Great Hackers

Paul Graham wrote an essay called ‘Great Hackers‘. I’m pretentious enough to call myself a hacker (though I do not claim to be great), so I had to jump on it!

Here are some juicy quotes…

Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They’ll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. Not just because it’s better, but because it gives them more control.

They [great hackers] work in cosy, neighborhoody places with people around and somewhere to walk when they need to mull something over, instead of in glass boxes set in acres of parking lots.

There’s no way around it: you can’t manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is.

And this is the reason that high-tech areas only happen around universities. The active ingredient here is not so much the professors as the students. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on the same projects. The smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and together they cook up new projects of their own.

If you’re worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is.

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

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