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.
Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.
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.
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.
You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.
Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel.
Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.
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.
A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that’s what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.
One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program.
Keep your identity small.
When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.
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.
There are plenty of other ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting. Most of the greatest fortunes have probably involved several of these.
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.
The spirit of resistance to government,” Jefferson wrote, “is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
Programmers tend to be divided into tribes by the languages they use. More even than by the kinds of programs they write.
The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.