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61 " In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. "
― Paul Graham , Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
62 " If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage. "
63 " Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. "
64 " To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy. "
65 " why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it. "
66 " To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. "
― Paul Graham
67 " Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don’t let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world. "
68 " A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate. "
69 " A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even neg- ative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. "
70 " In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called “corruption”) when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich. "
71 " Always produce. "
72 " learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code. "
73 " One of the less publicized benefits of the open source movement is that it has made it easier to learn to program. "
74 " GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially, less is more. It means much the same thing in programming. For architects and designers, it means that beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. "
75 " looking at things from other people’s point of view is practically the secret of success. "
76 " If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility. "
77 " Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why. "
78 " Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them.Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. "
79 " Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated. "
80 " If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage. "