Hackers Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham

Hackers Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age Reviews

• 
  Einar

  I had serious problems with this book. So Paul Graham is a successful Lisp hacker who made a lot of money from his start-up. Good for him. To be sure, this earns him some credibility in discussing languages and start-ups. Unfortunately, he takes it upon himself to extrapolate from this single data point to universal laws of what makes you successful. Moreover, he seems to think that his success as a geek entrepreneur somehow lends validity to whatever unsubstantiated thoughts, feelings and prejudices he may cook up, including some completely ridiculous views on the general superiority of geeks over regular people. The only reason so many of his readers seem to accept these views must be that he's preaching to the choir: certainly his geek audience would dearly like them to be true. His arcane and naive notions of art and aesthetics are too embarrassing to even discuss. Oh, and the smugness is just insufferable.
• 
  Kevin Powe

  What I expected going in was interested parallels on the process of creating software versus other creative arts, and what Graham had learned across multiple disciplines. That I can dig.
  
  What I got is a string of thinly justified essays that are lionising The Uber1337 Hacker as a misunderstood maverick agent for changing that is only being kept back by The Man.
  
  Graham is a smart man - far smarter than me, and he's written a lot more software. But the tone of the book is grating, because:
  
  a) he keeps coming back to that one point again and again
  b) he never stoops to justifying his claims with a backing argument.
  
  In Graham's view, the hacker is the central agent of change, of creating value, and while that may be true in his experience, it's a tremendously limited viewpoint, and he comes across as remarkably arrogant towards anything outside his experience. The biggest danger in this is people with half his intelligence justifying their own worldview via his writing.
  
  I'd be a lot less annoyed with this book if Graham did himself a giant favour and didn't introduce his views on how economics interacts with society. He's obviously entitled to a viewpoint, but it's a remarkably cloistered one, and without justifying his opinion, it just comes off as another rich white guy wondering why people are griping instead of getting out there and Making Stuff (go get 'em tiger!)
  
  The essays in here on programming and what he's learned from art are interesting - I'd love to read a whole book extrapolating on these points.
• 
  Anusha Narasimhan

  A collection of essays that are thought-provoking and insightful. The author makes nerds look super cool, so a big thumbs up from me. I recommend it to programmers and people interested in computer science. Will reread and write a proper review sometime in the future.
• 
  Vijay Chidambaram

  I am a fan of PG's essays, so I was looking forward to reading this book. Unfortunately, it is just a collection of essays he has published online. If you have read the essays available on his website, you can safely skip this book.
  
  In many of the essays, PG makes statements such as "The time to code a program depends mainly on its length.." which are ridiculous. I know he is trying to appeal to a wider audience, but staying stuff like this without anything to back it up is ridiculous. Some of his arguments go like this:
  
  1. Controversial statement
  2. Because of #1, controversial statement #2
  3. Because of #3, our conclusion! Viola!
  
  
• 
  Philipp

  It's a strange hit-and-miss affair, this collection -
  
  the essays on software design and especially programming languages (and the advantages of Lisp) are a joy to read, Graham's clearly a great, succinct writer.
  
  The essays on society, however, are too "American" for my taste - Graham takes a single data-point (often his own life) and then extrapolates from his point to hell and back creating a 100% black-and-white worldview. The very first essay is on "nerds" vs. "non-nerds", I'd say, and is mostly based on his own high school time. The gist of it is that nerds in high-school were the most pure beings and the only "adults" and oh-so-clear-sighted and just forced to put up with this prison called high-school, and how everybody else was and is just an idiot etc. pp. There's also one extremely strange essay on generating wealth that was just written, I think, because Graham is rich? It's mostly "Rich people earn so much money because they work hard and generate a lot of wealth", yeah, we saw in the last financial crisis how much wealth bankers generate.
  
  My advice: Skip the society essays, read the programming essays.
• 
  Ekaterina Kiseki

  Haven't finished the book. The man may be very good at his job, but he sucks at writing. The book looks like a compilation of cheap motivation posts with catchy titles. However it may amuse those who are completely unrelated to IT.
• 
  Michelle Tran

  The articles on technology were decent (not great), but it was hard not to facepalm every couple of pages on his articles about social commentary.
• 
  Matt

  A fun-to-read mix of insight and ideology, Graham is someone we can learn from no matter which side of the box he's thinking on. His essay on nerds ("Why Nerds are Unpopular") is still a favorite, even while his essay on disparity of wealth ("Mind the Gap") is among the most unreflective apologies for anarcho-capitalism I've ever read.
  
