Much as they suffer from their unpopularity, I don't think many nerds would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable.
They don't realize that it takes work to be popular.
Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below.
Out in the real world, nerds collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing.
Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value.
Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.引自第47页
Chapter2.Hackers and Painters
Hackers write cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software.
as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants.
The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.
Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters.
Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications.
The other problem with startups is that there is not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that's interesting to write.
hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.
It's a good idea to save some easy tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall.
One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical matter to someone without a technical background.
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.引自第47页
in every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our ideas they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past.
In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one.
Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads. Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos.
as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is amore or less complete collection of all our taboo
Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say.
When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot. The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want.
This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
But when people are bad at open mindedness, they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite.引自第100页
Chapter 4. Good Bad Attitude
"The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."引自第100页
Chapter 5. The Other Road Ahead
So shelving an idea costs you not only that delay in implementing it, but also all the ideas that implementing it would have led to.
paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly.
System administrators can become cranky and unresponsive because they're not directly exposed to competitive pressure.引自第100页
A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem.
you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.
Money is a side effect of specialization.
All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It's doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.
A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure.
Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score.
Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users.
Until you have some users to measure, you're optimizing based on guesses.引自第142页
Chapter 7. Mind The Gap
To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things.
If you buy a custom-made car, something will always be breaking. The only point of buying one now is to advertise that you can.
If there is enough demand for something, technology will make it cheap enough to sell in large volumes, and the mass-produced versions will be, if not better, at least more convenient.
It's absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty. If, as the evidence so far implies, you have to have one or the other in your society, take relative poverty.引自第142页
