Paul Graham @paulg Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

A huge policy mistake in one graph.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 months

@TateNews_ Thank you for doing your part to encourage people to get vaccinated.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

I used to think <person> was smart. Then I discovered that he disagrees with me about <political issue>, and I realized he couldn't be, because no one who disagrees with me about <political issue> could be smart.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 years

When you're dealing with exponential growth, the time to act is when it feels too early.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

When you think of a witty reply to a tweet, instead of replying (or worse still, quote-tweeting) with it, look at the existing replies and like the one that's there already.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

No one realized it at the time, but the accident at Three Mile Island cost thousands of lives. Not directly, but by making nuclear power unpopular in the US, and thus causing us to switch to more dangerous power sources.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

24 days

Remember when we were told children were being killed in Gaza because Hamas was using them as human shields? Now we know the real reason. When Israel wanted to kill someone, they waited till he went home, then dropped a bomb on the building, killing the whole family.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 months

This UN vote shows how completely isolated we are from world opinion. Is it because only America is smart enough to understand the Israeli point of view? Or because America's most powerful lobby has dragged us onto the wrong side of history? The answer to that is obvious.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

It's strange how many people there are who both worry that Elon will do a bad job of running Twitter, and also clearly hope that he does.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

"Cancelling student debt" is a misnomer. All that money still got spent. The only thing that changes is who pays. What "cancelling student debt" really means is that people who don't have student debt pay off the debt of those who do.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

I feel like someone killed a background process that had been consuming 5% of my CPU for the last 4 years.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

8 months

This was the point where AI-generated art passed the Turing Test for me.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

At this point, you should be default skeptical of any news story about Twitter. Many journalists have an agenda, there are a lot of angry ex-Twitter people ready to tell them what they want to hear, and there are a lot of readers eager to consume negative stories.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

9 months

Trees make towns look rich, and towns that look rich become rich.

Coby

@Cobylefko

9 months

Lancaster, CA transformed its downtown in just 8 months by redesigning it's main street from a mini-highway to a tree-lined boulevard. For the cost of just $11.5M, the project has generated $273M in economic output since 2010, creating 800 jobs, and nearly doubling tax revenue!

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

A company asked why it was so hard to hire a good writer. I told them it was because good writing is an illusion: what people call good writing is actually good thinking, and of course good thinkers are rare.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

@elonmusk That is in fact what has happened. Since the 90s the right has moved a little further right, but the left has moved a lot further left.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

10 months

I asked a friend who's a criminal defense lawyer what he'd change about the world to fix the most problems. He specializes in death penalty cases, so he's seen a lot. I expected him to say drugs, but he said if he could change one thing, it would be to make people better parents.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

ChatGPT's answers are like journalism: they sound fairly convincing unless they're about something you understand well, in which case you realize they're full of mistakes.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

This was funded by a group started by three rich Americans who became concerned about climate change after their houses in Malibu were threatened by wildfires in 2018. I'm not making this up.

Disclose.tv

@disclosetv

2 years

NOW - Climate activists defile Van Gogh's Sunflowers at the National Gallery and glued themselves to the wall.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

8 months

If you go to chrome://settings/adPrivacy you can turn off the spyware that got inserted into the latest version of Chrome.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

6 months

A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

"I think a life properly lived is just learn, learn, learn all the time." — Charlie Munger

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

Preschool parking, Venice.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

Men commit 95% of homicides. I don't consider it a slander if someone says men are inherently more violent. It seems obviously true.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 months

@elonmusk I wonder if the reason he thought it would be faster is that he thought at first that all they'd have to do was make a new version, and now he realizes they'll have to fire a lot of people first.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

It just occurred to me that (a) AI is probably the biggest story happening at the moment, (b) I'm following the story on Twitter rather than in the press, and (c) I had till now taken this for granted.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 months

Took me a long time to realize solutions aren't always what people want. Sometimes they just want someone to empathize with them.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

When I was a kid, I genuinely believed this was where we'd all be living by now. Do kids today have some sci-fi vision of the future, or was that just my generation?

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 months

Oxford surgeon Professor Nick Maynard on what he saw in Gaza:

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

Well, well, well. That felt coordinated. Turns out it was.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 months

The ridiculous images generated by Gemini aren't an anomaly. They're a self-portrait of Google's bureaucratic corporate culture.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

In 99% of startups, failing to execute is a much bigger danger than being copied. So it's a mistake to risk the former in order to avoid the latter.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

Andrew Yang has a message from America:

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Paul Graham

@paulg

7 months

If you're socially awkward, people will mistakenly think you dislike them, and that will make them actually dislike you.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 years

After years of puzzling over Elon Musk's behavior, a theory is gaining ground within the SEC that it's due to a previously unseen phenomenon known as a "sense of humor."

