Paul Graham

What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.

If you want to ensure that something you're writing has a sufficiently neutral point of view, imagine that you're an alien from another planet writing a report to your supervisors. But an alien with a sense of humor.

Most makers make things for a human audience. And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.

The standard to compare your software to is what it could be, not what your current competitors happen to have.

If you'll laugh about something one day, you may as well start now.

People tend to underestimate how much things can change, and this causes them to undervalue ideas that aren't viable now but could be in the future.

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.

Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.

Social networks are one of the rare counterexamples to the principle that you can discover the optimal product by following growth. In this domain there are local maxima. You're reading this on one.

think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don’t notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

If your startup's potential market is huge, make very conservative assumptions when estimating its size. There is nothing investors like more than an obviously conservative estimate that still ends up being huge.

Keep your identity small.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

This is always true, but it's truer now than usual.