Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side barely has the upper hand.

I’m not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable. Natural selection, for example.

In the sciences, especially, it’s a great advantage to be able to question assumptions.

look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what’s underneath. That’s where new theories come from.

If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.

When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.

if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts.

Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head...

The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor.

Another way to counterattack is with metaphor.

Best of all, probably, is humor.

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open mindedness, they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite.

To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself.

So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.

You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance.

Always be questioning. That’s the only defence. What can’t you say? And why?

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.

Suppress one, and you suppress the other.

It is by poking about inside current technology that hackers get ideas for the next generation.

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.

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

The thing about ideas, though, is that they lead to more ideas. Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing?

So shelving an idea costs you not only that delay in implementing it, but also all the ideas that implementing it would have led to.

Why did desktop computers take over? Mainly because they had better software. And the reason microcomputer software was better was that it could be written by small companies.

Starting a startup to write mainframe software would be a much more serious undertaking than just hacking something together on your Apple II in the evenings. And so you didn’t get a lot of startups writing mainframe applications.

The arrival of desktop computers inspired a lot of new software, because writing applications for them seemed an attainable goal to larval startups.

If a company wants to make a platform that startups will build on, they have to make it something that hackers themselves will want to use. That means it has to be inexpensive and well-designed.

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.

The less you spend, the easier it is to make more than you spend. Fortunately,

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.

Don’t listen to marketing people or designers or product managers just because of their job titles. If they have good ideas, use them, but it’s up to you to decide; software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can’t design software as well as implement it, don’t start a startup.

There is a large random factor in the success of any company. So the guys you end up reading about in the papers are the ones who are very smart, totally dedicated, and win the lottery.

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.

Money is a side effect of specialization.

want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.4

Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen.

Everyone in a company works together to create wealth, in the sense of making more things people want.

it’s clearer to programmers that wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed,

Wealth is whatever people want,

Nearly all companies exist to do something people want. And that’s what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company.

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

A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.

There is one other job besides sales where big companies can hire first-rate people: in the top management jobs. And for the same reason: their performance can be measured.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage. You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

An example of a job with measurement but not leverage is doing piecework in a sweatshop.

The only decision you get to make is how fast you work, and that can probably only increase your earning...