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dtj1123 3 hours ago

Genuine question, what work has Paul Graham done that can be classified as 'great'?

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gus_massa 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://paulgraham.com/spam.html

I think all the parts were invented by other people, but he got the right mix to make it work.

It's also like the wheel. Before it was a huge problem and no one know how to solve it. Now it's invisible.

Note that all modern versions use enhanced variants with a lot or trick to make it better.

	▲	api 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Every invention is made of other inventions all the way back to big rock and sharp stick. So yes Bayesian spam filtering was impressive for its time. I remember it being done locally in mail clients. It’s also one of the early popular deployments of a form of “AI” but that was still during the hangover from the first AI bubble when you had to call it “machine learning.”

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durdn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He wrote a lot about this. For example he built an e-commerce meta platform in Lisp that would allow anyone to build and customise their own shops that was far ahead of anything that existed at the time.

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baconbkr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Creating YCombinator

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rvba 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For me keeping Hacker News in the way it is. One of the last "inspiring" places, now that reddit is dead.

	▲	api 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It’s declined in quality too but not as sharply as Reddit or the cess pools of the rest of social media.

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ignoramous 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Per Graham's own definition, the founding to Y Combinator. Setting aside critiques, some of his influential essays ("Ramen profitable", "Do things that don't scale", "Founder mode", "Beating the averages", "Schelp blindness", etc) also fit the bill.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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