Hackers & Painters Quotes

“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, 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. ”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.”
― Paul Graham, 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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.”
― Paul Graham, 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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & 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.”
― Paul Graham, 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.”
― Paul Graham, 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.”
― Paul Graham, 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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, 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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & 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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age