Hackers And Painters Quotes

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.

The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.

Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.

if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.

In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.

If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.

Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.

People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.

Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I’ve read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.

Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage : the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it.

We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.

Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.

You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.

To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.

The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility.

One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.

looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success.

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel.

It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even neg- ative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs). This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.

Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don’t let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good for morale because it keeps you engaged.

A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it.” This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.

Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens.

The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well.

A lot of the statements that got people in trouble seem harmless now.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

The phrase “personal computer” is part of the language now, but when it was first used it had a deliberately audacious sound, like the phrase “personal satellite” would today.

Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion.

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.”1

The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner,

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work.

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one.

In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can’t do what all the other startups do.

Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.

The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.

GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.

So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

In almost any group of people you’ll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it’s generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most schools is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it’s considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that’s shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.

The government spying on people doesn’t literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they’re especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.

Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that’s not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. (I mean “outsource” in the sense of hiring another company to do it, not the more specific sense of hiring an overseas company.)

Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient so- lutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.

I think that, like species, languages will form evolutionary trees, with dead-ends branching off all over. We can see this happening already. Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead-end — a Neanderthal language. I predict a similar fate for Java. People sometimes send me mail saying, “How can you say that Java won’t turn out to be a successful language? It’s already a successful language.” And I admit that it is, if you measure success by shelf space taken up by books on it, or by the number of undergrads who believe they have to learn it to get a job. When I say Java won’t turn out to be a successful language, I mean something more specific: that Java will turn out to be an evolutionary dead-end, like Cobol.

Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Via web one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we’d always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can’t follow. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I’d be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.

This is the kind of possibility that the pointy-haired boss doesn’t even want to think about. And so most of them don’t. Because, you know, when it comes down to it, the pointy-haired boss doesn’t mind if his company gets their ass kicked, so long as no one can prove it’s his fault. The safest plan for him personally is to stick close to the center of the herd. Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is “industry best practice.” Its purpose is to shield the pointy-haired boss from responsibility: if he chooses something that is “industry best practice,” and the company loses, he can’t be blamed. He didn’t choose, the industry did.

If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.” - “The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That's where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Microsoft themselves did this at the start. So did Apple. And Hewlett- Packard. I suspect almost every successful startup has.” - “Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.” - “The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages. Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.” - “It turns out that looking at things from other people's point of view is practically the secret of success.” - “Part of what software has to do is explain itself. So to write good software you have to understand how little users understand. They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and it had better do what they guess it will, because they're not going to read the manual.

beautiful things don’t always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original — and as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure you’re exploring virgin territory is to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants. Number two, research must be substantial — and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome in order to get things done. Nothing yields meaty problems like starting with the wrong assumptions.

How can you see the wave, when you’re the water?

Like painting, most software is intended for a human audience. And so hackers, like painters, must have empathy to do really great work. You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker’s naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran’s skepticism. You have to be able to think how hard can it be? with one half of your brain while thinking it will never work with the other.

The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you’ll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go.

you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.6

You can’t let the suits make technical decisions for you.

If you start a startup, don’t design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. — C.S.LEWIS

think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn’t intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language.

A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase “software engineering” shake their heads disapprovingly.

To write good software you must simultaneously keep two opposing ideas in your head. You need the young hacker’s naive faith in his abilities, and at the same time the veteran’s skepticism.

People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage — just a shorthand — for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.

The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.