About a year and a half ago, I was stuck for a week away from home traveling for work. Searching for something to read while I was gone, I popped into an Atlanta Barnes and Noble and futilely tried to find some books which were on my Amazon wish list. Of the five or six I looked for, they didn't seem to have any, save for "Hackers and Painters" (which required a storewide manhunt to track down where exactly they had decided to shelve it).

I read it in my hotel room that night and spent the rest of the week enthralled by the thought of quitting my job and working at a startup (either my own, or someone else's). When I got home, I told my girlfriend that I was possibly in the middle of something, and would need to take the next few weeks to decide if I was about to upend my (our) life. She was understandably nonplussed by this discussion.

Fast-forward a few weeks and I managed to come back down from the ledge. It may have just been the comfort of home, or the general inertia of a content over-priviledged life; but I reverted back to my previous plans, and set aside the fanciful notion of slaying dragons and working at a startup.

So by all means, you should read it. Just be careful about your mindset when you do, lest you also be swept away by notions of ramen dinners and liquidity events. Like a call to the sea, it has the potential to plant itself in your mind and than drive you mad if unheeded. You've been warned.

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."

Startups in my portfolio at CRV (we're the guys that funded Twitter, Yammer, Millennial Media...) have plenty of cash and I think you'll make more money working in a startup and enjoy life more.

There is no risk, because if the startup fails, you move to the next one. Silicon Valley is like working in a big company with multiple divisions: you may change 'departments', but you're still working for something where everything loosely aligns as the same goal.

Startups can be huge successes personally and financially, but there’s definitely risk.

Nothing wrong with entrepreneurship. I just find it grating when the benefits are expounded by people who take the exact opposite deal, in terms of asymmetric risk.

My response was in the context of being an employee. I was an employee at a 5,000 person consulting firm in Australia when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and I had more fear losing my job then then when I moved to recession-plagued America in 2009 to work at a search-engine startup (and Australia has been one of the strongest economies in that period since). In fact, I was paid more (in salary, not counting options), given more responsibility, and enjoyed life more.

buzzkill

That you would consider it a ledge, means you made the right choice, for yourself. On the other hand, many people see the chance to create or work at a start-up a positive opportunity that they can benefit from regardless of the outcome.

What I was trying to convey, was that even someone like myself (pretty much without an entrepreneurial bone in my body) was so enraptured by the thought of it after reading the book that I almost did it. The book is powerful mojo.

It's not rocket science- just time consuming.

What made me realize this was going to Africa and seeing lots of animals in the wild. All or nearly all the big mammals lived in groups and cooperated to survive. It was clear that our ancestors would in their day have been one of these groups, also cooperating to survive (as hunter-gatherers still do in a few places), and that their cooperative inclinations were probably genetically preprogrammed.

If so then people's problem with inequality is not a learned behavior. It simply feels wrong to humans.

That doesn't mean they're right. The Monte Carlo fallacy feels right to humans, but it isn't. But it does probably mean that people are happier, all other things being equal, when there is less inequality.

Of course you have to balance this against (a) other, equally deeply held traditions, like not stealing, and (b) the slower technological/economic growth you get when you ban being rich.

If we're genetically constructed to feel unhappy about something, and we build a society that makes that thing true, then it seems as though we are manufacturing suffering, and we should seek to reduce it.

From what perspective can it be 'right' to knowingly maintain a society where the majority of people are guaranteed to suffer?

Also - isn't there a giant difference between 'banning being rich', and making it possible for a reasonable number of people to share in prosperity. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that the US was more prosperous when there was less inequality, and yet there were always some very rich people.

It does seem as though political opinion is moving in the direction of reducing attempts to mitigate then problem at the low end.

Also unconsidered is the idea that one period of adaptation early in one's life is no longer enough, and that is a new consequence of technological change that wasn't true during the heyday of the large corporation.

If the 'poor' and 'middle classes' simply don't have the resources to devote to accomodating change and developing new skills, their position will be systematically enforced. Information may be more widely available than ever, but learning still takes a long time and requires practice, and tacit knowledge is ever more important.

Isn't it disingenuous to infer that this inclination should not imply anything about economic policy? I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. Economics are sentiment driven by a huge factor. Robert Shiller's work in behavioral economics and his book Irrational exuberance has established and popularized this idea. Krugman's discussion of the unsuitability of BitCoin as a currency rests largely on the peculiar nature of human sentiment and behavior. Large income gaps are perceived by most people as unfair irrespective of the contributions by the wealthy. No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. I don't think the association of the net worth of an individual to the contribution that they have made to society is very strong. Economies rewards people largely on the basis of demand/supply with I believe is a weak proxy for social contributions.

Perhaps you want to draw an analogy to say gay marriage where the popular vote might end up denying gay rights, but I don't think a similar argument holds in the case of wealth distribution.

