Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning i… - Paul Graham

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Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.

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About Paul Graham

Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.

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A math problem with a built-in dad joke: if a circular cake a foot in diameter is shared equally between 36 people, how big a slice does each one get?
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The artist who occupies the most space in my brain is Stanley Badmin. Almost every day I look at the world and think "Badmin."
X @paulg (November 13, 2025)
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