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“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.”
―“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.”
―“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.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“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. ”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.”
― Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“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.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.”
―“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.”
―“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
―“if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.”
― Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“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.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“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.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.”
―“If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“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.”
― Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”
―“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.”
― Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as "suits.”
―“There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now,
because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun.
If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms,
calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.”
―“The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.”
― Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.”
―“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.”
― Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage : the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“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.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age“Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.”
―“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.”
― Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Saturday, January 21, 2023
in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below.
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