Paul Graham

If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.

If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was a kid, were uncool. They were dull and responsible and had no fun. And while it's not surprising that kids would believe that, to be honest I hadn't seen much as...

When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from...

An essay has to tell people something they don't already know. But there are three different reasons people might not know something, and they yield three very different kinds of essays.

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. It can have nice, flowing sentences, and it can draw correct conclusions about important things. It might seem as if these two kinds of...

What should one do? That may seem a strange question, but it's not meaningless or unanswerable. It's the sort of question kids ask before they learn not to ask big questions. I only came across it myself in the process of investigating...

The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:

I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write.

There's some debate about whether it's a good idea to "follow your passion." In fact the question is impossible to answer with a simple yes or no. Sometimes you should and sometimes you shouldn't, but the border between should and...

At a YC event last week Brian Chesky gave a talk that everyone who was there will remember. Most founders I talked to afterward said it was the best they'd ever heard. Ron Conway, for the first time in his life, forgot to take notes. I'm...

Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.

YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came up on the train from the University of...

_(This is a talk I gave to 14 and 15 year olds about what to do now if they might want to start a startup later. Lots of schools think they should tell students something about startups. This is what I think they should tell them.)_

It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about.

One of the most important things I didn't understand about the world when I was a child is the degree to which the returns for performance are superlinear.

_(Someone fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.)_

In the science fiction books I read as a kid, reading had often been replaced by some more efficient way of acquiring knowledge. Mysterious "tapes" would load it into one's brain like a program being loaded into a computer.

Since I was about 9 I've been puzzled by the apparent contradiction between being made of matter that behaves in a predictable way, and the feeling that I could choose to do whatever I wanted. At the time I had a self-interested motive...

If there were intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, they'd share certain truths in common with us. The truths of mathematics would be the same, because they're true by definition. Ditto for the truths of physics; the mass of a...

I recently told applicants to Y Combinator that the best advice I could give for getting in, per word, was

In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

to get them exactly right. And your ideas won't just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that's why I write them. Once you publish...

_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)_

If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have...

When people say that in their experience all programming languages are basically equivalent, they're making a statement not about languages but about the kind of programming they've done.

One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous...

A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This made me as happy as anything I've heard him say — not just because he was excited...

Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason:...

There's one kind of opinion I'd be very afraid to express publicly. If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous, I'd be very reluctant to say "That will never work."

Noora Health, a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launched a new NFT. It has a dramatic name,

When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given to some...

Every year since 1982, _Forbes_ magazine has published a list of the richest Americans. If we compare the 100 richest people in 1982 to the 100 richest in 2020, we notice some big differences.

I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.

Before college the two main things I worked on, outside of school, were writing and programming. I didn't write essays. I wrote what beginning writers were supposed to write then, and probably still are: short stories. My stories were...

Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to describe them as "earnest." This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You could be...

As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same.

To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb.

There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't...

One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even...

One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the...

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions." — Einstein

When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that I'm old, I know this isn't true.

_(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)_

There are two distinct ways to be politically moderate: on purpose and by accident. Intentional moderates are trimmers, deliberately choosing a position mid-way between the extremes of right and left. Accidental moderates end up in the...

I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.

The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.

If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy.

Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.

Ordinarily, the best that people can do is one without the other: either surprising without being general (e.g. gossip), or general without being surprising (e.g. platitudes).

People who are powerful but uncharismatic will tend to be disliked. Their power makes them a target for criticism that they don't have the charisma to disarm. That was Hillary Clinton's problem. It also tends to be a problem for any CEO...

Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become the...

_(This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk, Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.)_

Since there didn't seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.

I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a company called Y Combinator that helps people start startups. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds, its founders become rich. Which means by helping startup...

One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The...

YC had 4 founders. Jessica and I decided one night to start it, and the next day we recruited my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica and I ran YC day to day, and Robert and Trevor read applications and did interviews with...

This will come as a surprise to a lot of people, but in some cases it's possible to detect bias in a selection process without knowing anything about the applicant pool. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties...

Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.

When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last...

The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used to be for getting users. The problem with not having the .com of your name is that...

Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice --> -

No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it.

My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.

What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? --> -

Corporate Development, aka corp dev, is the group within companies that buys other companies. If you're talking to someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet or not.

I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several...

Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in the bank, they're also losing a lot each month, and revenue growth is either nonexistent or mediocre. The company...

Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In --> -

It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.

How to Be an Expert in a Changing World --> -

_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.)_

Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few...

The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes...

When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to...

One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a...

_(This talk was written for an audience of investors.)_

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making...

I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing.

A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. Her list seems plausible. I could see myself — _can_ see myself — making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.

I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is...

Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday.

As a child I read a book of stories about a famous judge in eighteenth century Japan called Ooka Tadasuke. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. A poor student who could afford only rice was eating his rice...

A year ago I noticed a pattern in the least successful startups we'd funded: they all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.

There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call _schlep blindness_. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means...

Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas --> -

A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.

If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.

I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem without waiting for the government.

Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb. VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So that post is further evidence what a...

Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened.

I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile...

_(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.)_ **1. Determination**

After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one...

Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's...

The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock...

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly,...

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that...

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you...

The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.)_

When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not. There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social lies...

Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.

