Speaking of Wolfram...

He gave a great talk on simplicity in nature's algorithms at MIT. I could see a lot of application to programming with his take on simplicity vs. complexity.

http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/147/

Also, he spoke at Startup School in 2005 - really excellent talk you should definitely check out if you get a chance.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Ycombinator-StartupSchool/~3/...

(For anyone new to the site, you can get all the available Startup School talk mp3's at this podcast: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ycombinator-startupschool )

PG, you just got me wondering about feedback. When you let people you trust or respect read drafts of your essays, what kind of feedback do you expect? How does the feedback affect your essays?

I don't have any specific expectations. Usually I just say "please let me know if got anything wrong, or missed anything important." If I'm writing about something I don't understand well enough, I ask domain experts. I always ask Hutch Fishman about startup funding, for example.

I take responses pretty seriously. I've killed whole essays friends thought were bad. Usually I just have to rewrite a sentence or two.

Not just Wolfram... also Google's Director of Research Peter Norvig, and as usual, the historic hacker Robert Morris.