Paul Graham - Essays

When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a year, they have to get jobs. The idea is to show them how awful the real world is, so they'll understand how lucky they are to be in college. This plan backfired with the guy who came to work for us, because he had more fun than he'd had in school, and made more that year from stock options than any of his professors did in salary. So instead of crawling back repentant at the end of the year, he took another year off and went to Europe. He did eventually graduate at about 26.

[3] Eric Raymond says the best metaphors for hackers are in set theory, combinatorics, and graph theory.

Trevor Blackwell reminds you to take math classes intended for math majors. "'Math for engineers' classes sucked mightily. In fact any 'x for engineers' sucks, where x includes math, law, writing and visual design."

[4] Other highly recommended books: What is Mathematics? , by Courant and Robbins; Geometry and the Imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. And for those interested in graphic design, Byrne's Euclid.

[5] If you wanted to have the perfect life, the thing to do would be to go to grad school, secretly write your dissertation in the first year or two, and then just enjoy yourself for the next three years, dribbling out a chapter at a time. This prospect will make grad students' mouths water, but I know of no one who's had the discipline to pull it off.

[6] One professor friend says that 15-20% of the grad students they admit each year are "long shots." But what he means by long shots are people whose applications are perfect in every way, except that no one on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations.

So if you want to get into grad school in the sciences, you need to go to college somewhere with real research professors. Otherwise you'll seem a risky bet to admissions committees, no matter how good you are.

Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts colleges are doomed. Most smart high school kids at least consider going into the sciences, even if they ultimately choose not to. Why go to a college that limits their options?

Thanksto Trevor Blackwell, Alex Lewin, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, and several anonymous CS professors for reading drafts of this, and to the students whose questions began it.

(A lot of people ask for advice about writing. In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes-- 23 of writing, and 44 of rewriting. But as an experiment I put it online. It is at least extremely dense.)

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 generated.

As for how to write well, here's the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it over and over; cut out everything unnecessary; write in a conversational tone; develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours; imitate writers you like; if you can't get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong; be confident enough to cut; have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag; don't (always) make detailed outlines; mull ideas over for a few days before writing; carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you; start writing when you think of the first sentence; if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first; write about stuff you like; don't try to sound impressive; don't hesitate to change the topic on the fly; use footnotes to contain digressions; use anaphora to knit sentences together; read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading); try to tell the reader something new and useful; work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far; when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with; accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don't feel obliged to cover any of them; write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately; ask friends which sentence you'll regret most; go back and tone down harsh remarks; publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas; print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen; use simple, germanic words; learn to distinguish surprises from digressions; learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

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 Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

For most of us, it's not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker's computer.

In the fall of 1983, the professor in one of my college CS classes got up and announced, like a prophet, that there would soon be a computer with half a MIPS of processing power that would fit under an airline seat and cost so little that we could save enough to buy one from a summer job. The whole room gasped. And when the Mac appeared, it was even better than we'd hoped. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. But it was also something we'd never considered a computer could be: fabulously well designed.

I had to have one. And I wasn't alone. In the mid to late 1980s, all the hackers I knew were either writing software for the Mac, or wanted to. Every futon sofa in Cambridge seemed to have the same fat white book lying open on it. If you turned it over, it said "Inside Macintosh."

Then came Linux and FreeBSD, and hackers, who follow the most powerful OS wherever it leads, found themselves switching to Intel boxes. If you cared about design, you could buy a Thinkpad, which was at least not actively repellent, if you could get the Intel and Microsoft stickers off the front. [1]

With OS X, the hackers are back. When I walked into the Apple store in Cambridge, it was like coming home. Much was changed, but there was still that Apple coolness in the air, that feeling that the show was being run by someone who really cared, instead of random corporate deal-makers.

So what, the business world may say. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? How big is the hacker market, after all?

Quite small, but important out of proportion to its size. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.

I remember telling my father back in 1986 that there was a new kind of computer called a Sun that was a serious Unix machine, but so small and cheap that you could have one of your own to sit in front of, instead of sitting in front of a VT100 connected to a single central Vax. Maybe, I suggested, he should buy some stock in this company. I think he really wishes he'd listened.