. Models receive past data and emit predictions. We can then see how well those predictions match future data. We call one model "better" than another model when that first models' predictions more closely match future data…
Comment linking /disagree.html
on “Social Cooling (2017)”Submitted How to Work Hard as a story · 1223 points
HN discussionThe industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one? Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience. A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve…
Comment linking /taste.html
on “Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?”Submitted The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius as a story · 1164 points
HN discussionDon't underestimate the power of your choice at the frontier, even if it takes a while to reverberate through time. I used to think it didn't matter what tools I chose as a lone developer making consumer tech products and DSP audio applications. But over time, I saw that consumers rely on frontier-makers for fast-moving tech choices more than you’d think, even if they lag a few years behind. When enough people make…
Comment linking /mac.html
on “macOS unable to open any non-Apple application”Submitted How to Think for Yourself as a story · 1090 points
HN discussionWhat are Larry Page and Sergey Brin's reputation in this regard? Since we're talking about the open source world, how about Guido van Rossum? Paul Graham seems like he's probably a direct yet civil guy. http://paulgraham.com/safe.html Elon Musk isn't abusive. He extremely driven and demanding but that's not the same as abusive. I could expand the list quite a bit if you want but do you really believe it'd be a chall…
Comment linking /safe.html
on “Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off”Submitted Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas as a story · 1032 points
HN discussionnothing you’ve cited has any factual basis in reality other than that you have convinced yourself that it’s a possibility. it’s purely a mirror of your own personal preconceptions and fears, none of which have a supportable factual basis. gotta love when someone is so deep into fanboyism that they go through life utterly paralyzed and victimized by the apple that only exists inside their head. literally, unsarcastic…
Comment linking /fh.html
on “U.S. sues Apple, accusing it of maintaining an iPhone monopoly”Submitted What I Worked On as a story · 986 points
HN discussionSome great points, but he's in deep denial about censorship. Here's what Paul Graham, who started this very forum, said about that thread: I read @yishan's thread about Twitter and agree, as I think anyone who's run a forum would, that Elon is "in for a world of pain," or at least for a type of pain both much nastier than hard engineering problems, and with far less upside as well. Where I think he's mistaken is his…
Comment linking /heresy.html
on “Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources”Submitted Life is Short as a story · 970 points
HN discussionReading this made me think of two essays I've recently revisited. 1. The Sound of Silence, by Jessica Livingston Three years ago she argued that the smartest people are silencing themselves because the downside risk of being attacked for (misinterpretations of) their opinions are too high. People are wary of sharing useful information outside of trusted circles, which serves to consolidate power with insiders – thos…
Comment linking /say.html
on “I Am Deleting the Blog”Submitted The Origins of Wokeness as a story · 935 points
HN discussionYour response falls into DH0, DH1, and at best DH2 of Paul Graham's disagreement hierarchy: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Comment linking /disagree.html
on “Bop Spotter”Submitted Heresy as a story · 929 points
HN discussion
