Hackers & painters

What Hacker News says

1. wcfrobertJun 2026
   I read pg's collection of essays (Hackers and Painters) in my 20s, and it single-handedly prevented me from being radicalized by leftist ideologies. The one insight from the book that I will always remember from the book is this: if you want to be rich, make something people want. Money is fiat to the value you've generated in growing the economic pie. It is in fact possible gain wealth ethically.

   However, there are several addendum to this argument:

   1. Most billionaires are hedge fund or private equity managers whose name no one has ever heard of. They provide liquidity or allocate capital or something. It's actually a major PR failure that people think Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk when they think of billionaires; If we can ignore their character for a second, these guys are actually hyper-productive and they've created immense wealth for society and are compensated in a power law sort of way.

   2. Rich people make money with money - in the form of dividends, interest, rent, etc. Poor people trading labor for money. Salary only scales linearly; therefore, generating value for society is only half of the equation, you must also have ownership, or slowly invest your earned capital to eventually make money with money (i.e. retirement).

   3. There must be a growing economy, otherwise it's a zero-sum game; a fixed-sized pie. In a stagnant economy, the customers you gained are customers another company lost. The wealth just shuffle hands from laid off workers to your employees. I think this is why Jeff Bezos once remarked that a stagnant economy is incompatible with free democratic society.

   4. There must be a new frontier, otherwise the chance of success is pretty much zero. Software is this generation's new frontier. There are no bars to entry. You just need a laptop and the skill to arrange symbols on a screen in the right order. It's literally alchemy. On the other hand, non-software startups can't just do things. In many cultures, maybe due to their lack of growth, "entrepreneur" is actually very low status. It's synonymous with ne'er-do-well who can't find proper work. In the case of USSR before its collapse, it's synonymous with literal thieves and black market thugs.

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2. eerichmond33Jun 2024
   I moved to San Francisco, but it feels like most of the tech people here are focused on fame and money without an intrinsic love of tech described in Paul's "Hackers and Painters". I'd like to live around people that love tech in the same way and intensity that I do. Where are they?
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3. eimrineMar 2023
   I am going to teach Computer Science to a group of young students, 20-30 motivated people aged 10-25 on a volunteer basis in my village without the experience of being a teacher. The task that I set for myself is to reveal to young people all the possible areas of computer science in 10-15 lessons and then divide them into smaller groups according to their interests, after which only occasionally monitor their progress. This set of lessons is going to be much broader than CS50, with much more demonstrating of electronic stuff, but with almost no homework. Because I suppose that no programming language should be mandatory to everyone but you know, everyone should know what is a bit, what is a code, and how long is a way of light travelling for one millisecond.

   What should I watch out for in these classes that are aimed at everyone? What, on the contrary, is not worth mentioning despite the temptation? How early should I show things like: systems programming, functional programming, declarative programming? How much to give discrete mathematics? At what stage should I give Lisp, C, JavaScript or Python, Wolfram Alpha? What names do I need to mention besides Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, Linus Torvalds and von Neumann? And last but not least, what should I do about the fact that I have never used smartphones (iPhone/Android) and I have no interest in them, when the vast majority of my students will only have such a "computer"?

   Here are few books I am going to start from, but I have a strong feeling that a lot of CS topics are missing in the list:

   Charles Petzold - Code (mandatory)

   Paul Graham - Hackers and Painters (mandatory for younger students)

   Alan Cooper - The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (mandatory)

   Steven Strogatz - The Joy Of X (mandatory for younger students)

   Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month

   Linus Torvalds - Just For Fun

   https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ (mandatory for advanced students)

   Don Knuth - TAoCP volume 1

   SICP/The Land Of Lisp (?)

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4. interleaveJan 2023
   I love this.

   Short and concise, this combines two of my most favorite mindshares.

   1. "Hackers and Painters" – I stumbled across in late 2004 at the Technical University of Vienna's (excellent) bookstore. Reading it changed my life.

   2. "Ideas are the Enemy of Observations (2012)" – Just Three months ago yamrzou shared this gem of a text. For me, it has become the most meaningful post ever shared on HN.

   "How to get new ideas" seems to fit snuggly right in the middle :)

   [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33355094

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5. _448Nov 2022
   The book "Hackers and Painters"
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6. boredmgrOct 2022
   Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham & Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr. Jason Fung. Hacker & Painters : This book have many thought provoking ideas. compels you to think what you can do being in whatever position you are and how you can add value to the society through hacking. Complete Guide to Fasting is all about learning about our eating habits. As advanced societies what we have forgotten and how it has lead to so many lifestyle related issues and what simple and small things should be done to get us back on track.
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