Paul Graham

Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born 1964) is a programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist, known for his work on Lisp. He is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004).

In 1995, Graham and Robert Morris founded Viaweb, the first application service provider (ASP). Viaweb's software, originally written mostly in Common Lisp, allowed users to make their own Internet stores. In the summer of 1998 Viaweb was sold to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at $49.6 million. At Yahoo! the product became Yahoo! Store.

He has since begun writing essays for his popular website paulgraham.com. They range from "Beating the Averages", which compares Lisp to other programming languages and introduced the word Blub, to "Why Nerds are Unpopular", a discussion of nerd life in high school. A collection of his essays has been published as Hackers and Painters (ISBN 0-596-00662-4) by O'Reilly.

In 2005, after giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society later published as How to Start a Startup, Graham along with Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris started Y Combinator to provide seed funding to startups, particularly those started by younger, more technically-oriented founders. Y Combinator has now invested in 80 startups, including reddit, Justin.tv, loopt and Xobni.

BusinessWeek included Paul Graham in 2008 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

Graham has a B.A. from Cornell. He earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences (specializing in computer science) from Harvard in 1988 and 1990 respectively , and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

In 2008, Paul Graham married Jessica Livingston.

In 2001, Paul Graham announced that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp named "Arc." Over the years since, he has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, and some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most notably the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program.

It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were.

He also stated that it is better for a language to only implement a small number of "axioms," even when that means the language may not have features that large organizations want, such as object-orientation. In fact, Graham feels that object-orientation is not useful as OO methods and patterns are just "good design," and he sees the language features used to implement OO as partially mistaken.

A controversy among Lisp programmers is whether, and how much, the S-expressions of the language should be complemented by other forms of syntax. Graham feels that additional syntax should be used in situations where pure S-expressions would be overly verbose, saying, "I don't think we should be religiously opposed to introducing syntax into Lisp." Graham also feels that efficiency problems should be solved by giving the programmer a good profiler.

The first publicly released version of Arc was made available on Tuesday, 29 January 2008. The release comes in the form of a .tar archive, containing the mzscheme source code for Arc. A tutorial and a discussion forum are also available. The forum is copied from news.ycombinator.com and is written itself in Arc.

The initial version has caused some controversy, notably by only supporting the ASCII character set, and by shipping with a built-in web application library that bases its layout on HTML tables. This, combined with the hype surrounding Arc and its generally slow development pace, has gathered some unfavorable comments.

The concept has been cited by writers such as Joel Spolsky.

In 2002, Graham published an essay entitled "A Plan for Spam," in which he advocated using a Naive Bayes classifier to identify spam. The first work on Bayesian spam filtering was done by Jason Rennie in 1996.

Bayesian filtering is a popular method for filtering spam in situations where the filter can be trained. It beats older heuristic approaches both in the simplicity of the process and in the quality of spam classification.

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Paul Graham (photographer)

Paul Graham (born UK, 1956) is an artist photographer whose work operates in the territory traditionally reserved for documentary photography but uses and abuses the classic genres of photography to map a cultural and social topography whilst exploring new visual approaches to photographic representation. His subjects have included the conflict in Northern Ireland, the shadow of history in Western Europe and Japan, and more recently the United States.

Graham was one of the first photographer to combine the sensibility of contemporary colour photography with classic British social documentary. In 1981/2 he made A1—The Great North Road, a book of 40 colour photographs taken along the length of the British A1 road, which had a transformative effect, dissolving the black and white tradition associated with British Photography to that point. This work, along with Graham's later photographs of the 1980s - the colour images of unemployment offices in Beyond Caring (1984-85), and the sectarian marked landscape of Northern Ireland Troubled Land (1984-86) - were pivotal in reinvigorating and expanding this area of photography, by both broadening it's visual language, and questioning our notions of what such photography could say, be, or look like. Photographers like Martin Parr made the switch to colour soon after, and a new school of British photography evolved with the subsequent colour work of Richard Billingham, Tom Wood, Paul Seawright, Anna Fox, Nick Waplington, etc.

