Monday, 06 September 2010

ze avatar *

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt

I hope that no one will claim to know the final answers; no good comes from prophets. But even when acknowledging our falibility, we must nevertheless continue to think about these matters and give the advice to others that intellect and conscience dictate. And let God be our judge, as our grandparents used to say. - Sakharov

Baka ni tsukeru kusuriwa nai (There's no medicine to cure stupidity) - an old Japanese Proverb

Home arrow Daily Digest
Daily Digest
Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed
Articles by Paul Graham

  • What Happened to Yahoo
    "You can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. And without good programmers you won't get good software."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • The Acceleration of Addictiveness
    "You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • The Top Idea in Your Mind
    "You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • How to Lose Time and Money
    "The way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • Organic Startups
    "There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you've found a gold mine."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • Apple's Mistake
    "Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style. How would Apple like it if when they discovered a serious bug in OS X, instead of releasing a software update immediately, they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like?"


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • What Startups Are Really Like
    "People just don't seem to get how different it is till they do it. Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • Persuade or Discover
    "I'd rather offend people needlessly than use needless words, and you have to choose one or the other. If you want to please people who are mistaken, you can't simply tell the truth. You're always going to have to add some sort of padding to protect their misconceptions from bumping against reality."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • Post-Medium Publishing
    "What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? You have two choices: give it away and make money from it indirectly, or find ways to embody it in things people will pay for."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham


  • The List of N Things
    "Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Mainly because it's easier to read than a regular article. Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure. In a list of n things, this work is done for you."


    Ad: "Hackers & Painters" by Paul Graham





Mambo is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL License.