  I was, at least, inspired enough while reading Graham to put a few more thoughts together; those interested can find them
  here.
• 
  Vignesh

  Starting from random opinionated views on how the world works, to interesting correlations about art and science ending with a strong evangelism on the programming language lisp, Paul forces us to put our thinking cap on.
• 
  Ross Siegel

  Self indulgent, self-congratulatory, vague concepts expounding on platitudes & trivialities.
  Paul Graham is a badass, no doubt, but this book can be skipped.
• 
  Ankush Chander

  I wish I picked this book in my first year undergrad(or any other book then for that matter :P). Glad to be reading it now nevertheless.
• 
  Mahrous

  Eye-opening and eloquently-written essays about hackers (experienced programmers, not the negative meaning), art, nerds and wealth.
• 
  Max Nova

  Full review and highlights at
  https://books.max-nova.com/hackers-and-painters/
  
  I was looking at my highlights for Paul Graham's "Hackers and Painters" and it seems like I basically highlighted the entire book. It's that good.
  
  At its core, this is a book about how changes in technology (particularly computer tech) has changed economic and social realities... and the new breed of tech-savvy doers that these technological shifts have brought to the forefront of our society.
  
  Graham begins at the beginning of the alpha-nerd's journey - middle school. He launches a withering salvo of criticism at the current educational system - a system which he fashions more of a prison than a temple of learning. He's a sharp critic of what he proclaims "the emptiness of school life" and he points out that "Misrule breeds rebellion" (in reference to troubled schools). Graham also contends that the total lack of real purpose in schools is the root of the crazy teenage drama that goes on in middle schools and high schools around the country.
  
  He moves on to discussing the role of "makers" in society - from the eponymous hackers to painters. He makes a great observation - which is that while both of these professions involve creating things, painting has a far longer tradition of training and educating its practitioners. Graham notes that almost all great programmers are self-taught, but the lack of a good training regimen for programmers means that society misses out on a lot of potentially great hackers.
  
  Graham touches on the often subversive, counter-authority, and contrarian culture of hackers - noting, "Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas." He goes on a bit of a (justified) rant against political correctness and moral fashions - noting that, "when people are bad at open mindedness, they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise"
  
  He also emphasizes how goddam patriotic it is to be a hacker: "There is such a thing as American-ness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it." He pulls in a great Jefferson quote too:
  
  "When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive." Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power."
  
  In the next section of the book, Graham discusses the nature of writing code itself. He emphasizes the design and complexity of software - "designing web-based software is like designing a city rather than a building: as well as buildings you need roads, street signs, utilities, police and fire departments, and plans for both growth and various kinds of disasters." He notes that, "with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers"
  
  Graham's next topic is on wealth creation - and why startups are so good at it. He claims that "I think every one who gets rich by their own efforts will be found to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. Everyone I can think of does: CEOs, movie stars, hedge fund managers, professional athletes. A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure." He also puts forth some pretty bold historical analysis: "Understanding this may help to answer an important question: why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it."
  
  He pulls out a few great examples of technology fundamentally reshaping society, noting "But it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. 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... Technology had made it possible to create wealth faster than you could steal it. The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a courtier but an industrialist."
  
  In regards to the increasing income gap, Graham says, "Will technology increase the gap between rich and poor? It will certainly increase the gap between the productive and the unproductive. That's the whole point of technology... Technology should increase the gap in income, but it seems to decrease other gaps. A hundred years ago, the rich led a different kind of life from ordinary people. They lived in houses full of servants, wore elaborately uncomfortable clothes, and travelled about in carriages drawn by teams of horses which themselves required their own houses and servants. Now, thanks to technology, the rich live more like the average person."
  
  A great money quote from Graham is, "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. 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."
  
  The rest of the book is a rant on programming languages and a lot of love for the esoteric Lisp programming language. Probably not of general interest.
  
  Overall though, this book really blew me away. Everything he says seems obvious in retrospect, but that's because he's a genius. The way he approaches this immense topic is totally unique among all the stuff I've read and Graham certainly has the credentials to back it up. Required reading for citizens of the 21st century.
• 
  Viet Nguyen

  A collection of essays from Paul Graham, a programmer who strongly advocates LISP programming. This book provides deep insights into nerd's life, hacker, entrepreneurship, and, which I enjoy the most, programming language. Paul showed why LISP is "the most powerful programming language" by comparing it with many other programming language: C, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby.
  
  4 star only because the info is somehow out of date.
  
  Here is my quick notes:
  
  Chap 1. Reading about nerds in school made something inside me resonate.
  
