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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.
Though hackers generally look dull on the outside, the insides of their heads are surprisingly interesting places.
Being smart seems to make you unpopular.
The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. 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. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.
Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters.
Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded.
I’ve found that the best sources of ideas are not the other fields that have the word “computer” in their names, but the other fields inhabited by makers. Painting has been a much richer source of ideas than the theory of computation.
If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.
Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design — deciding too early what a program should do.
A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it easy to change your mind.
Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. When it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that’s badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names.
One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical matter to someone without a technical background.
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
So while I admit that hacking doesn’t seem as cool as painting now, we should remember that painting itself didn’t seem as cool in its glory days as it does now.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good.
Nerds are always getting in trouble. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas. Convention has less hold over them.
It seems to be a constant throughout history: in every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise. Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right. It’s tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say?
In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. “Blasphemy,” “sacrilege,” and “heresy” were such labels for a good part of Western history, as in more recent times “indecent,” “improper,” and “un-American” have been.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.
When there’s something we can’t say, it’s often because some group doesn’t want us to.
To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that’s in the habit of going where it’s not supposed to.
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. It’s so simple. Why didn’t anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
Every era has its heresies, and if you don’t get imprisoned for them, you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical. And if it isn’t false, it shouldn’t be suppressed. 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.
How can you see the wave, when you’re the water? Always be questioning. That’s the only defence. What can’t you say? And why?
Hackers are not stupid, and unanimity is very rare in this world. So if they’re all squawking, perhaps there is something amiss.
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.
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.
Unlike high tax rates, you can’t repeal totalitarianism if it turns out to be a mistake.
Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be obeyed. But be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
The whole idea of “your computer” is going away, and being replaced with “your data.” You should be able to get at your data from any computer.
And this was the beginning of a trend: desktop computers won because startups wrote software for them.
If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That’s been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word “startup” dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.
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.
If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year.
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.
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around.
A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. 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.
All you need to do is be part of a small group working on a hard problem.
A startup is not merely ten people, but ten people like you.
I don’t think many people like the slow pace of big companies, the interminable meetings, the water-cooler conversations, the clueless middle managers, and so on.
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.
I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?
When you travel to a rich or poor country, you don’t have to look at people’s bank accounts to tell which kind you’re in. You can see wealth — in buildings and streets, in the clothes and the health of the people.
