Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they’re out. 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.

A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don’t see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average. If you took ten people at random out of the big galley and put them in a boat by themselves, they could probably go faster.

That’s the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That’s leverage.

guerillas,

When you’re running a startup, your competitors decide how hard you work. And they pretty much all make the same decision: as hard as you possibly can.

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.

Users are the only real proof that you’ve created wealth.

priori

allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it. Once you’re allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it.

stealth plane

How much someone’s work is worth is not a policy question. It’s something the market already determines.

In a feudal society, there are just two classes: a warrior aristocracy, and the serfs who work their estates. The middle class were a new, third group who lived in towns and supported themselves by manufacturing and trade.

Wozniak,

If you suppress variations in income, whether by stealing private fortunes, as feudal rulers used to do, or by taxing them away, as some modern governments have done, the result always seems to be the same. Society as a whole ends up poorer.

If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option.

virtumundo

Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they’re expressionists. It’s all evasion. Underneath the long words or the “expressive” brush strokes, there’s not much going on, and that’s frightening.

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.

When people first start drawing, for example, they’re often reluctant to redo parts that aren’t right. They feel they’ve been lucky to get that far, and if they try to redo something, it will turn out worse. Instead they convince themselves that the drawing is not that bad, really — in fact, maybe they meant it to look that way.

Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn’t help painting like Michelangelo. The only style worth having is the one you can’t help.

ostracism

intrinsically

Any programming language can be divided into two parts: some set of fundamental operators that play the role of axioms, and the rest of the language, which could in principle be written in terms of these fundamental operators.

Wasting programmer time is the true inefficiency, not wasting machine time. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster.

The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will parallelism go? In a hundred years will it affect even application programmers? Or will it be something that compiler writers think about, but which is usually invisible in the source code of applications?

There seem to be a huge number of new programming languages lately. Part of the reason is that faster hardware has allowed programmers to make different tradeoffs between speed and convenience, depending on the application. If

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. And if you don’t, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were.

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.

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.

Technology often should be cutting-edge. In programming languages, as Erann Gat has pointed out, what “industry best practice” actually gets you is not the best, but merely the average. When a decision causes you to develop software at a fraction of the rate of more aggressive competitors, “best practice” does not really seem the right name for it.

Notice I said “what they need,” not “what they want.”

making what works for the user doesn’t mean simply making what the user tells you to. Users don’t know what all the choices are, and are often mistaken about what they really want. It’s like being a doctor. You can’t just treat a patient’s symptoms. When a patient tells you his symptoms, you have to figure out what’s actually wrong with him, and treat that.

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

The worst thing photography did to painting may have been to kill the best day job. Most of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. Soon after the invention of photography they were undercut by hacks who worked from photographs.