Paul Graham - в основном и в заключение
Jul. 14th, 2005 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greyaЧто-то напортачили в заклинании и вместо родных душ получили чужие тела.
http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." ... Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.
To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto - which means you accumulate knowledge at what's colloquially called an exponential rate. ...Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html (this one is interesting re server-based software)
What's scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They're like a mountain that can walk.
http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." ... Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn't do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting.
To some extent it's like learning history. When you first read history, it's just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto - which means you accumulate knowledge at what's colloquially called an exponential rate. ...Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.
People trying to be cool will find themselves at a disadvantage when collecting surprises. To be surprised is to be mistaken. And the essence of cool, as any fourteen year old could tell you, is nil admirari. When you're mistaken, don't dwell on it; just act like nothing's wrong and maybe no one will notice.
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html (this one is interesting re server-based software)
What's scary about Microsoft is that a company so big can develop software at all. They're like a mountain that can walk.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 06:27 pm (UTC)А еще есть http://www.mcsweeneys.net/about/
И вообще много хорошего есть на этой земле.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-14 07:56 pm (UTC)А тако же и под ней,
например в подвалах UofM CS building. я кажется логово сменяю :) на семь этажей вниз (с шестого), на один доллар per hour вверх, не менее однообразная работа (in NLP), но более раскидистые перспективы, и company of peers.
осталось ключи поиметь..