Isegoria

Paul Graham has just put his Mind the Gap essay up on-line:

When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There’s a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.
[...]
I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society.

Definitely read the whole essay.

OK, I can’t leave it at that. On his first point, he references The Daddy Model of Wealth:

When I was five I thought electricity was created by electric sockets. I didn’t realize there were power plants out there generating it. Likewise, it doesn’t occur to most kids that wealth is something that has to be generated. It seems to be something that flows from parents.
[...]
Because kids are unable to create wealth, whatever they have has to be given to them. And when wealth is something you’re given, then of course it seems that it should be distributed equally.

OK, now go read the whole essay.

None of this is new for fans of Paul Graham and Y Combinator, but it’s good to see it in the New York Times. For Start-Ups, Web Success on the Cheap:

When Seth J. Sternberg and two colleagues started Meebo, a Web-based instant-messaging service, they didn’t go looking for venture capitalists. Using their credit cards, they financed the company themselves to the tune of $2,000 apiece. It was enough to cover their biggest expense — leasing a few computer servers at $120 a month each.

Within a month of its introduction in September 2005, Meebo was getting as many as 50,000 log-ins a day, and it needed more servers. It decided to take a modest $100,000 from three angel investors, wealthy individuals who typically contribute small amounts but do not get involved in management decisions.

“We had a bunch of V.C.’s talking to us about potentially putting more money in,” Mr. Sternberg said. “We said no. A lot of things happen when you raise a V.C. round, and they really slow you down.”

Eventually, Meebo did raise money from venture investors — about $3.5 million from Sequoia Capital. But that was after the company was well on its way to showing that its service was a hit; Meebo had about 200,000 daily log-ins.

In the last couple of years, hundreds of other Internet start-up companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have followed a similar trajectory. Unlike most companies formed during the first Internet boom, which were built on costly technology and marketing budgets, many of the current crop of Internet start-ups have gone from zero to 60 on a shoestring.

Some have gone without venture capital altogether or have raised far smaller sums than venture investors would have liked. Many were sold for millions before venture capitalists could even get in. That has been a challenge for venture capitalists, who have raised record amounts in recent years and need places to put that money to work.

“V.C.’s hate it; they want you to take big money,” said Jay Adelson, who is the chief executive of two start-ups, Digg and Revision3. Digg took some venture money, but far less than backers offered, and Revision3 has been running on about $850,000 raised from a group of angel investors.

Paul Graham lists The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups:

1. Single Founder
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders
18. A Half-Hearted Effort

Spam Goes Literary notes the latest spam tactic: including passages of classic works — like those posted on Project Gutenberg — in ads. And people have complained to Greg Newby, the director of Project Gutenberg:

“No we don’t send spam,” he says. “We’re not doing anything other than trying to give away good literature.”

A better person to blame (or thank) would be Paul Graham. He’s not a spammer; he’s a programmer famous for creating one of the first really good spam filters.

In 2002, he was trying to write a little program to separate spam from ordinary e-mail. It did what you’d expect; it looked for keywords like “click” as in “click here to buy our product.” Graham says the results were less than spectacular.

“For one thing, spammers could just replace the ‘I’ in click with a ’1′ and you’d be out of luck,” he says. “And they did in fact start doing that.”

Graham tried something different. He wrote a program to find out how to best separate spam from real e-mail. To train it, he fed it a good helping of spam and a separate sample of real e-mail.

The program looked at each word and counted how many times it appeared in spam or legitimate mail. It found, for instance that words like “lunch” tend to be in legitimate e-mails. And words like “Viagra” or “cl1ck” are more likely to be in spam.

“This was 50 lines of code,” Graham said, “it took me a day to write.”

He ran this simple filter on his incoming e-mail. It evaluated all the words in each e-mail, and calculated an overall probability that the e-mail was spam.

Remarkably, it caught more than 99 percent of new spam, and let all his real e-mail through.

“I was so delighted,” Graham said. “It got practically all my spam the first time try.”

And this is why the spammers have had to resort to literature. Filters like the one Graham wrote are everywhere now. In order to get past them, spammers try to make the text of their e-mails look more like something you’d actually write.

Paul Graham describes The Island Test — and his answer:

I’ve discovered a handy test for figuring out what you’re addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend’s house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won’t be able to leave while you’re there. Also, you’ve never been to this house before, so you can’t assume it will have more than any house might.

What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a point of packing? That’s what you’re addicted to. For example, if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka (just in case), you may want to stop and think about that.

For me the list is four things: books, earplugs, a notebook, and a pen.

This reminds me of the Getting Things Done methodology:

The notebook and pen are professional equipment, as it were. Though actually there is something druglike about them, in the sense that their main purpose is to make me feel better. I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. It’s just that if I can’t write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. Pen and paper wick ideas.

Paul Graham answers some reader letters about his What You Can’t Say in Re: What You Can’t Say:

I disagree with your generalization that physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature.

Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can’t say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up.

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they’ll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?

How can you dismiss socialism so casually

I’ve thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.

In England in the 1970s, the top income tax rate was 98%. That’s what the Beatles’ song “Tax Man” is referring to when they say “one for you, nineteen for me.”

Any country that makes this choice ends up losing net, because new technology tends to be developed by people trying to make their fortunes. It’s too much work for anyone to do for ordinary wages. Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn’t had American technologies to copy.

Finland is sometimes given as an example of a prosperous socialist country, but apparently the combined top tax rate is 55%, only 5% higher than in California. So if they seem that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don’t spend so much on their military.

Paul Graham goes over The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn — the ones he finds he has to keep repeating:

1. Release Early.
2. Keep Pumping Out Features.
3. Make Users Happy.
4. Fear the Right Things.
5. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
6. There Is Always Room.
7. Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.

In The Future of Programming: An Interview with Paul Graham, he gives his opinion on outsourcing — which is the same opinion I came to years ago:

In any case, I don’t think outsourcing per se is much of a threat. I bet much of the time it’s just a symptom of using a language that’s not abstract enough. In effect you’re using the programmers in India or wherever as human compilers.

Paul Graham Eats Breakfast (Director’s Cut) isn’t actually about his breakfast. It’s about his experiences living around the country:

I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you “you should make more money.” LA tells you “you should be better looking.” Rome tells you “you should dress better.” London tells you “you should be hipper.” The Bay Area tells you “you should live better.” And Cambridge tells you “you should read some of those books you’ve been meaning to.”