  Chap 2. Hackers and Painters
  - Hacking and Painting have a lot in common.
  - "Computer Science" is not a good term
  - mathematicians - people in between - hackers
  - Universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers
  - One way to build great software is to start your own startup. but 2 problems: have to do so much besides write software, 2) not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write.
  ex: hacking programming languages doesn't pay as well as figuring out how to connect some company's legacy database to their web server.
  --> Solution: day jobs. you have one kind of work you do for money, and another for love.
  - hackers learn to hack by doing
  - hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original
  - hackers can learn to program by looking at good programs - not just what they do, but at the source code.
  - hackers should have empathy for users, readers.
  
  Chap 3. What you can't say
  
  Chap 4. Good Bad Attitude
  
  Chap 5. The Other Road Ahead
  
  Chap 6. How to make Wealth
  
  Chap 10. Programming Language Explained
  
  Chap 11. The Hundred-year Language
  
  Chap 12. Beating the Averages
  
  Chap 13. Revenge of the Nerds
  - All languages are not equivalent
  - Java, Perl, Python, Ruby
  - Lisp - an effort to define a more convenient alternative to the Turing machine - John McCarthy
  - 9 ideas of Lisp:
  + Conditionals
  + A function type
  + Recursion
  + Dynamic typing
  + Garbage-collection
  + Programs composed of expressions
  + A symbol type
  + A notation for code using trees of symbols and constants.
  + The whole language there all the time.
  
  Chap 14. The Dream Language
  - succintness is one place where statically typed language lose.
  
  Chap 15. Design and Research
  
  
• 
  Maxwell Foley

  Capitalist propaganda at its finest (?). Paul Graham is the founder of YCombinator, an incredibly influential venture capital firm in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem, and in this book he appears to be spelling out a sort of Silicon Valley manifesto, in which he portrays talented computer programmers, who he calls "hackers", as Promethean heroes locked in a constant battle to overcome the stifling mediocrity of the "pointy-haired bosses" giving them orders. Graham comes off as a likable, intelligent, curious guy, but given the recent cultural turn towards criticism of the Silicon Valley new elite, it's hard not to read his anti-authoritarian stance with intense skepticism.
  
  The best part of this book is its first chapter "Why Nerds Are Unpopular". As one might imagine, it serves to glorify the titular nerds as solitary innovators unencumbered by the vapid fashions of the herd, and placing it at the front of his book reeks of self-indulgence and insecurity. Nevertheless, this is probably one of the more insightful critiques of the social dynamics of the American high school system that I have encountered.
  
  One strange chapter in the book is the one where he rails against political correctness, telling the reader that in any time and place there will always be heretical truths which you cannot say and should simply keep to yourself. I pretty much agree with this entirely, but what does this have to do with programming? It comes off as creepy in this context, imho.
  
  Most of the rest of the book is scattered meditations on various aspects of programming languages and software design. It is somewhat interesting and well-written, but doesn't really add up to a coherent book - it feels much more like reading someone's blog. I was kind of hoping to see more extended metaphors between programming and art given that I went to school for both, but the analogy is pretty surface-level.
• 
  Arden

  Often after I read a book I think about what it would be like to meet the author and talk about the book with him or her. I have no desire to meet Paul Graham. He sounds so arrogant and pontificates so much about things he really doesn't know much about that I can't imagine talking to him. I agree with David's review below.
• 
  Ilya Ivanov

  Great book, not only for developers. You don't need to agree with all Paul's points (I certainly didn't) in order to appreciate courage and creativity of authors ideas.
• 
  Saeed

  I just like the 2 chapters of this book. These two chapters are worth to read.
  They are: 6. How to Make Wealth & 7. Mind the Gap (The Daddy Model of Wealth).
  Highly Recommended.
• 
  Yevgeniy Brikman

  A great read for all programmers and anyone interested in software. I don't agree with everything in the book, bit there are some terrific insights here. Some of my favorite quotes:
  
  A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. pg 22
  
  Programmers were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if that is the word) of product managers into code. pg 23
  
  Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. pg 85
  
  [Programmers] literally think the product, one line at a time. pg 93
  
  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 mange 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. pg 46
  
  A program, like a proof, is a pruned version of a tree that in the past has had false starts branching off all over it. So the test of a language is not simply how clean the finished program looks in it, but how clean the path to the finished program was. pg 219
• 
  Tommy Collison

  Paul Graham is a fiercely intelligent human being and Hackers and Painters is a fantastic set of essays from the most astute author of our time. What really strikes you about PG's writing is not the tone or the atmosphere or anything else that we look for in other novels, it's the fact that everything he writes is right, and as such, the back cover is absolutely correct: the "Why are Nerds Unpopular?" essay is worth the price of admission alone.
• 
  João Conde

  I notice a trend among famous American tech-savvy authors: they state opinions as facts with little to no proof. For example, stating that nerds are unpopular because “smart makes you unpopular” by definition is a very American view of high school. I don't deny this is the case in most American high schools, but he is stating an opinion (that being a nerd equals being unpopular) which is just not true in many parts of the world (speaking of personal experience).
  
