YC的创始人Paul Graham 保罗·格雷厄姆
Paul Graham
- 不能说的话
为了在全社会制造出一个禁忌，负责实施的团体必定既不是特别强大也不是特别弱小。如果一个团体强大到无比自信，它根本不会在乎别人的抨击。美国人或者英国人对外国媒体的诋毁就毫不在意。但是，如果一个团体太弱小，就会无力推行禁忌。 我猜想，道德禁忌的最大制造者是那些权力斗争中略占上风的一方。你会发现，这一方有实力推行禁忌，同时又软弱到需要禁忌保护自己的利益。 大多数的斗争，不管它们实际上争的是什么，都会以思想斗争的形式表现出来。“他们接受流行，不是因为想要与众不同，而是因为害怕与众不同。所以，如果你要寻找“不能说的话”，可以观察流行的产生方式，试着预大多数的斗争，不管它们实际上争的是什么，都会以思想斗争的形式表 Viawet 现出来。
- 墙上的影子
问:乐观者、悲观者和工程师之间有什么区别吗? 答:乐观者看到的是一个半满的玻璃杯。悲观者看到的是一个半空的玻璃杯。而工程师看到的则是玻璃杯比实际需要大了一倍。 这个笑话源于我们脑子里对工程师的成见，即工程师喜欢成本更低的那些产品。
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Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.
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What can you say in this language that would be impossibly inconvenient to say in others? In the process of learning how to say things you couldn't previously say, you'll probably be learning how to think things you couldn't previously think
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But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes.
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And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones.
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And whether they were in fact the causes or consequences is beside the point.
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You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledge of art, and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneous influences like the fame of the artist.There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them. But there is equally definitely a partial order of both.There's a narrow sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one in which it refers to preferences of any kind.
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any work of art sets expectations by its level of finish.
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It's like saying something clever in a conversation as if you'd thought of it on the spur of the moment, when in fact you'd worked it out the day before.
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With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.. So nature and nurture combine to make us avoid self-indulgence.
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It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're supposed to conform to.
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The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith.
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For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception.
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In the process, the heart has been transformed from an almost supernatural object imbued with metaphor and meaning into a machine that can be manipulated and controlled
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This much, I assume, won't be that controversial. I think it will accord with the experience of anyone who has tried to write about anything nontrivial.
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To be a startup, a company has to be a product business, not a service business. By which I mean not that it has to make something physical, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than doing custom work for individual clients. Custom work doesn't scale.
