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I studied at PUC-Rio and I met Roberto Ierusalimschy (the main author of Lua) when he was teaching a course on semantics. I once asked him if I could send a PR about a feature I wanted in the language and he said something that I never forgot: "Yes, but I won't use your code. I love that people send me ideas, but I actually enjoy coding... so I will gladly take your suggestions, though I will write it myself."
He then explained this "dictatorial" behavior is what allowed him to keep the implementation simple and concise over the years. At the time he boasted about the source code being less than 8K LOC, though it has likely increased in recent versions. (I think it was around version 3.) I'd recommend taking a look at the source code, it's truly a C masterpiece.
I'm currently a PhD candidate at PUC-Rio. For context, there's a 'meet the researchers' round of seminars during the first semesters mainly targeted towards Master's students (so they can choose an advisor).
Prof. Ierusalimschy's was one of the most interesting seminars in my first year. His passion is apparent in the way he talks about Lua's history and current development. Unfortunately I haven't taken any courses with him
As a side note, it's nice to see folks from around here on HN
I second that recommendation about the Lua source code. Back in the 00s I built a kiosk management system in Lua, C, and C++ and it was a delightful language to work with and I found myself reading through the sourcecode a fair bit, always impressed.
I'm thinking of switching to Finance from CS. I'm all the way across the world but I think you may have some valuable advice. Can you -- or anyone here in similar position -- share your email?
I've once heard PG say that if you are an international startup, an important question is who will stay with the company back in your home country in your absence during the YC period. My founder and I would obviously both love to be there and we don't have a good answer for that. Any tips?
You can become better at this by doing it a lot. Every time a situation presents itself where you can try to convince someone of something, try to do it just for the heck of it. Most people evade these situations, but if you keep at it, it will improve.
Persuasion is independent of "shyness" (actually, being an introvert) but a lot of it has to do with natural talent, unfortunately [1]. You can definitely improve it, but some people are just born with a higher degree of "energy transitivity". For instance, their face have more muscles and they're wired in such a way that it is easier for them to control it, among other things.
[1] Malcom Gladwell wrote about this briefly in "The Tipping Point". You can learn more on this by looking up the book "Emotional Contagion" by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson. There's also Howard Friedman, from the University of California, who created the Affective Communication Test, which aims to give an individual a measure of his personal carisma - this transmissive or "magical" ability you speak of:
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~friedman/act.html
It's kind of sad to see pg stepping down, but I'm sure sama will do a great job. Should we expect any fundamental changes in the way things get done at YC?
A lot of the best known success cases did get lucky. For example, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but Microsoft was a tiny, obscure company (they wrote BASIC compilers and such) until they got the contract to supply the operating system for IBM's PC. This happened, in part, due to the missteps of their competitors (like Digital Research). IBM's ineptitude also helped make Microsoft successful: IBM let Microsoft keep the rights to the software because they couldn't imagine how valuable it could be; they were still in the mainframe mindset where the software was ancillary to the huge, expensive hardware. Also, Microsoft didn't write MSDOS themselves; they bought an OS called QDOS from some other company for $50K (who also didn't know what it was really worth). So, yes, Gates got very, very lucky.
The vast majority of new businesses fail, even the ones that get VC funding (VCs have about a 10% success rate; a handful of big successes pay for all the failures). So your most probable startup outcome is failure, in which case you'll need to make a living by working for somebody else. A lack of a college degree or a poor GPA would make that path much harder.
This idea that people objecting to you means you are on the right path is also known as "they laughed at da Vinci, they laughed at Edison, and they laughed at bozo the clown" - don't just assume you're not the third one.
That's the most important point. Don't drop everything just for a project. But if you have looked at your idea from all angles, and you are just so convinced that it will work, then give it your all and go all in.
Have a look though that you still take care of yourself a bit and don't let your endeavors affect your family or friends too much/someone other than you, then it's all good.
We're using a novel algorithm and lots of AI to achieve better results than similar tools.
We have just put a public Beta version online that you can try in a few seconds. It's a work in progress but you can get awesome results depending on your case.
Please give it a try and LMK if you have any feedback! Thanks!