
Paul Graham Interviewed By David Weinberger (Pretty Interesting) - mattjaynes
http://media-cyber.law.harvard.edu/VideoBerkman/paul_graham_2006-11-08.mov
======
rms
I made the interview! My team was one of the "We're doing X but easy to use"
people. We didn't have a functioning demo but we did have graphical mockups of
the design. I thought we nailed it, but apparently Paul didn't get it because
we didn't have an animated demo. I've been kicking around an essay for a while
about just how trivial easy-to-use design can be, it'll be on here eventually.

~~~
Goladus
A demo works. Explaining -how- you're going to make it easy to use might be
useful as well.

Describe a real hypothetical user (three if possible) using the software.
Describe in as much detail as possible, and then explain at some level how
your technology will allow you to accomplish this.

------
Goladus
Just to discuss a question that was skipped:

Romantic music (19th century) isn't always more complex than baroque music
(early 18th century). Indeed, in many ways the transitions saw a decrease in
certain kinds of complexity. Harmonic rhythm, that is the speed at which the
underlying chord pattern changes, slowed down during the late 18th century.
Tuning shifted from meantone to equal temperament. (More complex to implement,
but results in a cleaner+simpler UI for musicians ;)

Also, there were advances in instrument design. In particular, the piano of
the 19th century was much like a modern piano. Compared to the 18th century
piano, it had a much more expressive power. Bach for example really could not
write crescendos into his keyboard music. The keyboards of the time didn't do
dynamics very well. He had organs and harpsichords and clavicords and such. In
contrast, Brahms had the modern Piano.

------
cata
can someone please make an edit of this video... the interviewer is killing
me!!! I stopped watching after 3 minutes...

~~~
Tichy
Same here. Here is a business idea: write a software that automatically
creates transcripts of online videos. I hate the YouTube culture (old
fashioned guy who likes to read here).

~~~
jkush
Actually - that's pretty hard to do. What would probably be more "doable" is
to take a transcript (done manually by a transcriptionist) and sync up the
text with the video.

You could provide links in a transcript which when clicked take you to the
part of the video in question, if you'd like to see it. You could also go the
other way, and use a transcript to provide subtitles.

Any ideas on how to make this happen? My intial thought is to exploit pauses
and breaks in the sound and map them to sentences, etc. Voice mapping would
help too, so you could map a sentence to Paul Graham and another sentence to
the interviewer.

What would be pretty cool (actually, REALLY cool now that I think about it)
would be desiging a transcript markup language that could be married to a
video. Has anyone done this? Why not?

~~~
Tichy
I know that speech recognition probably is not quite good enough yet :-( I
have another interest in this: since I am not a native english speaker, I find
it often hard to understand everything that is being said in a video. English
subtitles would often be helpful (especially for those videos of interviews or
conference speeches etc.).

Perhaps Amazons mechanical turk could come in handy here? Would a clone of the
mechanical turk specialised on movie transcripts be feasible? Or is it too
special interest? (Perhaps most people either understand the words or they
would prefer a translation?).

As for syncing subtitles: I don't know the details anymore, but I remember
from ripping DVDs that the subtitles come simply in a text file along with the
movie. So presumably something like you propose already exists.

~~~
jkush
Sure, that exists because the movie studios usually ship movies out with a
transcription. I don't think something like this exists for run-of-the-mill
type videos. In the example of the video above, if there WERE a transcript,
you could use the software I propose above to provide subtitles automatically.

------
mattjaynes
The interviewer seems pretty clueless and confrontational, but PG handles it
quite well and makes some great points.

<http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/11/09/web-of-ideas-with-paul-
graham-2/>

~~~
akkartik
I disagree. It is true that:

1\. Video is a slow way to process information in the internet era.

2\. Weinberger doesn't come off well. The frequent interruptions at the start
are irritating. What starts out seeming like a talk turns into a debate
between two people, and the change in format is jarring for a bit. And it is
hard to understand what Weinberger is getting at. This might have to do with
our disparate vocabularies, and the wide disparity in the worlds he and I live
in.

In spite of these, W does have a point. It is non-trivial to separate the
fashionable from the timeless in a thing of beauty. 'Space aliens' may require
a human-like visual cortex to appreciate the Mona Lisa. Does that make it just
a narrow fad as well, or is a visual cortex a protocol prerequisite to
evaluating it? As I asked PG over email, where does fashion end and convention
begin?

A lot of the ancient philosophical arguments are between polar opposites like
these. Should we find out about the world with reason or the senses? Is mind
or matter supreme? Is it ok to abort foetuses or not? We know that one can
exaggerate anything to make a point, and yet it is easy to fall into the trap
of ending up with an extreme viewpoint because one can't decide where to draw
the line. Eventually we (will) figure out for each of these issues that there
can be richer answers than the obvious black-or-white.

So beauty can be timeless, but also tightly bound to a context. It is not
clear that all of the latter is bad. How to separate the two? Open question.
Relativism is no worse than believing passionately in the wrong anwer.

\---

So much for the academic debate; PG's outlook is more utilitarian[1]. The
problem of building beautiful things is a hard one, and it makes more sense
for a builder to 'flow timeless' rather than to follow fashions. The
alternative may work too, but there's less percentage in it. This is perfectly
reasonable, it's just not the same question W is grappling with. Both of them
are right, they're just asking slightly different questions. They don't ever
figure this out in the video, IMO.

BTW, I believe this conversation contributed to a PG essay:
<http://reddit.com/info/ufsk/comments/cugnx>

[1] A utilitarian philosophy of aesthetics, heh.

------
champion
I went to this talk back in Dec. and also found it a little painful. PG
mentioned some interesting things about actually using Arc to build the
YCombinator site (include this Reddit-like site). A lot of the rest of it
approached the "what is beauty?" stratosphere where oxygen gets thin...

------
Alex3917
I have a proposed unifying theory that covers the beauty of both simplicity
and excess.

Humans appreciate intelligence. Showing how much you can do with so little is
one way to show intelligence. For example, if you can create a brilliant
artistic masterpiece with only a single line then this is clearly a work of
amazing intelligence. The other easy way to demonstrate intelligence is by
doing the absolute most that you can with every resource you have available to
you. This explains the beauty of things like H2G2, where the beauty comes from
incorporating all of these random plot elements and linguistic tropes into
these beautiful sentences and descriptions.

------
akkartik
Related:

When something is built for a well-defined purpose it's much easier to judge
how timeless its solutions are.

<http://rodfrey.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/the-craftsmanship-of-code>

Appreciating beauty in a specific medium requires knowing the 'language', the
conventions of that medium.

<http://www.tinkerx.com/index.php/2007/04/15/the-box-part-2-the-frame>

------
kul
I actually really enjoyed this. My first guess is that when we find something
complex beautiful, it's because it is tapping into something innate (I would
love to write about how music taste works). Also, I thought comment about "how
easy something is to use" actually being a measure of how well it is made, is
brilliant, which sometimes people don't get. Alas, it's 3.30am and I should
sleep.

------
RyanGWU82
I thought the interview was pretty interesting. Good to see some critical
thinking and conflict over one of PG's essays -- much more interesting than
just a biographical interview or unnecessary flattery.

My favorite part:

"If you want to date a painting -- like in the sense of to identify its
origin, not to have a relationship with it..."

Thanks for the clarification there... ;-)

------
juwo
use juwo!!!

~~~
staunch
Shouting at people to use your product may work, but I think long-term you're
better off making something users want!!!

~~~
juwo
sorry, not shouting, simply excited (and frustrated, if I may add).

It is released. Please see

<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14254>