  I think this American bias is worse when it comes to wealth and money. In his words, “in our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses”. This is a very erroneous take. I challenge Graham to think about how his life would have been if he was born in the poorest African community.
  
  Graham says that wealth and money are different. I agree with this. In our specialized society, we produce some wealth for money, that we use to buy other forms of wealth. However, he deems it reasonable for a person to have 128x the money because he produces 128x the wealth. But the example he gives is that of a basketball player. Graham thinks a basketball player produces 128x more wealth than, for example, a doctor or a firefighter. Let that sink in, I won’t delve into how wrong this is, but he uses the same argument to justify CEO earnings, amongst others.
  
  Graham even contradicts himself, when he says “If one person gets more, someone has to get less” when referring to money and then saying that a common fallacy is thinking “if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else”. Wealth can be created (we see eye-to-eye on this one) but money can not, so if someone has more, someone has less.
  
  Graham states a society that taxes the rich will end up poorer because there will be no incentive to produce wealth. This is neither true nor false. I think Americans are quick to condemn communism but then fall to the extreme opposite, capitalism. To be clear, I think both are terrible systems in their purest forms. The secret: balance. You can’t tax to a point where working yields no increase in wealth, but you need to do so at a level that ensures the entire society has a HUMAN life (access to healthcare, education, transportation, housing, leisure time, ...).
  
  Finally, Graham makes the quintessential American tech-savvy author statement (I’ve seen Peter Thiel write something very similar). This is so ridiculous I have to just quote it: “Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of Americanness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.” To be clear, I am all for unruliness and questioning everything, especially what should not be questioned. But to link that exclusively to America is just laughable.
  
  I have some comments to make regarding the technical component of the book as well. For context, I learned to program in Scheme, which is a dialect of the Lisp family. And I loved it. However, I can’t agree with the overall statements Graham makes about Lisp superiority. What is funny is that he begins by saying that part of the problem is if you use a language long enough you start to think about it and think the one you use is the best…. but then he exhibits this exact behavior when talking about Lisp’s superiority throughout the book. He even goes as far as suggesting, given enough computing power in the future, that we only need lists as data structures. Not biased at all as a Lisp user.
  
  First, the assumption that a higher-level language is always preferable and superior (thus making Lisp one of the best) is just wrong. Each use case calls for a different tool. You will not write drivers, embedded software, firmware, and others in Lisp.
  
  Secondly, can we stop comparing languages using “Hello World” examples? This is extremely misleading because real-life software will be bigger and more complex, where, for example, Java’s boilerplate won’t be as noticeable as in a “Hello World” example. I dislike Java by the way, but this is no way to make comparisons.
  
  Thirdly, he is very keen on dynamically typed languages. Graham states a language needs to be good to write “throw away programs”. Here I think Graham mixed two concepts: typing and the ability to be explicit or implicit about it. Languages like Scala, TypeScript, and Rust can infer types, thus reducing static typing boilerplate. Of course, the book was written in 2004, when I think these languages did not exist or were just coming out (like Scala), so this is more of a comment than a critique.
  
  Finally, Graham says Lisp is worth learning and that it will make you a better programmer. I partially agree with him here. In reality, any language that makes you switch paradigms will make you a better programmer. Whether you are trying logical or constraint programming with Prolog, functional with Lisp, imperative with C++, or OOP with Java.
  
  I enjoyed the hackers and painters comparison. I do think we have more in common with fine arts than engineering itself. Nevertheless, I don’t fully agree when he says hackers need to understand computer science as much as painters need to know about chemistry (which is to say very little). Perhaps for Viaweb, an e-commerce store building website, that was the case, but try implementing Google Maps without knowing the first thing about path-finding algorithms and you are in for a treat.
  
  Overall, I am glad I read the book but I think Graham needs to stick to technical and business takes and leave social and economic takes to others.
• 
  Vincent Chen

  Fascinating view into PG's mind. The book made me think and changed my mind about several ideas... which makes it a great book!
• 
  Eskay Theaters & Smart Homes

  Considering his later fame as YC's founder, its surprising not enough people have read this anthology of essays. Glimpse into the mind of a contrarian thinker.
• 
  Barack Liu

  
  079-Hackers and Painters-Paul Graham-Essay-2004
  Barack
  
  —— “After finishing my graduate degree in computer science, I went to an art school to study painting. Many people were surprised: a person who likes computers likes painting! They seem to think that playing with computers and painting are two distinct things. The different things -- the computer is cold, precise, and orderly, and painting is a kind of expressive way of primitive desire. "
  
  "Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age" was first published in the United States in 2004. Essay books. This book discusses topics such as hacker hobbies, growth, and contributions.
  