Um, I do.

But I think that this sentence is unfair for Einstein.

  When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other 
  people were able to understand it.

However, the General theory was a far greater achievement than the Special theory, because the idea of mass influencing the geometry of space-time was far less obvious and it may have been a decade before anyone else would have investigated that possibility. Nevertheless: someone else would have come up with it. Einstein was no greater than any of the other great physicists of the time, who each had brilliant idea. Einstein just happened to have one that became widely known.

But it is really off topic. Let's say Einstein and his contemporaries are more important than Bill, the guy who really made DOS, and the first few MS employees, but obviously the later group is a lot wealthier.

This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.

> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity

They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.

This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.

In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1st_Movement

Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.

And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field.

I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible.

However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.

Gates is a tremendous example of modern capitalism - ie leveraging regulatory capture. Microsoft, as an unneeded but forcibly installed middleman, has been a drain on the economy. Broken windows for everyone.

Windows is a better corporate OS than any of the alternatives and Office is an awesome piece of software by any standard.

While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.

Hardware is king - try executing your code manually if you disagree. Try wiring the world with a particularly clever algorithm or executing that massively parallel algorithm on a single-core CPU.

When he says software is king he means that it's profitable to dominate because its incremental costs are minimal. And with the DMCA preventing reverse engineering, software patents preventing use of trivial algorithms, etc, they're assuring the monarchy will last forever.

> If Apple/Amiga had won that round we [...]

... could still have a free market where competitors weren't locked out before they started.

Microsoft delivered crippled products to its customers specifically to preserve its marketshare. If I did that as a consultant it'd be criminal.

> poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.

Hardware is ultimately fungible so the same boom would have occurred regardless. The boom was happening before MS and the PC, and before Apple too.

Just as an example, it'd be as reasonable to credit RMS for the hardware commoditization as Gates. Stallman was largely personally responsible for reinventing proprietary lisp-machine functionality. By killing off one of the most potentially profitable specialized hardware companies Stallman started the commodity hardware trend.

If anyone really influenced it though it was one of the computing pioneers like Turing simply by proving computational equivalence. After that it's a given.

There's a world of difference between "ban being rich" and "resist oligarchy with progressive taxation, investment in public services, infrastructure, research, and consumer-friendly laws and protections."

Makers versus takers...

However, there's another aspect of inequality: when a significantly large number of people are living in poverty, while others are "filthy rich". In this context, the issue is real and important, and people are right in being concerned about it.

Even though the word inequality means merely "not equal" and could very well refer to the fact that some people are rich while some other aren't, I think that what most people really mean by "inequality" is the second case: where some people are extremely poor while some others are extremely rich.

You may have read a very famous book by Jared Diamond called "Guns, Germs and Steel" which won the '98 Pulitzer in nonfiction. A lot of these conversations about wealth and equality (and why they are not equal among different sets of society, or among countries) are addressed in the book. This is definitely a life-changing read worth looking into.

Because you might be really (really) busy, I also recommend a short article that sumarizes a lot of the themes in an interesting way: http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/SocJusticeRes.pdf Cheers - Jamison

Equality/inequality is, I think, a cultural factor. Culture is also subject to some sort of evolution process, which means that some inventions got lost, but some remain and evolve. So, more equal society is indeed more stable and healthy. You might not see so intense struggling or competition which means less innovation and so-called progress, but innovations or progress aren't among ultimate goals of the process of human evolution.

I would assume the same practice were true for most hunter-gatherer societies. But one aspect that led to this "wealth" sharing is the fact that in primitive societies people living in the same community were closely genetically related.

Matt Ridley touches tangentially on this topic in his book "The Origins of Virtue".

I'm not sure living in groups and cooperating implies a genetic predisposition to equality. Even though a group might have, say, twenty to fifty members, some members tend to rule and others tend to hang on the outskirts. I'd pick Venkat Rao's division into Sociopaths, Clueless, and Losers (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) as the best way to divide up types of people in such a group. He writes about their role in businesses, but it's the same in a small societal group. The Sociopaths are the jocks who absolutely must have the power, eat the most food, and have the most offspring. The Losers are the ones who live at the edge of the group, eat the least food, and be eaten first by predators. The Clueless are the majority who follow the Sociopaths' rules and rise slowly through the group hierarchy to their natural level of competence.

Perhaps society is best modeled as a cell, where the Sociopaths are the nucleus and the Losers are the membrane. It does seem to be a male-oriented model, where females act more like glue, facilitating relationships. The male Sociopaths would have two or more females each, eat the food, feed the women, and produce the most offspring. The male Clueless would only have one female and follow whatever other rules the Sociopaths impose, and get food based on their rank in society. Perhaps the females overall are most similar to male Clueless in this model.

