Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

You don’t want small in the sense of a village, but small in the sense of an all-star team.

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.

If it were simply a matter of working harder than an ordinary employee and getting paid proportionately, it would obviously be a good deal to start a startup.

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.

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.

Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as you can. Until you have some users to measure, you’re optimizing based on guesses.

The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

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

Remember what a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster.

Instead of accumulating money slowly by being paid a regular wage for fifty years, I want to get it over with as soon as possible. So governments that forbid you to accumulate wea...

The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class.

Is it a problem if technology increases that gap? It doesn’t seem to be so far. As it increases the gap in income, it seems to decrease most other gaps.

I’d like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health.

Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don’t see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren’t doing it, or (c) that they aren’t getting paid for it.

Will people create wealth if they can’t get paid for it? Only if it’s fun. People will write operating systems for free. But they won’t install them, or take support calls, or train customers to use them. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind.

In every case, the creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off the prospect of keeping it.

It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty.

If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.

let’s try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

It’s a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job. If taste is just personal preference, then everyone’s is already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that’s it.

GOOD DESIGN IS TIMELESS. In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake.

Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations.

It’s hard to guess what the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions. So if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500.

GOOD DESIGN SOLVES THE RIG...

And so the mark — or at least the prerogative — of strength is not to take oneself too seriously.

Hard problems call for great efforts. In math, difficult proofs require ingenious solutions, and these tend to be interesting. Ditto in engineering.

GOOD DESIGN LOOKS EASY. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way.

GOOD DESIGN RESEMBLES NATURE. It’s not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time to work on the problem. So it’s a good sign when your answer resembles nature’s.

It’s not cheating to copy. Few would deny that a story should be like life. Working from life is a valuable tool in painting too, though its role has often been misunderstood. The aim is not simply to make a record.

GOOD DESIGN IS REDESIGN. It’s rare to get things right the first time. Experts expect to throw away some early work. They plan for plans to change.

It takes confidence to throw work away. You have to be able to think, there’s more where that came from.

Dangerous territory, that. If anything, you should cultivate dissatisfaction.

Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix.

Open source software has fewer bugs because it admits the possibility of bugs.

GOOD DESIGN CAN COPY. Attitudes to copying often make a round trip. A novice imitates without knowing it; next he tries consciously to be original; finally, he decides it’s more important to be right than original.

Unknowing imitation is almost a recipe for bad design.

I think the greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that’s no reason not to use it. They’re confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.

GOOD DESIGN IS OFTEN STRANGE. Some of the very best work has an uncanny quality: Euler’s Formula, Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, the SR-71, Lisp. They’re not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful.

The only style worth having is the one you can’t help.

Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.

GOOD DESIGN IS OFTEN DARING. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise.

Today’s experimental error is tomorrow’s new theory.

If you want to discover great new things, then instead of turning a blind eye to the places where conventional wisdom and truth don’t quite meet, you should pay particular attention to them.

Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough. You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing. You have to do your homework.