  Paul Graham was born in Weymouth, England in 1954. He studied at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design, Cornell University, and the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he co-founded Viaweb. In 1998, Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo.
  
  In 2005, he established Y Combinator, a startup incubation period. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded more than 2,000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. Representative works: "Hacker and Painter", "On Lisp", etc.
  
  Paul Graham ’s father was a physicist who designed nuclear reactors. He started programming himself as a teenager. During the undergraduate period, he majored in philosophy at Cornell University. During the graduate period, he majored in artificial intelligence in the Computer Department of Harvard University. During the doctorate period, he listened to the Harvard Art Department. After receiving a Ph.D. from the Computer Department of Harvard University, he traveled to Europe to study fine arts at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts.
  
  Paul initially wanted to be a painter and found that he couldn't support himself, so he returned to the United States as a programmer. In 1995, he worked with Robert Morris, a graduate student at MIT, to develop Viaweb, the world ’s first Internet application. In 1998, Yahoo acquired Viaweb for $ 49 million.
  
  In 2005, Graham rediscovered the young Morris, who was teaching at the MIT computer department and co-founded Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. YC is not only an incubator for startups, but also a trainer, and an intermediary to connect with investors.
  
  In August 2010, 30 of the 36 new startups incubated by YC received venture capital, many of which exceeded the US $ 1 million. So far, there are more than 200 startups that have "graduated" from YC, and less than 20% of the companies have failed, far below the industry average of 90%. These YC students have become the mainstream of a new generation of Silicon Valley startups. They have formed a growing network. Some people call these rapidly rising new members of Silicon Valley "YC bandits."
  
  This book is a selection of 15 of Graham's articles published on his website. In the past, I tended to think that American teenagers are freer to engage in things they are interested in, at least to some extent. Now it seems that the significance of many young people engaging in various social activities is not necessarily really because of interest, but to make themselves more popular. Just as we try various learning methods to get high scores.
  
  Therefore, those who are not in groups may not necessarily be unable to obtain the welcome or group of others. It may just because they are not willing to spend too much time on this. Because grouping sometimes means doing something that meets the expectations or standards of others. And there is such a group of people who waste their energy to meet the standards of others and prefer to do things according to their wishes. They don't pay much attention to other people's feelings. So others are not willing to get along with them.
  
  Graham described the United States in the 1970s. I don’t know if this is still the case in American middle schools today. As far as my personal feelings are concerned, in Chinese middle schools, the opposite is true. The most popular people are those nerds. They don't have to be handsome or strong, as long as they can get high scores in the exam, they can win the respect of others. In this way, Chinese middle schools and American middle schools seem to be representatives of two extremes.
  
  Of course, our main purpose in setting up schools is to enable children to systematically learn comprehensive knowledge and improve their overall quality to adapt to future jobs. This is the responsibility of the school. From a family point of view, I think parents should let their children get in touch with society in some suitable way earlier. Instead of waiting for him to turn 18 years old and leave high school to enter the undergraduate level, he began to try this aspect.
  
  In fact, for most people, even after entering the undergraduate stage, they still have a long distance from society and live in a virtual environment. Of course, this environment is very comfortable, which is why many people regard college-age as one of the best times in adult life. But I think that parents should prepare early when the children are 12-18 years old in junior high school and high school. It should be in various forms, such as weekend part-time work, etc., to expose children to the real society.
  
  What matters is not how much money he has earned during this time, or that he has learned a specific skill. What is important is to make the child cultivate this feeling and let him see how people interact and do things in adult society. After he passed the role of an observer for 6 years, he could understand more that everything he did in the special environment of the school was for his future preparations to enter the real world.
  
  Therefore, if you want to avoid the competitive advantages of large companies, the best way is to enter a new field that no one has ever entered. There, the big companies did not build military fortresses in advance or lay down ambushes, which made the competition between you relatively fair.
  
  If you love writing, you will use your free time in the evening to work on your creation. If you love art, you will also spend your spare time to create. So, where you allocate your precious resources like time, it shows where your interests are.
  
  If you don't like writing programs, then you will not be a good hacker. If you don’t like turning your thoughts into words, you won’t be a good writer. If you don't like to draw lines by hand, then you will not be a good painter.
  
