

Favorite PG essay? - terpua

<a href="http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html</a><p>My fellow friends and I identify :)
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chwolfe
Beating The Averages <http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>

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brlewis
That's the one that cured me of trying to evangelize Lisp. If the combination
of pg's success and pg's essays wasn't going to win people over, nothing was.

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Goladus
<http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html> \- What You'll Wish You'd Known

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sabhishek
<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html> my all time fav.

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geebee
While I'd pick Hackers and Painters, my favorite few paragraphs come from "Why
to not not start a startup."

<http://paulgraham.com/notnot.html>

I find the comparison of a job to serfdom to be unsettling. Of course, a
modern day cubicle dweller isn't living the kind of life of a medieval serf,
but that won't necessarily stop people in the future from looking back on the
lives of most people in the early 21st century with pity, wondering how they
could have lived with so little personal freedom.

It's not just the analogy, it's the optimism. One reason I'm so behind the new
tech economy is that it's about more than business and money - this is about
changing the rules. Even if you don't start a startup, or work for one, the
way you work and live may be changed, much for the better, if startups prove
that people who work freely and own their results dramatically outperform the
serfdom of the cubicle dweller. I hope that we can prove that there's no hope
in running a cubicle dwelling company - you will simply be thrashed and
outperformed by more nimble startups.

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staunch
Forced to choose one, I'd say _What Business Can Learn From Open Source_
(<http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html>). I've felt that stuff for a long
time but I was never able to articulate it like PG did. Now I just give people
that essay and tell them "This will help explain where I'm coming from."

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tx
Wow... I somehow managed to skip this one. Great read.

I, however, cannot get rid of the feeling that in open source world there is
always one or two "few" who get all the credit (money, fame) for work of many.

Working on something you love is a wonderful thing, but in a realm of all
acitivtes _required_ to build something, not everything is a subject of
someone's love. In other words, someone will always have to get paid to clean
the restrooms.

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awt
1\. <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

2\. <http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html>

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mojuba
Succinctness is power -- <http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html> \-- probably
the best article for a language designer. Not only succinctness is power, it
turns out to be the most important quality of a good programming language. The
rest is a matter of taste, I think.

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amichail
Hackers and Painters <http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html>

See also my view on this here: [http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-
art-of-computa...](http://weblog.fortnow.com/2006/07/science-and-art-of-
computation.html)

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dawie
My favorite one is: <http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html>

And this one really inspired me. <http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>

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dfranke
I don't think I would have survived high school if I hadn't read "Why Nerds
Are Unpopular".

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pramodbiligiri
What You'll Wish You'd Known: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html>

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mattculbreth
Beating the Averages and The Python Paradox

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daniel-cussen
<http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

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altano
"What you can't say" is definitely one that struck a chord. In fact, my
paraphrasing the article online is the way I met my husband, so thanks Paul :)

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benhoyt
Do you have a link to this, ahem, "engaging" paraphrase?

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altano
Sorry, but it's not online anymore. Though if you're curious, it was the part
of the essay about people using words that don't mean anything.

No but seriously, what the hell does it mean to be "offended?"

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akkartik
<http://paulgraham.com/essay.html>

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jamiequint
The Power of the Marginal

