

Stephen Wolfram: On Starting a Long-Term Company - hhm
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/talks/ycombinatorschool/

======
mattjaynes
Wolfram gave a really great talk - you can hear the audio here:
[http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-
StartupSchool/~3/...](http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-
StartupSchool/~3/106570510/Stephen_Wolfram.mp3)

(For anyone new to the site, you can get all the available Startup School talk
mp3's with this feed I put together awhile back:
<http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator-startupschool> )

Ask PG: Speaking of Startup School, could we get the official video/audio from
the last Startup School? I used my own poor audio for the last Startup School
in this podcast feed, but it'd be great to replace it with the official video
that was taken. Thanks!

~~~
hhm
Thanks a lot for the audio link! I didn't know it...

------
machine
"I remember, I'd just had my twentieth birthday. I'd just gotten my Ph.D. And
it looked like my plan to "be a physicist" was going just great."

I had to stop reading there as I became ill. (23 year old that hasn't passed
quals)

~~~
carpal
Maybe it was faster for truly smart people to get a Ph.D. back in the day. My
father had his Ph.D. in computer science by the time he was 21. I tried to
take one masters-level course when I was 22 and they laughed at me.

I think it is the education systems' fault, rather than your own.

------
imgabe
Obviously, Stephen Wolfram has accomplished a lot, but what is the deal. With
the sentence fragments? This sort of thing. Can make an article. Really hard.
To read. Am I. The only one. Who noticed. That? And if it's not a fragment,
it's just a big, long run on sentence, with commas liberally sprinkled,
throughout it. Usually I'm the last person to pick on grammar, but someone as
smart as Wolfram should at least have a basic understanding of how to
construct a complete sentence.

~~~
hhm
The text is a direct transcript from audio, that's why. The link to the
conference in mp3 is in some of the comments above.

------
ivankirigin
_But somehow when it comes to keeping the whole system coherent and unified,
that ends up being something I have to do._

I've heard it is a horrible place to work due to an extreme level of
micromanagement. If you can bend to his will, it might be ok.

------
ivankirigin
Wow. tones.wolfram.com is bad. Really, really bad.

[edit: I love Wolfram's work, don't get me wrong. I mean specifically that the
music generated is horrible. There is such a thing as objectively good music.
Use tones.wolfram.com as a contrapositive proof.]

------
mechanical_fish
I would upmod this twice if I could... once for the talk, and once for the
WolframTones site.

------
skenney26
Why does the phrase 'my science' make me uneasy?

~~~
ivankirigin
Because science is based on open, repeatable experimentation -- making it
inherently community based. Wolfram often has a hard time making reasonable
attributions -- a major criticism of "A New Kind of Science". But for a
transcribed talk, it's reasonable.

