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Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 11 years ago
What convinced you California is out of the question?
If anything was possible, would you want to live in the Bay area, find a co-founder, and grow the bootstrapped product into a company?
I say this because your comment is contradictory. You "just" wanted to mention something important to you that may be frightening. And then you doubled up trying to convince us the entire of California, which includes the expensive Bay Area and all the other inexpensive areas, is "out of the question".
I think you want to start a company, and it's frightening as it should be.
You only live once. The choice is yours.
Comment · 11 years ago
It's true creativity is connecting things. Daniel Kahnman in Thinking Fast and Slow referred to it as associative memory working exceptionally well. Additionally, being in a good mood has been proven to make people more creative and intuitive, but is that the whole story? So what if you make more connections. Is that enough to say you are more creative? Do you do something with them or do you just forget them?
I'm not as convinced it's changing your state in general that makes you more creative. We all change many states daily. Are we all de facto more creative daily and haven't got a clue about it?
The general idea is you start from an open mode where all thoughts are entertained and progress is slow. After you become sure of what you want to do, you eventually enter a closed mode, where you shut out the world and move as fast as you can, until you run into the next big obstacle. According to John Cleese, who studied creativity, a big problem is we stay in the closed mode too long. It's the change between open and closed mode that is a big deal. He names 5 factors that make us more creative: http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creat...
I do know of a few specific creativity exercises though in addition to John Cleese's.
1. Unstructured play. Setup some time, at least 1.5-2 hrs and ideally every day, where the goal is to just play. This removes the expectation to produce anything, which allows your subconscious to visit thoughts you ordinarily wouldn't let it. It's one way to counteract one of the biggest killers to creativity: expectations.
2. Constraint before freedom. Don't initially give yourself the freedom to work on something big or on everything. Instead focus on something small and specific, however minute and irrelevant it might originally seem. This has the effect of keeping the fire contained, which leads to a denser collection of connections. You touched on this already, it's a way of artificially setting a filter without waiting for a personal mood swing or an external change to do it for you. It feels like zig-zagging aimlessly like a fly originally and that's ok.
But do switch into a freedom mode after that. Once the ideas kick in, feel free to run after them. When? There's an embarrassing pull of delight that alarms you. "Why didn't I think of this before...?"
Unstructured play is one instance of the application of this principle.
3. Purge in the morning. This is another long-known writing trick. Write aimlessly in the morning as soon as you wake up, mostly to get the negativity out. Although you are awake, the critical part of yourself isn't yet, which allows thoughts produced by your subconscious overnight to come nearer to the surface. This might be more related to the REM state of sleep, which is when dreams happen, and where tough problems are solved by the subconscious. (The book The Committee of Sleep offers ample evidence to this.) So purging might be less related to mornings and more related to waking up.
Sounds too negative? Don't be surprised the writing continues with solutions to the annoying problems you write about.
Julia Cameron's other two pieces of advice that complement purging in the morning are: a) have a date with yourself once a week (it sounds like unstructured play in the real world) and b) (IIRC) get in the habit of imagining the physical world from a different camera angle.
Which seems similar to...
4. Toy with limits. You touched on this too with improv comedy. Get in the habit of purposefully looking for the two extremes in each situation. If you could lay out every subject on a continuum, what's the worst case and what's the best? It mostly helps understand the forces at play behind a subject and that helps generate ideas.
btw, I like your thinking. At some point reading this post I exclaimed "Hey it's visakanv!" We seem to be interested in similar things.
Comment · 11 years ago
As a Lisp, it has macros and treats data as code. Other languages don't.
As an improvement over Lisp, it's succinct. You use fewer tokens, which helps write less code. You couldn't write less code in a different language even if you wanted to. (Try it.) There's no other Lisp that is more succinct.
For web apps, html templates are code in Arc, not files you have to edit and maintain separately. This helps keep all code in one file, and combined with macros helps shrink code. More code fits in your head, which frees you to think of writing programs that would otherwise have been so disturbing to think about, because of how much code or html you would need to write manually that would also be more complicated code, that you wouldn't attempt to write them. Like programs you must autogenerate: programs that write themselves.
