hack
Table of Contents
Hackers and Painters
- What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers.
- Unfortunately, beautiful things don’t always make the best subjects for papers. Number one, research must be original … Number two, research must be substantial … 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.
- Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry.
- Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are. A page of formulas just looks so impressive. (Tip: for extra impressiveness, use Greek variables.) And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important.
- You can’t do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you’ll inevitably be working on projects of your own.
- You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking.
- Maybe it would be good for hackers to act more like painters, and regularly start over from scratch, instead of continuing to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions.
- Hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.
- I like debugging: it’s the one time that hacking is as straightforward as people think it is. You have a totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve it. Your program is supposed to do x. Instead it does y. Where does it go wrong? You know you’re going to win in the end.
- One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch them explain a technical matter to someone without a technical background.
- 自问一个问题：大庭广众之下，你有没有什么观点不愿说出口？如果回答是 没有，那么你也许应该停下来想一想了。你的每一个观点都能毫不犹豫地说 出口，你自己深深赞同这些观点，并且你也确信肯定会获得别人的赞同，这 是否太过于巧合了？一种可能是，也许事情并没有这么巧合，你的观点就是 从别人那里听来的，别人告诉你什么，你就相信了什么，你把别人灌输的观 点当作了自己的观点。
- 人们真正注意到你的时候，不是第一眼看到你站在那里，而是发现过了这么 久你居然还在那里。
- 画作永远没有完工的一天，你只是不再画下去而已。
- 随着技术的发展，每一代人都在做上一代人觉得很浪费的事情。