  If I want to do something in the future, then I must learn to master the ability from now on, to sink my heart, and repeatedly polish a detail. This may be boring, but it is the only way from 80 to 90 points.
  
  I once reported to people with no technical background, but I couldn't make it clear to them. In essence, this is because my understanding of this thing is not thorough enough.
  
  As long as we look at the news, we can easily find that this situation is everywhere. So, I think that an American who criticizes China should come to China to live on the ground for a while. And a Chinese who criticizes the United States should also go to the United States to live on the ground for a while.
  
  After I was an adult, I experienced such a cultural conflict for a long time. I used to think that it was right to firmly defend the values or morals. If it is found to be impractical in practice, it will be considered pedantic and morally clean. I found that in real life, a method adopted by most people is something that my education tells me is inappropriate. Each child may experience such a period of conflict sooner or later as he grows up.
  
  Some people meet earlier, some people meet later, it depends on his environment. Some people stay longer in this process, some stay shorter, depending on their ability to adapt to the environment and his adherence to certain guidelines.
  
  At the individual level, I agree that this view is more correct, but when it becomes the company level or the country level, I think the situation may be different. If the leader of a company or the leader of a country admits that he is not doing well, then there may be many people who are not sensible enough to distinguish the truth and regard this self-criticism as a fact, which will make the company or country lose stand by.
  
  Be aware that there are only a handful of people who can treat criticism objectively. When we face the masses, we need to treat the masses away. You need to keep telling the masses that if you are good, they will believe. If you say you are not good, they will soon believe it, and then quickly abandon you.
  
  It is the responsibility of parents to continuously guide their children out of traditional ideas. Unfortunately, it seems that many parents don't think it makes sense to do so, and they often even assist schools and teachers to crack down on their children's natural ability. When the children became adults and entered the society, the parents were finally relieved to see the children stunned.
  
  I used to insist on some of my own opinions and refute others in public. Later, I found that such persistence did not bring any benefit to myself, but on the contrary, it caused trouble to myself. So after a period of painful cognitive disorder, I decided to change my principle. It is no longer against others to defend principles or certain beliefs. Usually, the way I object is to express silence.
  
  I am a person who likes to socialize, but I don’t like to be in a group with strong consistency. In such a highly integrated group, there is often a fanatical atmosphere. At this time, it is often my emotions that control me, not my reason. When I am in it, I may feel a noble emotion. It seems that my ability has been greatly extended. But when leaving this collective. Again, I would be resistant to the fanaticism of being in it.
  
  The smartphone we use today is such an Internet terminal. Although it is not necessarily the simplest, it is much simpler than a personal computer. As long as a person is not illiterate, under normal circumstances, he should be able to use it to do some basic things.
  
  During my internship at WeChat, I saw Zhang Xiaolong 's internal sharing video. In the video, he mentioned that the iteration of WeChat's version did not make a very long-term plan. Because he did not know what to do in the future. The author expresses a similar point here. He doesn't have any exact ideas about the future, because once he has an idea, he is already working on it.
  
  When we start to do something, we don't have to think about it very well before we can start to do it. In the process of doing this, we may slowly generate more ideas and do better.
  
  The author discussed Internet software and its profit model. These models have become mainstream now. I don’t know what a market environment was like a decade ago, but it shows such a possibility. That is, what seems to be a non-mainstream business model today may become mainstream in the future. So the same, we must have certain business models today that are unobtrusive, but they are indeed effective and profitable.
  
  After 10 years, these business models may become popular. Well, we need to be able to uncover these unobtrusive money-making models in a forward-looking manner. Because, when everyone knows in the future, only the average income can be obtained.
  
  The rise of Internet companies is also gradually changing the traditional corporate operating model. Enterprises are gradually moving from closed systems to open systems. Today, a large enterprise is closely related to many upstream and downstream partners and partners. I think that this trend will be further enhanced in the future, and will gradually extend to small and micro-enterprises. Small and micro-enterprises do not need to do everything by themselves, but can directly purchase various services from other professional companies. This allows them to focus their energies on their core products.
  
  When we made the micro-barrage in 14 years, the initial goal was an individual. The more high-end and stronger purchasing users come to us afterward instead of contacting them. I think that when I start a business in the future, I will also focus on serving individuals or small and micro businesses first.
  
  When our products are getting better and better, and the market occupancy rate is getting higher and higher, there will naturally be more high-end customers willing to contact us and willing to spend more money to purchase exclusive services. If you aim at the high-end market from the beginning, you may fail before earning money.
  
