dan's Favorite Articles by Paul Graham list

How Not to Die

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:12:49 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that way, it doesn't sound good at all. In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich. If half the startups we fund succeed, then half of you are going to get rich and the other half are going to get nothing.

Why to Not Not Start a Startup

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:15:57 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html So here is an even more striking statistic: 0% of that first batch had a terrible experience. They had ups and downs, like every startup, but I don't think any would have traded it for a job in a cubicle. And that statistic is probably not an anomaly. Whatever our long-term success rate ends up being, I think the rate of people who wish they'd gotten a regular job will stay close to 0%.

The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:18:16 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should.

A Plan for Spam

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:08:04 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html To the recipient, spam is easily recognizable. If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, they would have little trouble doing it. How much do we have to do, short of AI, to automate this process?

Better Bayesian Filtering

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:06:43 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/better.html Spam filtering is a subset of text classification, which is a well established field, but the first papers about Bayesian spam filtering per se seem to have been two given at the same conference in 1998, one by Pantel and Lin [2], and another by a group from Microsoft Research [3]. When I heard about this work I was a bit surprised. If people had been onto Bayesian filtering four years ago, why wasn't everyone using it?

The Hacker's Guide to Investors

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:21:56 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly because investors are so unlike hackers, and partly because they tend to operate in secret. I've been dealing with this world for many years, both as a founder and an investor, and I still don't fully understand it. In this essay I'm going to list some of the more surprising things I've learned about investors. Some I only learned in the past year.

What the Bubble Got Right

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:20:19 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was $12. I went to the next cubicle and told my friend Trevor. "Twelve!" he said. He tried to sound indignant, but he didn't quite manage it. He knew as well as I did that our valuation was crazy.

Why Nerds are Unpopular

dan at Seekler.com — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:24:30 -0500

Why Nerds are Unpopular

Filter that Fight Back

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:10:19 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/ffb.html We may be able to improve the accuracy of Bayesian spam filters by having them follow links to see what's waiting at the other end. Richard Jowsey of death2spam now does this in borderline cases, and reports that it works well. Why only do it in borderline cases? And why only do it once? As I mentioned in Will Filters Kill Spam?, following all the urls in a spam would have an amusing side-effect.

Being Popular

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:01:51 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html What does make a language popular? Do popular languages deserve their popularity? Is it worth trying to define a good programming language? How would you do it?

Revenge of the Nerds

dan at Seekler.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:03:49 -0500

http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html So, who's right? James Gosling, or the pointy-haired boss? Not surprisingly, Gosling is right. Some languages are better, for certain problems, than others. And you know, that raises some interesting questions. Java was designed to be better, for certain problems, than C++. What problems? When is Java better and when is C++?