Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

How on earth did Orbitz pull this off? Largely by using a better programming language.

What does that have to do with computers? The fact is, hackers are obsessed with free speech.

Why do hackers care so much about free speech? Partly, I think, because innovation is so important in software, and innovation and heresy are practically the same thing. Good hackers develop a habit of questioning everything. You have to when you work on machines made of words that are as complex as a mechanical watch and a thousand times the size.

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that “no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.”

teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be popular.

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

people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below.

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.

When the things you do have real effects, it’s no longer enough just to be pleasing.

The other thing that’s different about the real world is that it’s much larger.

Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates.

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.

The only external test is time. Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded. Unfortunately, the amounts of time involved can be longer than human lifetimes. Samuel Johnson said it took a hundred years for a writer’s reputation to converge.

I’ve found that the best sources of ideas are not the other fields that have the word “computer” in their names, but the other fields inhabited by makers. Painting has been a much richer source of ideas than the theory of computation.

For example, I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer.

You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

programming language should, above all, be malleable. A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.

hack. When I got to Yahoo, I found that what hacking meant to them was implementing software, not designing it. Programmers were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of product managers into code.

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.

What I’m saying is that open source is probably the right model, because it has been independently confirmed by all the other makers.

When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can’t do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you’ll inevitably be working on projects of your own.3

Most hackers don’t learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn by writing programs of their own at age thirteen. Even in college classes, you learn to hack mostly by hacking.

So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

The other way makers learn is from examples.

copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking...

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization.

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty.

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

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

One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical matter to someone without a technical background.

You need to have empathy not just for your users, but for your readers.

Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to the point that there is even something of a fashion for it in some places.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains mistakes.

If you believe everything you’re supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn’t also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s

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.

To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true?

When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as “divisive” or “racially insensitive” instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention.

Another way to figure out what we’re getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.

So you can try diffing other cultures’ ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.)

any idea that’s considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we’re mistaken about.

to look at how taboos are created.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power.