I bet you the current issue of _Cosmopolitan_ has an article whose title begins with a number. "7 Things He Won't Tell You about Sex," or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every...

Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on.

Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects. Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning, the last 9...

The Segway hasn't delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don't want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork.

Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails.

Recently I realized I'd been holding two ideas in my head that would explode if combined.

Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule --> -

I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have an administration that's open to suggestions, I'm going to risk making one. The single biggest thing the government could do to increase the number of startups in this country is a...

_Inc_ recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most? Who do...

A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at AngelConf.)_

About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word...

Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. --> -

What I've Learned from Hacker News --> -

I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.

A few months ago I read a _New York Times_ article on South Korean cram schools that said

For nearly all of history the success of a society was proportionate to its ability to assemble large and disciplined organizations. Those who bet on economies of scale generally won, which meant the largest organizations were the most...

One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over all the time....

Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? --> -

Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty...

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy --> -

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message...

The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company --> -

Procrastination feeds on distractions. Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else.

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_

Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.

There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about. This is one of them: a list of my heroes.

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we...

March 2008, rev May 2013 _(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to understand its implications.)_

A user on Hacker News recently posted a comment that set me thinking:

After the last talk I gave, one of the organizers got up on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before. I only heard the first few sentences, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that...

Six Principles for Making New Things --> -

_(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)_

In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying...

A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.

_(This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from...

A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught...

It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still see evidence of that if you look for it. For example, in my house in Cambridge, which was built in 1876, the bedrooms don't have closets. In those days people's...

An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him?

People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing jobs that boosted the median income....

_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at Stanford.)_

There are two different ways people judge you. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there's a second much more common type of judgement where it isn't. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We'd...

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd...

_(This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.)_

A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence. Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are smart, but not very wise. And yet...

_(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.)_

I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than anyone else's. There is no such thing as _good_ taste.

The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups --> -

_(This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.)_

August 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010 In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer present to investors. Y Combinator funds startups twice a year, in January and June. Ten weeks later we invite all...

July 2006 When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be...

I've discovered a handy test for figuring out what you're addicted to. Imagine you were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house on a little island off the coast of Maine. There are no shops on the island and you won't be able to...

_(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.)_

_(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_

_(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)_

The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn --> -

Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living." Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at Google.)_

A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a patent. It issued in 2003, but no one told me. I wouldn't know about it now except that a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I happened to run into a Big Cheese I knew...

Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started Y Combinator. Or more precisely, he asked if we'd started YC mainly for fun.

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?

Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are...

Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear.

In the next few years, venture capital funds will find themselves squeezed from four directions. They're already stuck with a seller's market, because of the huge amounts they raised at the end of the Bubble and still haven't invested....

_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)_

The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how well it went. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if I had to guess now, I'd predict three or four of the eight startups we funded will make it.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)_

Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder. That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job...

What Business Can Learn from Open Source --> -

_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)_

"Suits make a corporate comeback," says the _New York Times_. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February,

This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the...

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at...

I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. 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...

_(Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.)_

A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a "technologist in residence" at a new venture capital fund. I think the idea was to play Karl Rove to the VCs' George Bush.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)_

_(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.)_

_(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of Hackers & Painters. It tries to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)_

November 2004, corrected June 2006 Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory that will offend both liberals and...

November 2004 A lot of people are writing now about why Kerry lost. Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls so wrong? In Ohio, which Kerry ultimately lost 49-51, exit polls gave him a 52-48 victory. And...

Part of the reason it happens is that writers don't want people to see their mistakes. But I'm willing to let people see an early draft if it will show how much you have to rewrite to beat an essay into shape.

_(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)_

Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in _Moby Dick_ was a Christ-like figure.

In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.

_(This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.)_

When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between...

_(This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters.)_

To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who...

January 2004 Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? _Did we actually dress like that?_ We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the...

Why only do it in borderline cases? And why only do it once?

_(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated an earlier talk at Northeastern.)_

In languages, as in so many things, there's not much correlation between popularity and quality. Why does John Grisham (_King of Torts_ sales rank, 44) outsell Jane Austen (_Pride and Prejudice_ sales rank, 6191)? Would even Grisham...

_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)_

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E....

_(This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. It describes the work I've done to improve the performance of the algorithm described in A Plan for Spam, and what I plan to do in the future.)_

_(This article is derived from a keynote talk at the fall 2002 meeting of NEPLS.)_

_(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc. An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering.)_

"We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec

"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid." - Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture

**Algol:** Assembly language is too low-level. **Pascal:** Algol doesn't have enough data types.

"...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...." - Thomas Kuhn, _The Copernican Revolution_

Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented --> -

_(This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds.)_

_(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp — both in the sense...

Five Questions about Language Design --> -

_(This article was written as a kind of business plan for a new language. So it is missing (because it takes for granted) the most important feature of a good programming language: very powerful abstractions.)_

This essay developed out of conversations I've had with several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious. It's not a critique of Java! It is a case study of hacker's radar.

After a link to Beating the Averages was posted on slashdot, some readers wanted to hear in more detail about the specific technical advantages we got from using Lisp in Viaweb. For those who are interested, here are some excerpts from a...

_(This essay is from the introduction to_On Lisp_.)_

This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California --> -