Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

Developing new technology is a pain in the ass. It is, as Edison said, one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Without the incentive of wealth, no one wants to do it.

Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

The theory that led to the stealth plane was developed by a Soviet mathematician. But because the Soviet Union didn’t have a computer industry, it remained for them a theory; they didn’t have hardware capable of executing the calculations fast enough to design an actual airplane.

Don’t let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the

entrepreneurs.

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

making money is a very specialized skill.

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).

Because kids are unable to create wealth, whatever they have has to be given to them. And when wealth is something you’re given, then of course it seems that it should be distributed

You get paid by doing or making something people want, and those who make more money are often simply better at doing what people want.

I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another.

“Are they really worth 100 of us?” editorialists ask. Depends on what you mean by worth. If you mean worth in the sense of what people will pay for their skills, the answer is yes, apparently.

Would a basketball team trade one of their players for 100 random people? What would Apple’s next product look like if you replaced Steve Jobs with a committee of 100 random

In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want.

People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets.

To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that peo...

It’s lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust? That seems like saying that blue is heavy, or that up is circular.

The appearance of word “unjust” here is the unmistakable spectral signature of the Daddy Model.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly.

With the rise of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero sum game. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t have to make us poor to make themselves rich.

Idealistic undergraduates find their unconsciously preserved child’s model of wealth confirmed by eminent writers of the past. It is a case of the mistaken meeting the outdated.

In high school I made money by mowing lawns and scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. This was the only kind of work available at the time. Now high school kids could write software or design web sites. But only some of them will; the rest will still be scooping ice cream.

Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to decrease other gaps.

If there is enough demand for something, technology will make it cheap enough to sell in large

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won.

A 747 pilot doesn’t make 40 times as much as a checkout clerk because he is a warlord who somehow holds her in thrall. His skills are simply much more valuable.

in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health.

Will people create wealth if they can’t get paid for it? Only if it’s fun.

We’ve even had a twin study: West Germany, on; East Germany, off.

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.

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. If I had children, it would arguably be immoral not to.

It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so...

You need rich people in your society not so much because in spending their money they create jobs, but because of what they have to do to get rich.

The Achilles heel of the spammers is their message.

If we can write software that recognizes their messages, there is no way they can get around that.

I’ve found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words.

fact, ff0000 (HTML for bright red) turns out to be as good an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.

If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it.

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows.

GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE.

say what you mean and say it briefly.

something seems to come over people when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn’t sound anything like the way they speak.

When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real

problem.

if something is ugly, it can’t be the best solution. There must be a better one, and eventually someone else will discover it.

Aiming at timelessness

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.

But this is a simple answer to the wrong question.

A lot of bad design is industrious, but misguided.