  16/07/22
  20/05/31
  
• 
  Venkat

  Highlights:
  
  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.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 24 | location 363-364 | Added on Thursday, 27 August 2020 22:00:26
  
  Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 27 | location 402-403 | Added on Thursday, 27 August 2020 22:05:17
  
  Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they’d be a net loss.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 40 | location 611-614 | Added on Thursday, 27 August 2020 22:30:23
  
  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.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 44 | location 672-673 | Added on Thursday, 27 August 2020 22:40:40
  
  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 & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 46 | location 695-697 | Added on Thursday, 27 August 2020 22:43:11
  
  Dynamic typing is a win here because you don’t have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract. The easiest program to change is one that’s short.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 51 | location 772-772 | Added on Friday, 28 August 2020 21:56:48
  
  Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 98 | location 1498-1509 | Added on Sunday, 30 August 2020 21:41:51
  
  Whatever the procedure for reporting bugs, it is likely to be one-directional: support people who hear about bugs fill out some form that eventually gets passed on (possibly via QA) to programmers, who put it on their list of things to do. It was different at Viaweb. Within a minute of hearing about a bug from a customer, the support people could be standing next to a programmer hearing him say “Shit, you’re right, it’s a bug.” It delighted the support people to hear that “you’re right” from the hackers. They used to bring us bugs with the same expectant air as a cat bringing you a 67 ha ckers & painters mouse it has just killed. It also made them more careful in judging the seriousness of a bug, because now their honor was on the line.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 108 | location 1644-1644 | Added on Sunday, 30 August 2020 22:07:25
  
  Selling web-based software through ISPs is like selling sushi through vending machines.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 110 | location 1687-1689 | Added on Sunday, 30 August 2020 22:13:51
  
  A large part of what big companies pay extra for is the cost of selling expensive things to them. (If the Defense Department pays a thousand dollars for toilet seats, it’s partly because it costs a lot to sell toilet seats for a thousand dollars.) And this is one reason intranet software will continue to thrive, even though it is probably a bad idea.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 115 | location 1750-1751 | Added on Monday, 31 August 2020 21:17:12
  
  available for users who want that. I don’t expect Microsoft to go all the way to the extreme of doing the computations
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 121 | location 1846-1847 | Added on Monday, 31 August 2020 21:28:21
  
  There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend. If you get these two right, you’ll be ahead of most startups. You can figure out the rest as you go.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 122 | location 1860-1862 | Added on Monday, 31 August 2020 21:32:36
  
  The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 136 | location 2085-2086 | Added on Monday, 31 August 2020 22:01:46
  
  For one thing, the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can. But a more serious problem is that the company has no way of measuring the value of your work.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 144 | location 2195-2197 | Added on Monday, 31 August 2020 22:18:28
  
  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.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 153 | location 2334-2336 | Added on Tuesday, 1 September 2020 22:06:02
  
  everyone who has done it has used essentially the same recipe: measurement and leverage, where measurement comes from working with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 157 | location 2406-2407 | Added on Tuesday, 1 September 2020 22:21:24
  
  How much someone’s work is worth is not a policy question. It’s something the market already determines.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 159 | location 2424-2425 | Added on Tuesday, 1 September 2020 22:26:34
  
  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 people want the wrong things.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 165 | location 2515-2517 | Added on Tuesday, 1 September 2020 22:38:16
  
  The only thing technology can’t cheapen is brand. Which is precisely why we hear ever more about it. Brand is the residue left as the substantive differences between rich and poor evaporate.
  
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 184 | location 2814-2817 | Added on Thursday, 3 September 2020 22:25:25
  
  Like many of the half-truths adults tolds us, this one contradicts other things they told us. After dinning into you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference, they took you to the museum and told you that you should pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist. What goes through the kid’s head at this point?
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 187 | location 2856-2856 | Added on Thursday, 3 September 2020 22:34:52
  
  Aiming at timelessness is a way to make yourself find the best answer:
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 189 | location 2888-2889 | Added on Thursday, 3 September 2020 22:41:45
  
  a good building, for example, will serve as a backdrop for whatever life people want to lead in it, instead of making them live as if they were executing a program written by the architect.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 192 | location 2943-2944 | Added on Thursday, 3 September 2020 22:49:46
  
  There are two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion. Recursion means repetition in subelements, like the pattern of veins in a leaf.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 195 | location 2990-2992 | Added on Saturday, 5 September 2020 21:37:39
  
  Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. Open source software has fewer bugs because it admits the possibility of bugs.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 199 | location 3039-3040 | Added on Saturday, 5 September 2020 22:38:21
  
  We aren’t, and the reason is that to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 216 | location 3307-3308 | Added on Saturday, 5 September 2020 23:05:08
  