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

It looks like The Guardian is hoping that Elon will do for their subscriber numbers what Trump did for the New York Times's.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

The survival curve inflates like a sail, but the far end of it doesn't move much.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

In both those companies, people die if the software doesn't work right. Do you really think he's not up to managing a social network?

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

Something I explained to my 12 yo: When you're a little kid, your parents create your environment. Then there's a second stage where your peers do. Then for ambitious people there's a third stage where you create your own environment by choosing your own peers.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

When people talk about using "real" human body shapes in ads, they're talking about body shapes determined by processed foods and sedentary lifestyles, which are both quite unreal.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

Idea: Before writing an essay, have ChatGPT write one on the same topic to show you what would be the conventional thing to say, so you can avoid saying that.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

Reddit is unique in social media. 15 years after launching, it still hasn't peaked.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 months

Technologies often reach a remarkable level of perfection just before they become obsolete.

Massimo

@Rainmaker1973

4 months

Building a Mercedes-AMG G63 V8 engine. [📹 Mr. Benz]

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 months

You know something is bad when people have to invent a phrase you've never heard before in order to avoid using the ordinary word for it.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 years

Bizarre discovery: Tesla has a fleet of haters who must search for tweets mentioning the company in order to reply to them. I've seen plenty of haters before, but never such proactive ones. Who are they? Car dealers? People who shorted the stock? Bots?

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Paul Graham

@paulg

6 months

I don't agree with Elon about everything, but you have to give him this: He's achieved much more than roughly 100% of his critics.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

If you think people have scar tissue, you should see organizations. Each time there's a disaster, they create a process to prevent future disasters of that type. Eventually they accrete a thick layer of these processes that prevents them from moving. Then they die.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 years

Your parents miss you and wish you'd call. Later you'll miss them and wish you could.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

NFTs can be used for so many different things that you're inviting history to make a fool of you if you dismiss them. Even if I were sure that most current uses of NFTs were bogus, I'd never dare to say that all possible uses were.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 years

Universities are backing themselves into a dangerous corner by becoming more expensive at the same time they're becoming less necessary.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

I gave a talk about startups to 14 and 15 year olds, and their questions afterward were better than I get at top universities. I puzzled over this, then realized why. Their questions were motivated by genuine curiosity, rather than to make some kind of comment or to seem smart.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

With ambition, you tend to get one step below what you aim for. So unless you try to be the best, you won't even be good.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

10 months

People complaining about "capitalism" are like teenagers complaining about their parents. 1. Most are only able to thanks to the high standard of living supplied by capitalism/their parents. 2. Most of their problems are not in fact due to capitalism/their parents.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

A friend of mine who is basically never wrong about financial questions converted 80% of his Bitcoin into Ethereum.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

The striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly something big is happening.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

Extremists on both sides share one tactic: to treat Israel and Jews as identical. This is where we must draw the line. We can't allow disagreement with Israeli policy to devolve into attacks on Jews. And we can't allow those who criticize Israeli policy to be called antisemitic.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

Deleting the original blue checks makes it easy for the first time to see what proportion of users pay for them. Of the 723 accounts I follow, 136 have paid, 28 are either verified organizations or associated with one, and 559 have neither.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

If you have a mocking personality, people won't bring you new ideas.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 months

Prediction: Wokeness will recede significantly in 2024. There were always more people against it than there seemed, but many were afraid to say so. Now that it's safer to criticize it, more will.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

7 months

I don't mind when people are unambitious. It's up to each person to decide that. But it bugs me when the people who aren't ambitious try to bring down those who are.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

The idea of a standoff between 3 board members and 95% an organization's employees is so unprecedented that it seems almost grammatically ill-formed. I wouldn't have thought such a thing was even possible. If 95% doesn't count as a vote of no confidence, what number would?

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

Some of the stealth edits that Vox made to its article debunking "conspiracy theories" that Covid-19 originated in a lab leak between its original publication in March 2020 and now.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

@elonmusk Interesting point, but an example might make it clearer. Can you think of a prominent person who's currently wasting his talents in software when he could be working on manufacturing and heavy industries?

