Great Throughts Treasury

"In a sense there?s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want."

"In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortably routine. It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall."

"In essence, let the market design the product."

"In a low-tech society you don't see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous."

"In previous elections, we've had voting stations overrun by panicky mobs, and there's been a bit more obvious intimidation."

"In programming, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve."

"In the startup world, 'not working' is normal."

"Instagram is an anomaly, not a sort of thing you can reproduce. One reason that you're hearing people talk about high valuations is that companies are taking much longer to go public. Yes, prices are high. But there is a difference between high prices and a bubble. Valuations are high, which means they will probably go down, and then they will go back up again and then down. But a bubble is a different thing. A bubble is when people knowingly pay ridiculously high valuations hoping to sell their assets to a greater fool later. And that's not going on now. No one is thinking that they're going to fund this company and it's going to go public and stupid retail investors are going to buy these overpriced stocks at an even higher price. I know these people. That's not their motivation."

"It is clear that a substantial section of the public believes what she did was undermining good governance, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of this particular case. This suggests the presidency will have to reformulate the guidelines in an appropriate manner."

"It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant to let hackers work on open-source projects. At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn't. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own."

"It?s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy."

"It will take more experience to know for sure, but my guess is that a lot of hackers could do this-- that if you put people in a position of independence, they develop the qualities they need. Throw them off a cliff, and most will find on the way down that they have wings."

"Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage: the pain is a memory as soon as you feel it."

"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."

"It?s OK to start out with a small idea. People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them? If you try to do some big thing, you don?t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it?s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better."

"It's not so important what you [high school students] work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take."

"It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology."

"I've written a lot about what a bitch the start-up world is. So, maybe the other incubators are underselling, but we're not. That being said, everyone is surprised by how difficult it turns out to be, because it's not the kind of difficulty people have experienced before. That's one reason you want to have something like Y Combinator, because not a lot of money or time is at risk. So we're totally OK with funding people who seem promising and earnest, and then, if it turns out to be too hard for them, that's all right. Nobody knows what they're capable of until they try it. Maybe half a percent of people have the brains and sheer determination to do this kind of thing. Start-ups are hard but doable, in the way that running a five-minute mile is hard but doable."

"Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on."

"I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up."

"It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take."

"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?"

"Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world."

"Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself."

"Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school."

"Nerds just don't happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as prophylactic measure against stupidity."

"No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination."

"Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches."

"One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies."

"Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems."

"One thing that leads us astray here is that the selector seems to be in a position of power. That makes him seem like a judge. If you regard someone judging you as a customer instead of a judge, the expectation of fairness goes away. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Stupid, perhaps, but not unfair."

"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."

"People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you?ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don?t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it?s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That?s the way the government does things. They do something really big that?s really bad, and they think, Well, we?ll make it better, and then it never gets better."

"Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just that line but the whole program around it. John McPhee wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision. "Perfect'' eyesight means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision. Bill Bradley had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor. Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability."

"Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being water-boarded."

"Start-ups fail for the same reasons restaurants do: their food is bad. If a place has really good food, it can be in an obscure location, charge a lot, and have really bad service, and it will still be popular. If it has bad food, boy, it better do something really special to get anybody in there. Which is why we say, ?Make something people want.? That?s the fundamental problem. If you die, it?s probably because you didn?t make something people wanted."

"Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it is possible, but it requires extraordinary effort."

"Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part."

"She was the type of person you just felt was going to succeed in whatever she did. She was quite lively and outgoing."

"Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup."

"So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original."

"Some people just get what they want in the world."

"Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."

"Startups almost never get it right the first time. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares. Don?t assume when this happens that you?ve failed. That?s normal for startups. But don?t sit around doing nothing. Iterate."

"Start-ups are hard but doable, in the way that running a five-minute mile is hard but doable."

"Startups often have to do dubious things."

"Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"The first type of judgment is the type where judging you is the end goal... But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgments where judging you is only a means to something else."

"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."

"The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices."