Favorite PG essay? | Hacker News Reader

Favorite PG essay?

14 pointsterpua21 comments

http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

My fellow friends and I identify :)

Beating The Averages http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

That's the one that cured me of trying to evangelize Lisp. If the combination of pg's success and pg's essays wasn't going to win people over, nothing was.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html - What You'll Wish You'd Known

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html my all time fav.

While I'd pick Hackers and Painters, my favorite few paragraphs come from "Why to not not start a startup."

http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html

I find the comparison of a job to serfdom to be unsettling. Of course, a modern day cubicle dweller isn't living the kind of life of a medieval serf, but that won't necessarily stop people in the future from looking back on the lives of most people in the early 21st century with pity, wondering how they could have lived with so little personal freedom.

It's not just the analogy, it's the optimism. One reason I'm so behind the new tech economy is that it's about more than business and money - this is about changing the rules. Even if you don't start a startup, or work for one, the way you work and live may be changed, much for the better, if startups prove that people who work freely and own their results dramatically outperform the serfdom of the cubicle dweller. I hope that we can prove that there's no hope in running a cubicle dwelling company - you will simply be thrashed and outperformed by more nimble startups.

Forced to choose one, I'd say What Business Can Learn From Open Source (http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html). I've felt that stuff for a long time but I was never able to articulate it like PG did. Now I just give people that essay and tell them "This will help explain where I'm coming from."

Wow... I somehow managed to skip this one. Great read.

I, however, cannot get rid of the feeling that in open source world there is always one or two "few" who get all the credit (money, fame) for work of many.

Working on something you love is a wonderful thing, but in a realm of all acitivtes required to build something, not everything is a subject of someone's love. In other words, someone will always have to get paid to clean the restrooms.

ditto

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Succinctness is power -- http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html -- probably the best article for a language designer. Not only succinctness is power, it turns out to be the most important quality of a good programming language. The rest is a matter of taste, I think.

Hackers and Painters http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

See also my view on this here: http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-computa...

I don't think I would have survived high school if I hadn't read "Why Nerds Are Unpopular".

My favorite one is: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

And this one really inspired me. http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

What You'll Wish You'd Known: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

Beating the Averages and The Python Paradox

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

"What you can't say" is definitely one that struck a chord. In fact, my paraphrasing the article online is the way I met my husband, so thanks Paul :)

Do you have a link to this, ahem, "engaging" paraphrase?

Sorry, but it's not online anymore. Though if you're curious, it was the part of the essay about people using words that don't mean anything.

No but seriously, what the hell does it mean to be "offended?"

http://paulgraham.com/essay.html

The Power of the Marginal

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