Ask HN: What does PG mean here?
"When you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them back."[0]
[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
> But it's particularly hard for hackers to know how good they are, because it's hard to compare their work. This is easier in most other fields. In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest. Even in math there seems to be a general consensus about which problems are hard to solve, and what constitutes a good solution. But hacking is like writing. Who can say which of two novels is better? Certainly not the authors.
> *With hackers, at least, other hackers can tell. That's because, unlike novelists, hackers collaborate on projects. When you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them back. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. So if you ask a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know. He's not just being modest. He really doesn't know.
PG's using some kind of sport (baseball?) analogy... you send problems out to other people (the ball) and find out how well and easily they solve them (hit them back). In other words, by interacting with other hackers on collaborative projects like open-source development, you quickly learn how good other hackers are because you can see how they solve problems, so you develop a more objective judgement of the relative strengths of hackers that is harder to achieve with some other professions.