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Preface
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.
Ideal claims in red
idea claims in red, people claims in blue, cool analogies and arguments in yellow, procedure in orange
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
This sort of banal observation seems to be at least 20 years old by the time of his writing. I’m curious why Graham chooses to start his book in this way, given the current emptiness of the observation, and the cliche status at ToW. Entire chapter is about people, quotes in blue.
While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.
So far I mostly object to the idea that my high school was such a dichotomy (hierarchy, whatever). This statement mostly corresponds with my belief system though.
And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.
Oooh man it gets whinier. What is the reason for this chapter to exist Graham? Is this really the big idea?
And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don’t really take it seriously — not even the smart kids.
Well, this doesn’t actually end in university.
They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.
There’s actually a lot to peel out of this. Context in sharing rites of rebellion, and the availability of opportunities to do so overlapping.
Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for school plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another.
quite.
I’ve never liked the term “computer science.” The main reason I don’t like it is that there’s no such thing. Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.
At one end you have people who are really mathematicians, but call what they’re doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers — studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example. And then at the other extreme you have the hackers, who are trying to write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or paint for painters. It’s as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same
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This is the sentence that made me buy the book! Cool arguments and analogies in yellow
In the best case, the papers are just a formality. Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software. But often this mismatch causes problems. It’s easy to drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.
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.
procedure claims in orange
If hackers identified with other makers, like writers and painters, they wouldn’t feel tempted to do this. Writers and painters don’t suffer from math envy. They feel as if they’re doing something completely unrelated. So are hackers, I think.
Only a small percentage of hackers can actually design software, and it’s hard for the people running a company to pick these out. So instead of entrusting the future of the software to one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is designed by committee, and the hackers merely implement the design.
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.
Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers. Painters and writers notoriously do. If you’re lucky you can get a day job closely related to your real work.
One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the example of painting is how to learn to hack. You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking. Most hackers don’t learn to hack by taking college courses in programming.
Scientists start out doing work that’s perfect, in the sense that they’re just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it’s just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.
Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.
The right way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it. It’s not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English.
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.
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. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials.
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can’t reply in kind to jokes.
To add to the confusion, the noun “hack” also has two senses. It can be either a compliment or an insult. It’s called a hack when you do something in an ugly way. But when you do something so clever that you somehow beat the system, that’s also called a hack. The word is used more often in the former than the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more common than brilliant ones.
Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in common: they both break the rules.
But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate new speech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved.
There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. It’s hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. Maybe it’s not a coincidence.
Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of American-ness.
It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh.
Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you’d notice a definite trend.
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. And because this is so important to hackers, they’re especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm.
“The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.”
There’s something wrong when a sixty-five-year-old woman who wants to use a computer for email and accounts has to think about installing new operating systems. Ordinary users shouldn’t even know the words “operating system,” much less “device driver” or “patch.”
I was always under pressure to hire more, because we wanted to get bought, and we knew that buyers would have a hard time paying a high price for a company with only three programmers. (Solution: we hired more, but created new projects for them.)
At times we toyed with the idea of a new service called Viaweb Gold. It would have exactly the same features as our regular service, but would cost ten times as much would be sold in person by a man in a suit. We never got around to offering this variant, but I’m sure we could have signed up a few merchants for it.
The phrase “personal computer” is part of the language now, but when it was first used it had a deliberately audacious sound, like the phrase “personal satellite” would today.
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.
If you’re a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup, there are probably two things keeping you from doing it. One is that you don’t know anything about business. The other is that you’re afraid of competition. Neither of these fences have any current in them. There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.
It’s a lot easier for a couple of hackers to figure out how to rent office space or hire sales people than it is for a company of any size to get software written.
You may not believe it, but I promise you, Microsoft is scared of you. The complacent middle managers may not be, but Bill is, because he was you once, back in 1975, the last time a new way of delivering software appeared.
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.
You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour.1 You should get another multiple of two, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company. Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be? Suppose another multiple of three. Combine all these multipliers, and I’m claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you’re expected to be in a random corporate job.
No doubt Bill did everything he could to steer IBM into making that blunder, and he has done an excellent job of exploiting it, but if there had been one person with a brain on IBM’s side, Microsoft’s future would have been very different.
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.
The advantage of creating wealth, as a way to get rich, is not just that it’s more legitimate (many of the other methods are now illegal) but that it’s more straightforward. You just have to do something people want.