  A program is a formal description of the problem you want a computer to solve for you.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 260 | location 3985-3987 | Added on Tuesday, 8 September 2020 21:31:57
  
  If you start a startup, don’t design your product to please VCs or potential acquirers. Design your product to please the users. If you win the users, everything else will follow. And if you don’t, no one will care how comfortingly orthodox your technology choices were.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 287 | location 4388-4389 | Added on Wednesday, 9 September 2020 22:44:33
  
  “The best writing is rewriting,” wrote E. B. White. Every good writer knows this, and it’s true for software too. The most important part of design is redesign.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 287 | location 4398-4400 | Added on Wednesday, 9 September 2020 22:45:20
  
  The trick is to realize that there’s no real contradiction here. You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you’ve got so far.
  ==========
  Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From the Computer Age (Paul Graham)
  - Your Highlight on page 292 | location 4465-4469 | Added on Wednesday, 9 September 2020 22:51:44
  
  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.
  ==========
• 
  Vasiliy Sikorskiy

  Книга из тех, которые расширяют взгляд и приносят эстетическое удовольствие в процессе чтения. Хотя она по структуре похожа больше на набор больших лонгридов из фейсбука. Стоит заметить, что ее автор (Пол Грэм) это фаундер Y-Combinator - самого топового стартап-акселератора США, а то и мира. В то же время стоит заметить, что книга написана в 2004 году, когда YC и в помине не было. Однако о глубине мышле��ия и о масштабе автора можно судить.
  
  В целом, все выстроено в книге вокург айти, стартапов и "хакеров". Обо всем этом он много и подробно рассуждает. Рассуждает интересно, часто глядя с очень нестандартной стороны. Хакерами он называет очень умных и очень увлеченных программированием ребят. В целом, из книги следует, что их он относит к некоей высшей расе (как и стартаперов, как и отрасль айти в целом). Это в какие-то моменты может немного напрягать, несмотря на то что я сам себя так или иначе отношу к каждой из этих категорий.
  
  Первая половина книги в принципе очень интересная, где он рассуждает про то, почему nerds are so unpopular, как устроено создание богатство в обществе, что такое стартап и какие идеи были смешными (или даже опасными) 300 лет назад и стали естественными сегодня. Но вторая половина книги становится слишком технической, он уходит в специфичные детали - почему язык программирования Lisp лучше других, каким будет идеальный язык программирования через 100 лет и т.д. Это читать уже сильно менее интересно, потому что книга написана 15 лет назад, я не настолько погружен в программирование, чтобы дискутировать с автором и в итоге возникает ощущение, что читаешь просто из уважения к глубине мысли автора.
  
  Из выводов и интересных мыслей для себя.
  1. Я еще больше стал сомневаться в разумности отдавания ребенка в школу. Он своими рассуждениями усилил мои сомнения. Школа это удобно для родителя, но не факт, что продуктивно для ребенка. Идеальная модель, на мой взгляд, это правильно собранный микс образовательных активностей.
  2. Интересный взгляд на то, что есть стартап. По мнению автора, это 50 лет, спресованные в 2-4 года по интенсивности и сложности деятельности. И сделать это может далеко не каждый. Тот, кто может работать в разы продуктивнее, чем работают в среднем, и тот, кто может работать сильно больше, чем работают в среднем. В целом, мне видится это справедливым.
  3. Что-то наподобие того, что если бы я выбирал страну, где жить, и развилка была бы между богатым в бедной стране или бедным в богатой стране, то я бы без сомнений выбрал второе. И в целом все разумно обосновано. Да, к сожалению, это так. Это удар под дых в болевую область текущего положения России по сравнению со Штатами и Китаем. К сожалению, наши дети уже находятся в отстающих позициях по сравнению с другими детьми из стран выше.
  4. Отличный совет про развилку в решениях по развитию стартапов. Да и не только стартапов, а и в личной стратегии. Если не можешь выбрать, куда именно идти и что именно делать, то выбирай наиболее сложное решение. Не наиболее ресурсозатратное, а наиболее непонятное и интеллектуально-емкое. Это сильно отстроит тебя от конкурентов. Хотя стоит помнить и о том, что в тяжелой ситуации начинай с того, чтобы собирать "низко висящие фрукты".
  5. Ну и много всего другого, про позитивность различий в доходах у разных людей, про важность первых десяти людей в бизнесе, про два необходимых качества при работе в стартапе - измеримость деятельности каждого и большое плечо его действий.
  
  Короче говоря, большую часть книги читал с удовольствием. Наслаждаясь общением с очень умным собеседником. Если бы я был больше подкован технически, то наверное вообще бы очень кайфанул.