Category Archives: Engineer

Six Principles for Making New Things

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Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

If you work on overlooked problems, you’re more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own.

— Paul Graham

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2010.06.18 Friday ACHK

Startup

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The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question:

what do you wish someone would make for you?

— Paul Graham

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2010.06.10 Thursday ACHK

Information should be free

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I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses… When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.

— Richard Stallman 1990

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2010.05.15 Saturday ACHK

Transcender

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One of the most useful mental habits I know I learned from Michael Rabin: that the best way to solve a problem is often to redefine it.

The way to kill it is to redefine the problem as a superset of the current one. The problem is not, what operating system should people use on desktop computers? but how should people use applications? There are answers to that question that don’t even involve desktop computers.

Everyone thinks Google is going to solve this problem, but it is a very subtle one, so subtle that a company as big as Google might well get it wrong. I think the odds are better than 50-50 that the Windows killer– or more accurately, Windows transcender— will come from some little startup.

— Paul Graham

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2010.03.15 Monday ACHK

Hacker ethic

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Hacker 4

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* Access to computers — and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works — should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!

* All information should be free.

* Mistrust authority — promote decentralization.

* Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position.

* You can create art and beauty on a computer.

* Computers can change your life for the better.

… free and open source software allows hackers to access the code used to create the software to improve or reuse it. In effect the free and open source software movements embody all of the hacker ethics.

— Wikipedia on Hacker ethic

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[10] Hacker here means a highly skilled programmer, not a computer criminal. — Me

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them. — Eric S. Raymond

“In academia, a “hacker” is a person who follows a spirit of playful cleverness and enjoys programming.”

– Wikipedia on Hacker (academia)

2010.03.05 Friday  ACHK

Hacker 3

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The Jargon File has had a special role in acculturating hackers since its origins in the early 1970s. Many textbooks and some literary works shaped the academic hacker subculture; among the most influential are:

* Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy
* Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter
* The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), by Donald Knuth
* The Mythical Man-Month, by Brooks
* Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (“the Dragon Book”), by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman
* Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), by Abelson and Sussman
* The C Programming Language (K&R), by Kernighan and Ritchie
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
* The Tao of Programming, by Geoffrey James
* The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
* Principia Discordia, by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley
* The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
* The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll
* The Unix System, by Stephen R. Bourne
* Hackers & Painters, by Paul Graham
* The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond
* The essays of Richard M. Stallman (many published in Free Software, Free Society: Select Essays of Richard M. Stallman)

— Wikipedia on Hacker (programmer subculture)

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[10] “Hacker” here means a highly skilled programmer, not a computer criminal. — Me

The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them. — Eric S. Raymond

In academia, a “hacker” is a person who follows a spirit of playful cleverness and enjoys programming.

— Wikipedia on Hacker (academia)

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2010.03.04 Thursday ACHK

Hacker 2

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* Creating software and sharing it with each other
* Placing a high value on freedom of inquiry; hostility to secrecy
* Information-sharing as both an ideal and a practical strategy
* Upholding the right to fork
* Emphasis on rationality
* Distaste for authority
* Playful cleverness, taking the serious humorously and their humor seriously

The difference between hackers and crackers, according to them, is that where hackers use their skills and knowledge to learn more about how systems and networks work, crackers will use the same skills to author harmful software (like viruses, trojans, etc.) and illegally infiltrate secure systems with the intention of doing harm to the system.

「hacker」們建設，而「cracker」們破壞。

真實的黑客所指主要指的是高級程式員，… 而不是為人所誤解專指對電腦系統及程式進行惡意攻擊及破壞的人。

— Wikipedia on Hacker (programmer subculture)

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2010.03.03 Wednesday ACHK

Design and Research

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The difference between design and research seems to be a question of new versus good. Design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but actually worth solving. So ultimately we’re aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

— Paul Graham

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2010.02.25 Thursday ACHK

Zero cost

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First, the Internet lets anyone find you at almost zero cost. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth. Together these mean that in many fields the rule will be: Build it, and they will come. Make something great and put it online. That is a big change from the recipe for winning in the past century.

— Paul Graham

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2010.02.23 Tuesday ACHK

The Open Cage

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Have you ever noticed that when animals are let out of cages, they don’t always realize at first that the door’s open? Often they have to be poked with a stick to get them out. Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. … it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.

— Paul Graham

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2010.02.11 Thursday ACHK

Information Age

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Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller.

— Paul Graham

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2010.02.07 Sunday ACHK