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May 2021There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly.
If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person
proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant
to say "That will never work."Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the
history of scie... |
May 2004When 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 prof... |
December 2014If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing
confidence in our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience
a belief survived, the less likely it would be false. Most people
implicitly believe something like this about their opinions. And
they're justified in doing so with opinions... |
October 2015When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or
9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same.
Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth
is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to
profitability on the money they have lef... |
January 2003(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting
of NEPLS.)Visitors to this country are often surprised to find that
Americans like to begin a conversation by asking "what do you do?"
I've never liked this question. I've rarely had a
neat answer to it. But I think I have finally solve... |
February 2021Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school,
were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what
beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still
are: short stories. My stories were awful. They had hardly any plot,
just characters with strong feelings, w... |
November 2022Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction
between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and
the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the
time I had a self-interested motive for exploring the question. At
that age (like most succeeding ages) I w... |
Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator.
October 2014(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at
Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is
applicable to potential founders at other ages.)One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have... |
May 2001
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly
what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff
to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to
anyone who wants to
understand the essence of Lisp both in the sense of its
origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core
i... |
"May 2001(This article was written as a kind of business plan for a\nnew language.\nSo it is missing(...TRUNCATED) |
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