Besides writing programs that write new programs, you can also write programs that change existing programs. You can parse programs and automatically transform them. 99% of programmers probably spend their entire lives never attempting this. Although too strong, this is an example of what separates a programmer who is exceptional from one that is merely competent. An advantage of Arc here is that, because it's more succinct than Lisp, it takes less work to transform an Arc program instead of a Lisp program. There's less to deter you from doing it when the opportunity arises and some types of problems can only be solved if you transform programs, especially programs written by others.
A huge advantage of Arc is simulating continuations in web pages with closures, which you end up needing in pages that contain a form. Write the following example in another language and see how many lines of code it takes: http://paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html
You can work around a lack of libraries. You can call the system function, that calls some other programming language that returns results. But you cannot work around a lack of macros in a language that isn't Lisp without adding macros to the language. Though if you do that, you are basically back to using Lisp.
All roads lead to Lisp and Arc is the most powerful one.
Comment · 11 years ago
Better by what measure? If you accept succinctness is power, Arc is the most powerful language there is. Python's goal seems to contradict wanting to be powerful. http://paulgraham.com/power.html
And if what you are writing is web apps, you don't know how useful Arc is unless you used it.
Any language looks extremely powerful when you first start to program because programming itself does. You don't have a baseline of comparison at that point. So it's easy to be tricked into using a less powerful language when you are inexperienced.
What's surprising in this thread is inexperience in programming didn't sway jack into picking a less powerful language. It even caused him to feel guilty about this advantage: "secondarily (very minor)". That's impressive already. He's already ahead of those who don't hack in Arc and stay mislead they shouldn't.
Comment · 11 years ago
This tangent might sound mean but I often wished there was some glassdoor-like site or startup for shaming bad behavior, especially lying. Starting with rental agents.
If you stuck to reporting facts, how would that put you in danger?
Comment · 11 years ago
Arc. Besides boosting your productivity, it will stretch your mind in ways you have yet to imagine.
Comment · 12 years ago
Quotes are content, or at least a specific aggregation of them. The article's title is context.
What I found as a dangerous idea was pointing out things you notice when you are not sure why you notice them. Which is how the subconscious operates. Not everything that makes you pause should initially have an explanation. The majority of people's decisions occur without their awareness.
One thing I learned from this exercise was something I hadn't consciously noticed before. That I feel pressured on HN to comment. I don't like that. I want to do something about that.
Comment · 12 years ago
I'm starting to believe there's an odd property to curiosity. Unique observations are threatening to people's identity.
Those were two actual questions asked to Elon along with his responses, and the two that stood out for me the most. Did he mention showering because that's the time he gets most of his ideas[1]? Did he say no to politics because it's more likely to change the world through innovation[2]?
Result: 8 downvotes. It'd be enough if the comment was downvoted just once, to sink in the page. That happens to everyone. But seven other people found it imperative to make an authoritative statement on the matter. Impressive. Did that keep their identity safe? Pushing threatening ideas away isn't the best way to help rearrange the semantic tree in your mind.
Could there be an inverse correlation between being downvoted and having good ideas? It shouldn't be a surprising discovery on valuable ideas if you consider the nature of the most valuable startup ideas: look like bad ideas but are good ideas.
So if you want to know if your ideas are good, it's not enough to see them gain support. It's also important to see people turn against them.
I know HN guidelines discourage commenting on downvotes, because they make for boring reading, but I'm starting to think being downvoted is a positive sign of how dangerous your ideas are.
Are you being downvoted enough?
[1] http://paulgraham.com/top.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8801803
edit: revised 80% of this after having a shower
Comment · 12 years ago
Q: What daily habit do you believe has the largest positive impact on your life?
A: Showering
Q: Would you ever consider becoming a politician?
A: Unlikely
Comment · 12 years ago
"What surprised you the most?"
You wouldn't be able to if you tried. Your subconscious would start pulling you to things you really like.