Quotes from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. 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. ”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can cut a bagel.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It’s hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it’s hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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. I'm not talking about the trickle-down effect here. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. I'm saying that he'll make you a tractor to replace your horse.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“People who do good work often think that whatever they’re working on is no good. Others see what they’ve done and think it’s wonderful, but the creator sees nothing but flaws. This pattern is no coincidence: worry made the work good.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage : the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“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.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Via web one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we’d always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can’t follow. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I’d be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

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