The male Losers would be the first to miss out on the food, not get any girls, and die young, being the first to be sacrificed to predators. And maybe there's the reason why Sociopaths naturally shun any interaction with Losers, going through the Clueless intermediaries, as in "the jocks hate the nerds". When there's any threat to their survival or status, the Sociopaths in the nucleus can't afford to have any emotional attachment to the Losers in the outer membrane. They need to be able to sacrifice Losers without hesitating if that's required for their own survival.

I guess I'm saying not only are mammals built out of biological cells internally, but also make up societal cells externally. When there's plenty of food and the group grows too big, the Sociopaths start electioneering among the Clueless for loyalty. The group will eventually split in half, just like cells do, some Sociopaths taking some of the Clueless with them and the others taking the other Clueless. When there's just enough food for the Sociopaths to multiply but not enough Clueless for a successful cell split, the Sociopaths will turn on one another, a coup takes place, and the losing Sociopaths killed or thrown outside the membrane.

This model describes how a genetic predisposition to inequality and hierarchy can also explain group living and apparent cooperation.

I think you're confusing this personality with someone who's classed as an alpha-type.

You do not need to be unable to relate to people on a human level to be able to rule.

It does seem to be a male-oriented model, where females act more like glue, facilitating relationships [..]

Why?

You should remember that women and men can equally be equally be classified as antisocial. If this classification is the main indicator of leadership potential, then women would have been just as likely to lead.

--

If your model is correct, and people who can be classified as antisocial really did rule the pre-historic world - why aren't we all 'sociopathic' now?

1) What You'll Wish You'd Known

2) What You Can't Say

3) Disconnecting Distraction

4) The Age of the Essay

5) Why Nerds are Unpopular

6) Writing, Briefly

7) Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas

8) Good and Bad Procrastination

9) How to Do What You Love

10) See Randomness

11) The Power of the Marginal

12) How Art Can Be Good

13) Taste for Makers

14) Two Kinds of Judgement

15) Stuff

There's obviously some overlap with this list and Hackers & Painters. But I think this grouping would be much more useful for the general population; most freshmen aren't as keen on programming language discussions.

I often use the first three essays listed above in the freshman comp classes I teach, and they often yield interesting reactions from students. Sometimes we venture into "The Age of the Essay" and "Stuff." Students who are especially interested in why high school is structured the way it is often get pointers to "Why Nerds Are Unpopular."

If you know anyone at O'Reilly, you can tell them they'd get about 50 copies a semester ordered. That's probably pretty small time, but I suppose something is better than nothing.

I could imagine the process being relatively easy if you have a pre-existing relationship with a publisher like O'Reilly: send me the contract, here are the essay URLs (which have already been proofread), do the typesetting, and send the book out into the world.

In actuality I suppose it's not that simple.

[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/09/mobile-first-web-second.html

Probably worth linking to here.

While I enjoy pg's writing and I think the essays convey a good message in spirit, I do think there's quite a substantial populist aspect to some of them.

I'm glad I read all of them, but if I had to choose, I'd probably get On Lisp in deadtree format first.

This is not a troll, and it is not inflammatory. It is reasonable discourse and an opposing view. These kinds of things are required for intellectual honesty.

It's especially ironic because the post starts out with a quote from pg:

I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really* like to avoid it*

Whichever moderator killed that link, and anyone downvoting this guy - high quality discussion allows reasonable minds to disagree. Censoring it because it is about pg is perpetuating the very problem pg describes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982832

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048849

Kindof hilarious actually. idlewords finishes by calling pg a "weenis".

Yes I thought the crude insults were indicative of the quality of the post as a whole.

Maciej was mocking Paul's use of the same name-calling he professes to despise.

(That probably sounds like some kind of passive-aggressive complaint about the fact that hans00 got banned, so let me add that after looking through his comments I think his net contribution was solidly negative on account of his gratuitously obnoxious tone.)

Also, the linked blog post didn't strike me as very convincing. The points that were potentially valid ("Start with purpose" paragraph and reference 4) were underdeveloped and most of it read like a rant.

I get the sense that PG wrote the essays and that book so they could be read many years in the future. Call it a decade for the timely ones, and much more than that for the rest. A few of the updates would be along the lines of "This needs to change from the future tense." For example, this brief review of the iPhone from 2001:

With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones.

The essays are great, read them.

A good/bad analogy is a good book (or the good book), most of the advice has very long shelf life.

I created my HN account soon afterwards and applied for YC that winter (rejected). I haven't done much in all this time, though. Books can carry you only so far.

I was looking at learning a new language and considered Lisp, but decided on rails because it seems to be the most common language for web-apps these days, and therefore it should be easier to find good Rails developers than Lisp developers.

I'm curious if PG feels the same way about using Lisp/Arc for business reasons vs. Lisp for technical reasons.