Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted.

Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. 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.

Nearly everyone I’ve talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens’ main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I’ve read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

analogy between public school teachers and prison wardens

If life seems awful to kids, it’s neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It’s because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don’t have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don’t think things you don’t dare say out loud.

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.

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.

think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.

When there’s something we can’t say, it’s often because some group doesn’t want us to.

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they’ll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear.9 This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.

The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: 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.

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

Viso Sciolto?

How to fight zealots?

To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it’s doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed.

think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people.

A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.

Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.

There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of pain.

Bill Gates is a smart, determined, and hardworking man, but you need more than that to make as much money as he has. You also need to be very lucky.

Smart, dedicated, hard working and LUCKY

This essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it.

Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things you need, you can’t make for yourself. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to live, you have to get it from someone else.

Money is the side effect of specialization

People think that what a business does is make money. But money is just the intermediate stage — just a shorthand — for whatever people want. What most businesses really do is make wealth. They do something people want.4

Business, money, wealth

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

And so it’s clearer to programmers that wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a pie, by some imaginary Daddy.

If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don’t make anything physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.

But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won’t make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.

A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. 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.

What you need to do when you get out of college?

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.

But you don’t have to become a CEO or a movie star to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. All you need to do is be part of a small group working on a hard problem.

Starting or joining a startup is thus as close as most people can get to saying to one’s boss, I want to work ten times as hard, so please pay me ten times as much. There are two differences: you’re not saying it to your boss, but directly to the customers (for whom your boss is only a proxy after all), and you’re not doing it individually, but along with a small group of other ambitious people.

Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees.

the payoff is only on average proportionate to your productivity.

For potential acquirers, the most powerful motivator is the prospect that one of their competitors will buy you. This, as we found, causes CEOs to take red-eyes. The second biggest is the worry that, if they don’t buy you now, you’ll continue to grow rapidly and will cost more to acquire later, or even become a competitor.

Powerful motivators for getting acquired.

In effect, acquirers assume the customers know who has the best technology. And this is not as stupid as it sounds. Users are the only real proof that you’ve created wealth. Wealth is what people want, and if people aren’t using your software, maybe it’s not just because you’re bad at marketing. Maybe it’s because you haven’t made what they want.

The ball you need to keep your eye on here is the underlying principle that wealth is what people want. If you plan to get rich by creating wealth, you have to know what people want. So few businesses really pay attention to making customers happy.

Wealth is what people want.

Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.

Understanding this may help to answer an important question: why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

Hypothesis about : How europe grew so powerful?

In that respect the Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don’t let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

Because of the circumstances in which they encounter it, children tend to misunderstand wealth. They confuse it with money. They think that there is a fixed amount of it. And they think of it as something that’s distributed by authorities (and so should be distributed equally), rather than something that has to be created (and might be created unequally).

Mostly we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we then trade for the forms of wealth we

The more you have to say to get something done, the harder it is to see bugs.

A compiler is a program that translates programs written in a convenient form, like the one liner above, into the simple-minded language that the hardware understands.

Another advantage of high-level languages is that they make your programs more portable.

Open source software is like a paper that has been subject to peer review. Lots of smart people have examined the source code of open source operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD and have already found most of the bugs.

The biggest debate in language design is probably the one between Those who think that a language should prevent programmers from doing stupid things, and those who think programmers should be allowed to do whatever they want.

But the object-orientedness of a language is a matter of degree. Indeed, there are two senses of object-oriented: some languages are object-oriented in the sense that they let you program in that style, and others in the sense that they force you to.