黑客与画家：二
目录
二 黑客的想法和做法
2.1 关于公司和创业
2. 2 关于财富 wealth
2.3 关于设计
二 黑客的想法和做法
2.1 关于公司和创业
关于计划和实现
If I’d had to wait a year for the next release, I would have shelved most of these ideas, for a while at least.
The thing about ideas,though, is that they lead to more ideas.
Have you ever noticed that when you sit down to write something, half the ideas that end up in it are ones you thought of while writing?
The same thing happens with software.
Working to implement one idea gives you more ideas.
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. In fact, shelving an idea probably even inhibits new ideas: as you start to think of some new feature, you catch sight of the shelf and think, “but I already have a lot of new things I want to do for the next release.”
What big companies do instead of implementing features is plan them.
At Viaweb we sometimes ran into trouble on this account. Investors and analysts would ask us what we had planned for the future.
The truthful answer would have been, we didn’t have any plans. We had general ideas about things we wanted to
68 the other road ahead improve, but if we knew how we would have done it already.
What were we going to do in the next six months? Whatever looked like the biggest win. I don’t know if I ever dared give this answer, but that was the truth.
Plans are just another word for ideas on the shelf.
When we thought of good ideas, we implemented them.
And paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly.
关于客户 customer
There is always a tendency for rich customers to buy expensive solutions,even when cheap solutions are better,because the people offering expensive solutions can spend more to sell them.(P78)
The best plan is to go for the smaller customers first.The rest will come in time.(P79)
不必追，该来的总会来。
关于创业startup
In a startup writing web-based applications, everything you associate with startups is taken to an extreme.
想要出人头地，就要做到极致。
You can write and launch a product with even fewer people and even less money.
You have to be even faster, and you can get away with being more informal.
打破常规的迅速行动。
You can literally launch your product as three guys operating out of an apartment, with a server collocated at an ISP.(P83)
Web-based software never ships.
You can work 16-hour days for as long as you want to.
And because you can, and your competitors can, you tend to be forced to.
You can, so you must.
你能，所以你必须做到。
因为你必须做到，所以你能。
It’s Parkinson’s Law running in reverse.（P84）
If you’re a hacker who has thought of one day starting a startup,there are probably two things keeping you from doing it.
One is that you don’t know anything about business.
The other is that you’re afraid of competition.
Neither of these fences have any current in them.（P87）
As for building something users love, here are some general tips.
Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself.
Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do.（P88）
写论文也是，先写出来大致框架根据反馈再修改。
2. 2 关于财富 wealth
关于欲戴王冠，必承其重
There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars’ worth of
pain.
For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny
of your salary.
Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years.
In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years.
You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can’t evade the fundamental
conservation law.
If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.（P91）
You can have wealth without having money.
Wealth is what you want, not money.
关于价值 value
In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.
When those far removed from the creation of wealth—undergraduates,reporters, politicians—hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice!
An experienced hackers & painters programmer would be more likely to think is that all?
The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
关于工作
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a
member of an institution.
A more direct way to put it would be:you need to start doing something people want.
You don’t need to join a company to do that.
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.
关于致富
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things,measurement and leverage.
You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more.
And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.
A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure.
Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss. CEOs, stars, fund managers, and athletes all live with the sword hanging over their heads; the moment they start to suck, they’re out.
If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
风险和收益并存。
技术具有时效性，迎难而上
The leading edge of technology moves fast.
Technology that’s valuable today could be worthless in a couple years.
What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems.
关于公司company
Venture capitalists have a list of danger signs to watch out for.
Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of
making users happy.
In a startup, you’re not just trying to solve problems.
You’re trying to solve problems that users care about.
关于大众需求
Well, of course people want the wrong things. It seems odd to be surprised by that. And it seems even odder to say that it’s unjust that certain kinds of work are underpaid.
Then you’re saying that it’s unjust that people want the wrong things.
It’s lamentable that people prefer reality TV and corndogs to Shakespeare and steamed vegetables, but unjust?
In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs.
2.3 关于设计
关于statistical
The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters.
Most hackers’ first instinct is to try to write software that recognizes individual properties of spam.
关于设计design
Good design is simple.
When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem.
When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.
Good design is hard.
If you look at the people who’ve done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard.
If you’re not working hard, you’re probably wasting your time.
When you have to climb a mountain you toss everything unnecessary out of your pack.
And so an architect who has to build on a difficult site, or a small budget, will find that he’s forced to produce an elegant design. Fashions and flourishes get knocked aside by the difficult business of solving the problem at all.
Not every kind of hard is good.
There is good pain and bad pain.
You want the kind of pain you get from going running, not the kind you get from stepping on a nail.
A difficult problem could be good for a designer, but a fickle client or unreliable materials would not be.
Good design looks easy.
In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice.
Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought.
Good design is redesign.
It’s rare to get things right the first time.
Experts expect to throw away some early work.
They plan for plans to change.
Good design can copy.
The greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness.
They just want to get the right answer, and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that’s
no reason not to use it.
They’re confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.
Good design happens in chunks.
Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems.
Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence.
Good design is often daring.
Intolerance for ugliness is not in itself enough.
You have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing.
You have to do your homework.
But as you become expert in a field, you’ll start to hear little voices saying, What a hack!
There must be a better way. Don’t ignore those voices. Cultivate them.
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.