Since this work of the early 1980s, Graham has continued to work in the fertile territory where the documentary and artistic potential of photography coalesce, often tackling subject matter difficult for a medium that is based in the observable world: New Europe (1988-1993) looked at the shadow of history in Western Europe, and Empty Heaven (1989-1995) dealt with the relationship between historical trauma and the child-like fantasy world in Japan, themes that were later central to the "Superflat" movement of contemporary Japanese art. For the past decade his work has grown into an examination of what we expect from a photographic image, be it a portrait - as in the blurry and colour stained images of young people in End of an Age (1996-98), and questioning what actually registers in our vision (or on film) with American Night (1998-2003), which reflected the social fracture of American society through overexposed, near invisible white images. Most recently Graham completed "A Shimmer of Possibility" (2004-2007) that captures the ebb and flow of everyday life in America, whilst also reflecting photography's ability to compress or expand time, utilising multiple sequences of images. This was published as a 12 volume set of books, and described as "one of the most important advances in contemporary photographic practice that has taken place in a long while," and subsequently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2009.

Paul Graham has been a prolific and well published artist, including Steidl (2009) and Phaidon (1996) survey monographs, along with 10 other publications. His work has been exhibited extensively - notably a one person show at the Tate Gallery, London (1996), along with participating in the Italian Pavilion of the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), the inaugural exhibition at Switzerland's national Fotomuseum Winterthur, and a solo retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He was one of the 20 photographers included in the Tate Gallery's landmark "Cruel and Tender" survey exhibition of 20th century photography (2003), and has a European mid career survey exhibition scheduled to tour from 2009-2011.

Graham resided in the UK for most of his life, though with sustained periods abroad, including Switzerland and Japan. He moved to New York City in 2002, where he now lives.

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Paul Graham (disambiguation)

Paul Graham is a Lisp programmer.

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Paul Graham (basketball coach)

Paul Graham is a men's college basketball coach. He has served as the head coach at Washington State University. Most recently, he was an assistant on Ricardo Patton's staff at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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SpamBayes

SpamBayes is a Bayesian spam filter written in Python which uses techniques laid out by Paul Graham in his essay "A Plan for Spam". It has subsequently been improved by Gary Robinson and Tim Peters, among others.

The most notable difference between a conventional Bayesian filter and the filter used by SpamBayes is that there are three classifications rather than two: spam, non-spam (called ham in SpamBayes), and unsure. The user trains a message as being either ham or spam; when filtering a message, the spam filters generate one score for ham and another for spam.

If the spam score is high and the ham score is low, the message will be classified as spam. If the spam score is low and the ham score is high, the message will be classified as ham. If the scores are both high or both low, the message will be classified as unsure.

This approach leads to a low number of false positives and false negatives, but it may result in a number of unsures which need a human decision.

Some work has gone into applying SpamBayes to filter internet content via a proxy web server.

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Paul Walker (footballer born 1949)

Paul Graham Walker (born April 3, 1949 in Bradford) was a former professional footballer, who played for Wolverhampton Wanderers, Watford, Swindon Town, Peterborough United, Barnsley and Huddersfield Town.

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Paul Bolland

Paul Graham Bolland (born 23 December 1979) is an English professional footballer who plays for Grimsby Town.

Born in Bradford, England, Bolland started his career with his home town team of Bradford City at the start of the 1997–98 season after progressing through the club's youth setup.

After struggling to break into the first team at Bradford, he joined Notts County, initially on loan, and then permanently for £75,000. Bolland was unexpectedly not given a contract extension by Notts County at the end of the 2004–05 season, prompting him to join Grimsby Town.

Now starting his third year at Grimsby, Bolland has established himself as a fans' favourite, thanks to his non-stop running and never-say-die attitude. He also pops up with the odd spectacular goal. On 15 September 2007, he made his 100th appearance for Grimsby.

One of Bolland's notable goals was in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy semi-final first leg against Morecambe in a 1–0 win at Christie Park. In the second leg at Blundell Park, Grimsby defended for their lives as they earned a 0–0 draw. After the final whistle Bolland was mobbed by fans as he had played a major part in enabling the Mariners to play at Wembley Stadium for the third time in their history. In the final, Grimsby Town played Milton Keynes Dons, at Wembley Stadium, where they lost 2–0.

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Hackers & Painters

Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (ISBN 0-596-00662-4) is a collection of essays from Paul Graham discussing hacking.

It is also the title of one of those essays.

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Viaweb

Viaweb is a web-based application that allows users to build and host their own online stores with little effort and technical expertise, directly from their own web browser. Started in August 1995 by Paul Graham and Robert Morris, it is well-known as the first application service provider and for being written in the Lisp programming language.

According to Paul Graham, the software was originally called Webgen; another company was using the same name and they renamed it to Viaweb, "because it worked via the Web".

In 1998, Yahoo! Inc. bought Viaweb for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, valued at about $45 million, and renamed it Yahoo! Store. It is currently still operational.

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