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

You can tell what people want believe by their standards for evidence. The lower their standard for evidence for x, the stronger their desire to believe x must be.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

The most dangerous thing about carrying a cell phone everywhere is that you're never bored. Boredom, like pain, is a signal.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 years

An early photograph of Stripe. They had a wonderful office next to Coupa Cafe in downtown Palo Alto, but they were about to move out because they'd gotten too big. It felt like the end of an era, so I took a picture of them.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

Trends in mental health problems among US women and girls, 2001 to 2018. It's so obvious that something changed, and we all know what it is.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

The 4 biggest French companies are all fashion brands.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 years

Funny how characteristically each country reacts to the coronavirus. China tracks its citizens' every move. Hungary becomes a dictatorship. The US gives money to businesses. The Japanese conceal the problem. The British bravely but stupidly seek herd immunity.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

When someone publicly mocks someone else's reading choices, assume by default that their motive is to display their own sophistication.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

My office at this moment. The papers on the desk are notes for a new essay. After dropping 10 yo off at school, I go for a walk and think about what to write next. I bring a piece of paper to scribble down notes that I never read, and probably couldn't.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

9 months

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

8 yo: I'm worried I'm a nerd. Me: There's nothing wrong with being a nerd. I'm a nerd. 8 yo: That makes me even more worried.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

92% of grades in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies classes at Yale are A or A-, vs 55% in Mathematics. The math majors must just not be as smart. (Table via @sfmcguire79 .)

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

One of the most dangerous trends I've noticed in the last decade is the increasing tendency to believe that if someone disagrees with your political opinions, they're not merely mistaken, but evil.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 months

Time flies by when you're using addictive apps and games. But many of the most important things in life have at least soft deadlines. This is a very dangerous mismatch. If you're not careful, a lot of windows are going to close on you.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

Not even aesthetics, but mere uniformity. Managers drive changes like this, not artists.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

9 months

If you'd told me as a kid that in the 2020s liberals would be the ones punishing dissent and the protest songs would be conservative, I not only wouldn't have believed it, I couldn't even have imagined it.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

You can't replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

20 days

Someone sent me a cold email proposing a novel project. Then I noticed it used the word "delve."

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Paul Graham

@paulg

10 months

If an art dealer tells you that the work he's trying to sell you is sure to go up in value, ask why he's selling it.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

The striking thing about this list, to me, is the preponderance of software companies. Making physical stuff is hard. But don't let that deter you, if that's what you're interested in. If things go right for Helion, it could be the biggest of the lot.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 years

You get an email that makes you think "this requires a thoughtful reply." So instead of dashing off a reply as you would with an ordinary email, you wait till you have time to give it the reply it deserves. <Montage of life happening.> You never reply.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

Someone who knows Elon Musk well explained why he's so successful. It's simply that he's an engineering genius. I imagined it was because he was a good manager. Cars and rockets seemed so different that I couldn't imagine someone being an expert in both. But apparently he is.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

14 days

One of the most dangerous things you can do is to treat a fixable problem as part of your identity. Then you'll never fix it.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

If the far left are upset that having advanced math classes in public schools produces unequal outcomes, wait till they see how unequal the outcomes are without such classes.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 months

This trend has a boringly obvious explanation. Boys and girls used to hang out together more. The girls made the boys more liberal and the boys made the girls more conservative. But now the boys are at home playing shooter games, and the girls are at home posting on Instagram.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 year

According to this data assembled by @cremieuxrecueil , the difference in IQ between identical twins raised separately is only half a point greater than the difference between two tests of the same person.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

1 month

"I hoped my brother Tarazan was still alive. But I found him in an unimaginable state, his head severed. I wish for death after seeing my brother like that. He was only 18 months old. What has he done in this war?"

The 12-year-old girl who lost her family overnight

Alma's family was killed when a bomb hit their building, leaving her an orphan.

www.bbc.co.uk

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

@engineers_feed Travel before you have kids.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

Something I taught 9 yo: Even if the stuff you're learning in your classes is just mindless memorization, it's still worth getting good grades, because good grades get you sorted with smarter people, and being around smart people is genuinely worthwhile.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

3 years

Elon owns less of Tesla than most people who start businesses. The reason he's so rich is because Tesla is doing so well. So in effect Reich is complaining that Tesla is doing too well. I believe we are now ad absurdum.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

5 months

How many people make it through each day of Replit's online 100 Days of Code tutorial.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

2 years

Elon buying Twitter could be good for Twitter, but I worry it will suck for him personally. His fame will ensure that every problem is blamed on him. And a site full of people who are literally crazy = lots of problems.

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Paul Graham

@paulg

4 years

Work with people you want to become like, because you'll become like whoever you work with.

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