There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask yourself at every Friday evening, "What are the important problems in my field?" Not entirely dissimilar from PG’s take on how the educational system in forcing you to commit prematurely often has you overlook this entirely.
In the vein of "great minds think alike," both of them hammer home the importance of working on what genuinely grabs your interest. PG's advice is to "optimize for interestingness" ; Hamming when he says, "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."
I got a kick out of how both of them advocate for being flexible in our approach to work — especially given how launching and pivoting after learning from your users has also been the PG advice for the better part of two decades in startup-focused essays. PG's all for switching horses mid-race if a more exciting problem shows up , and Hamming shares the same sentiment, stressing the importance of being ready to seize new opportunities. Today pivoting is just default vernacular in startup world, but also cutting losses and getting that fractal and pushing that to its end is worth it.
Curious how has "optimizing for interestingness" played out in your own work or life? Additionally, curious if there are any good HN stories about pursuing research and “pivoting” in fields that are not searching for product-market/fit for a startup…
There's an unspoken aspect of the word "important" here — important to you, or important to the world (society, etc)?
From Hamming:
"I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a chance I can do important things."
It seems he is talking about the important to the world aspect. He wants to have a big impact on the world, and be where the action is. The goal is to make a name for yourself, or to at least have a hand in the next big transformations.
But there is also the "important to you" aspect. In Hamming's case, those two notions of importance align. But not so for everyone.
Quoting again:
"I went home one Friday after finishing a problem, and curiously enough I wasn't happy; I was depressed. I could see life being a long sequence of one problem after another after another."
So, he is happiest when working on problems that have big "important" implications for the world. Good for him; I'm glad he discovered that about himself, and followed what made him happy.
So now for my actual point: I'd encourage a person to actually first and foremost focus on what is important to them personally — what makes them happy — rather than what seems "important" from some external perspective.
I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy. But to put that choice on a pedestal as though it is the True Goal — to put "important to society" above "important to oneself" is putting the cart before the horse. It's how you get a bunch of unhappy people chasing after other people's dreams.
It's actually somewhat touched upon in TFA, with:
"The following recipe assumes you're very ambitious."
Indeed — like Hamming was. But not everyone is, and not everyone needs to be to be happy. I am just slightly irked by our somehow reserving the word "great" for ambitious people's accomplishments.
>I think a lot of people will decide, like Hamming did, that they want to be where the action is, that they want to participate in transforming the world, that that is what makes them happy.
In my 37 years of experience: people do want to be where the action is, but many people who are the main examples of 'being at the action' already were at a location where the action happened to end up. I.e., people working for a long time on an 'obscure' problem interesting to them suddenly see that 'obscure' problem become important and fall into success (think of all the CS people working on DL/ANNs in the 90s. I don't think Yann LeCunn was a known name in the 90s).
The tragedy is that it's very hard to predict where the action will be. Literature is full of people who lucked into that position, and obviously ignores the millions who were where the action never ended up.
With some experience you can shift your focus to where you think the action will be: it's probably best not to run after the money, but walk towards it.
Right now, the audio tech/software niche is abuzz with ideas and attempts related to using transformer technology within the field. Music generation, new synthesis techniques, generative DSP and more.
According to the field, viewed from some altitude, these the "important (to the world)" things.
But for myself, with 25+ years in the field, I couldn't give a rat's arse about any of it. Absolutely not "important (to me)".
Am I ambitious (still) ? I think so. But I'm also picky about where I'm willing to put my energy.
Not the industry, but the rush-to-"AI" is certainly over-hyped and displays a very shallow understanding of the role of art of any form for most human beings.
The older I get the more I think this is fine, and more or less the way of the world.
Let the young ones expend their energy and drive trying to do all kinds of weird, pointless and occassionally very useful shit while we keep the world running.
This was neat. It reminded me of a similar story in poker history - Stu Ungar. Stu was a phenomenal player who won the World Series of Poker (WSOP) Main Event three times, in 1980, 1981, and 1997. Like Tosa, Stu had an uncanny ability to read his opponents and seemingly predict their moves.
Similar to Tosa, people questioned Ungar's poker prowess as to whether he was cheating or not (it's a pretty deep conspiracy rabbit hole that you can go down if you'd like). People wondered if he had some secret method for reading his opponents — like whether his blue glasses were letting him read marked cards, but it turned out to be like Tosa, he was a product of pretty deliberate and intense practice.
In both cases, it's a weird example of humans being exceptional at pattern matching in ways you almost can't imagine after deliberate practice.
Ungar is most famous for his WSOP win calling down with a ten high to win.
I think a fascinating aspect to all of this is the other idea in any edge based game where nearly all great players will start on a winning streak and how incredibly difficult it is to discern whether you are lucky or good (there's a small chapter in "The Signal and the Noise" about that specifically with poker players).
I will say, Epihub was really the byproduct of Epigrammar (as Mike highlighted above) and us just using the term “hub” a lot. It was hard to mispronounce, we had the .com, it felt like an homage to our previous work, and we didn’t think about it too much afterward.
I do like Teachify though. It’s a pretty great name; I can’t lie.
Even though I also think that epihub sounds like epipen or something epidemiology related (especially in the time of covid) - getting a 6 letter dot comfor a nice prononceable name is not a small feat haha. That alone is a not insignificant number of points in favor of the name.
