Paul Graham Quotes

Empathy is probably the single most important difference between a good hacker and a great one.

The third worry of the pointy-haired boss, the difficulty of hiring programmers, I think is a red herring. How many hackers do you need to hire, after all? Surely by now we all know that software is best developed by teams of less than ten people. And you shouldn’t have trouble hiring hackers on that scale for any language anyone has ever heard of. If you can’t find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. In fact, choosing a more powerful language probably decreases the size of the team you need, because (a) if you use a more powerful language, you probably won’t need as many hackers, and (b) hackers who work in more advanced languages are likely to be smarter.

The sweet spot for present-day AI seems to be projects that were constrained by the rate at which humans could produce text. That's why it works so well for programming. Basically programmers produced valuable text. But there are lots of other projects with this quality.

One big advantage Google has over Microsoft when they were having the paradigm shifted out from under them is not being run by Steve Ballmer.

Once it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, society as a whole started to get richer very rapidly. Nearly everything we have was created by the middle class. Indeed, the other two classes have effectively disappeared in industrial societies, and their names been given to either end of the middle class. (In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates is middle class.)

AI will be very good at attributing paintings. The clues you use in attribution are exactly the kind it's good at. And this is going to generate some interesting news, because misattributions in both directions are common.

A selection process will be unbiased only if (a) the later performance of those selected is measured and (b) the selectors are judged according to this.

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.

When mechanical watches became obsolete around 1970 they represented almost exactly 700 years of refinement by some of the best minds of their time. That is a really long run.

I don't agree with Elon about everything, but you have to give him this: He's achieved much more than roughly 100% of his critics.

Expressing yourself well compounds. You don't just understand your current ideas better. You're also more likely to have the new ideas that follow from them.

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.

Most people don't realize that the word "dated" doesn't mean old-fashioned. Something can be both dated and also perfectly aligned with current fashions. Indeed, it's almost certain that something perfectly aligned with current fashions is also dated.

You can go anywhere in books

The success of Apple's new microprocessors (combined with Intel's failure) has upset a lot of people's predictions. It's pretty impressive for an established company to throw everyone a curve ball on that scale.