Hacker News: paul

New comment by paul in "Tony Hoare has died"

paul — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:14:00 +0000

One of my favorite quotes: “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”

I think about this a lot because it’s true of any complex system or argument, not just software.

New comment by paul in "New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco"

paul — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 19:32:59 +0000

Agreed! Wonderful museum.

They also have some original codices along with translations that are interesting to look at https://photos.app.goo.gl/zeo3Hn2Q8v81cidX9

New comment by paul in "The saga of the Closure compiler, and why TypeScript won"

paul — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 23:40:28 +0000

To be clear, minification was absolutely a key feature/motivation for the compiler. Runtime performance was more important than code size, but as usual the key to improving runtime performance is writing better code -- there's not much a compiler can do to fix slow code. For example, I wanted the inbox to render in less than 100ms, which required not only making the JS fast but also minimizing the number of DOM nodes by a variety means (such as only having a single event handler for the entire inbox instead of one per active element).

As other here have pointed out, JS was very much looked down upon by most people at Google, and there was a lot of resistance to our JS-heavy approach. One of their objections was that JS didn't have any tooling such compilers, and therefore the language was "unscalable" and unmaintainable. Knocking down that objection was another of the motivations for writing the compiler, though honestly it was also just kind of fun.

New comment by paul in "The saga of the Closure compiler, and why TypeScript won"

paul — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 04:25:25 +0000

Interesting read. I wrote the original compiler back in 2002/2003, but a lot changed by the time it was open sourced (including the confusing name -- I just called it a javascript compiler).

One detail this story gets wrong though is the claim that, "The Gmail team found that runtime JavaScript performance was almost irrelevant compared to download times." Runtime performance was actually way more important than download size and we put a lot of effort into making the JS fast (keep in mind that IE6 was the _best_ browser at the time). One of the key functions of the js compiler was inlining and dead-code removal so that we could keep the code readable without introducing any extra overhead.

New comment by paul in "Myocarditis after Covid vaccination: Research on possible long-term risks begins"

paul — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 20:41:17 +0000

It’s both a novel virus and a novel vaccine. Without clinical trials we really don’t know if the boosters are helping or hurting.

Also, we should be doing clinical trials on flu shots as well. New drugs, even if they are only slightly different still require clinical trials. Why is hacking the immune system not subject to the same scrutiny?

New comment by paul in "Prometheus: Fuel from the Air"

paul — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 01:30:48 +0000

Comparing global fuel consumption with global electricity production is a good approach. It’s clearly substantial, but doable, especially since fuel production can utilize “unreliable” renewables (make gas when the sun shines).

New comment by paul in "Prometheus: Fuel from the Air"

paul — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 22:40:51 +0000

Show your math. Unless those nukes are very small, your claim seems way off.

New comment by paul in "Reflections on Being a Female Founder"

paul — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 23:07:07 +0000

She’s also one of the best founders I’ve ever worked with. Her talks at yc are my favorite — incredibly honest, personal, and insightful.

New comment by paul in "“The books will stop working.”"

paul — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 21:00:11 +0000

I’m more disturbed by the fact that they can also edit or remove books that I’ve already purchased. How long until Amazon is forced to “deplatform” something offensive? Those old books contain a lot of words and ideas that have no place in 2019.

It’s one of several reasons why I mostly only buy paper books.

New comment by paul in "As the SpaceX steamroller surges, European rocket industry vows to resist"

paul — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 17:40:02 +0000

The denial is strong. Reminds me of how cell phone makers responded to the iPhone:

“The development of mobile phones will be similar in PCs. Even with the Mac, Apple has attracted much attention at first, but they have still remained a niche manufacturer. That will be in mobile phones as well,” Nokia chief strategist Anssi Vanjoki told a German newspaper at the time.

Back in the day, smartphones were pretty much defined by devices like the Palm Treo, and Palm CEO Ed Colligan doubted some computer maker was going to just waltz in and eat his lunch.

“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” Colligan said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.”

New comment by paul in "Grow the Puzzle Around You"

paul — Sun, 01 Jul 2018 15:43:10 +0000

CMGI and the other “incubators” of that era were nothing like YC. The label “accelerator” was applied to YC years after it was started because of the need for a generic term to describe YC and all of the clones. Whether or not that label was previously used for some other kind of business is irrelevant.

New comment by paul in "A Third of Antidepressants Are Prescribed for Something Else"

paul — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 04:16:25 +0000

This may interest you: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/08/curing-the-incurable/

New comment by paul in "A Pre-History of Slashdot"

paul — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 15:55:30 +0000

Slashdot is where I first encountered both Google ('98 / early '99) and YC (the Summer Founders Program). So pretty valuable personally. Thanks for that :)

I miss the enthusiasm of that community.

New comment by paul in "Summer Reading List"

paul — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 18:01:13 +0000

It always surprises me that people find the concept of the brain being connected to the body to be "woo-woo". The objections are very unscientific. Biology is incredibly complex, and our understanding of it is very shallow, yet people scornfully dismiss the idea that the brain could in any way cause sensation in the body. I think the key to their misunderstanding is the tendency to imagine the brain as a completely separate thing, like the driver of an automobile, rather than a deeply integrated and intertwined system, which science shows it to be.

Phantom limb syndrome is in many ways similar -- do these same people consider that "woo-woo"?

My one issue with Sarno is that he's a little light on detail in terms of what exactly I need to do to get rid of the pain. For that, I've found this organization/program to be helpful: http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/pages/overcomingpain/

New comment by paul in "What's Y Combinator's conversion rate?"

paul — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:01:51 +0000

This is a very poor metric. Companies running out of money and doing a small exit counts as "good" ("conversion") while a successful and growing company is interpreted as something negative (no exit).

New comment by paul in "Options vs. Cash"

paul — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 18:53:30 +0000

"If you look at companies that have made a lot of people rich, like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, almost none of the employees who became rich had an instrumental role in the company’s success. "

100% false.

New comment by paul in "Convertible and SAFE notes"

paul — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 16:44:58 +0000

It's really not that hard to understand how these notes convert and how much you are diluting if you spend just a few minutes modeling it out with https://angelcalc.com

Of course it's still possible to get more dilution than expected if you raise at unrealistically high caps (or uncapped!) and convert at a lower valuation down the road, but even that is probably less painful than a conventional down round.

How Many Startups Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?

paul — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 18:55:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/how-many-startups-does-it-take-to-change-a-lightbu

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573865

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Cruise Shows Off Level 4 Skills in SF, Passing Uber and Maybe Waymo

paul — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 18:58:13 +0000

Article URL: http://www.driverless.id/news/video-breakdown-gms-unicorn-cruise-shows-off-level-4-skills-sf-passing-uber-maybe-waymo-0176031/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508055

Points: 371

# Comments: 143

New comment by paul in "Elon Musk is getting serious about digging a tunnel under Los Angeles"

paul — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 18:06:49 +0000

So awesome. And maybe the tunnels will only allow self-driving electric cars :)