I think it could work, we haven’t tried it for a conference, but email me directly (first name at company name.com) so we can make sure you’re setup right.
To answer your question, not only is every single string of text customizable, but so is every icon. So you can rebrand and redesign it however you please and the interface will update.
Thanks for the question. So a pretty big difference from the outset is the type of customer we focus on (again, correct me if Learnworlds is different).
Where Learnworlds is focused on creators who want to build courses that are asynchronous. We are focusing on live instruction particularly with businesses that have already been handling live instruction so teams of tutors, trainers, teachers, and coaches.
In many ways Learnworlds is quite similar to Kajabi, Teachable, and a whole host of other great tools for building online courses.
In our case, we started with thinking about existing businesses where a primary concern is team management as the instruction is live. Coordinating live instruction already requires a pretty different software stack from an online course.
In a coaching business of twenty tutors, you have to manage twenty instructor schedules against schedules for your students, figure who is owed what, who you have to bill, and provide space for live online instruction.
The last few months, particularly in New York, have made this coordination problem far worse as these businesses look to move online while trying to keep their branding and identity front-and-center.
—
Now a number of our users have already asked to be able to sell online courses/materials, and we have been experimenting with blending asynchronous online courses with live instruction, so it’s on the roadmap. Right now, however, our focus is uniquely bringing existing businesses with live instruction online.
Thank you, to be honest Abinsthe and Apollo go together incredibly well.
I think coming from Rails and switching out controllers for resolvers made adjusting to building SPAs far easier. I still think building routing on the client side feels strange, but it’s way easier when GraphQL just gives you one endpoint to hit and with Apollo you just query exactly what you need.
Yes, Abinsthe is quite incredible! I have used it with react and vue and had some success. However lately whenever liveview is the right fit I find myself fist pumping all over the place. Something magically about writing most of your code in elixir and only sprinkling JS when needed. Your site is very ui heavy so I imagine it needs to have a lot of js strictly client side so a SPA makes sense (I just find the mental overhead of having to deal with a js framework front end and a elixir backend tricky).
Yeah the original application borrowed heavily from our first product which predates LiveView so we stuck with what we knew. Our first product actually predates contexts and schemas in Phoenix. We started working on it around the time Phoenix was deprecating models from 1.2 to 1.3.
LiveView is incredible, but I haven’t used it enough to know the shortcomings. From the outside looking in, it does seem nice to work with a view that’s already nicely coupled with the app.
Makes total sense, I only used LiveView for a new project that I started within the last year, I can imagine it being tough to only use a little bit in an existing app, especially if its SPA hitting an api. Cool to see you evolved as Phoenix evolved.
Great question. We built the product originally to help us bring a tutoring business online as in-person instruction was impossible.
Again, these were businesses built around live instruction so the only option was video. Zoom was the one place where we opted for an integration as there’s simply no way we could build better video than Zoom given a limited (or unlimited) time frame.
We actually built tooling inside to pick locations for your classes and appointments, but so far they have rarely been used.
Next we had a bunch of tools from our first product in Epihub, but something we learned from talking to teachers and having built tools for instructors was that you really didn’t need too much. Teachers know how to teach so the best tooling isn’t something overly prescriptive, but something in a virtual classroom isomorphic to a real classroom like a virtual whiteboard.
I’m always amazed by the sheer number of products Google has built and sunset. I didn’t actually know about this, but it sent me down a rabbit hole. What kind of work was most popular on Helpouts?
Yeah we're currently limited by Stripe Express, but we'll probably look to expand relatively soon. We've been looking at RazorPay for India or even enabling Stripe Standard accounts across the board. Any particular countries you're looking for?
This made me laugh so thank you, but in all seriousness, we started by working through the lifecycle of a customer from the top and push it to the end. The first part being, how do you meet and qualify a new client, to the last part where you're handling paystubs and invoicing clients.
There are a ton of things I wish we handled better, particularly on-boarding where although it's self-serve, it needs work, but we did figure it's better to launch and learn from more users before building more software.
The second thing was we used the product itself to onboard (vip.epihub.com/reserve), and again once we were users, we kept pushing until it worked well enough for us to train people on how to use our product.
Then I realized that the funny part is that PG has already linked to Hamming's talk on his site (http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html), and mentioned it on Twitter (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/849300780997890048).
There’s a part in that talk that has always stuck with me: he advises to ask yourself at every Friday evening, "What are the important problems in my field?" Not entirely dissimilar from PG’s take on how the educational system in forcing you to commit prematurely often has you overlook this entirely.
In the vein of "great minds think alike," both of them hammer home the importance of working on what genuinely grabs your interest. PG's advice is to "optimize for interestingness" ; Hamming when he says, "If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work."
I got a kick out of how both of them advocate for being flexible in our approach to work — especially given how launching and pivoting after learning from your users has also been the PG advice for the better part of two decades in startup-focused essays. PG's all for switching horses mid-race if a more exciting problem shows up , and Hamming shares the same sentiment, stressing the importance of being ready to seize new opportunities. Today pivoting is just default vernacular in startup world, but also cutting losses and getting that fractal and pushing that to its end is worth it.
Curious how has "optimizing for interestingness" played out in your own work or life? Additionally, curious if there are any good HN stories about pursuing research and “pivoting” in fields that are not searching for product-market/fit for a startup…
(Hamming’s talk has been shared countless times here and this feels like PG’s contribution to a similar idea (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35778036)).