Paul Graham posted Great Hackers, an adaptation of his keynote OSCON 2004 speech. He’s also the author of Hackers and Painters, which I haven’t read yet, but probably will pick up shortly.

His comments to me seem rather thought provoking, but should be tempered a bit by a sense of humility. For instance, in talking about individual productivity, it seems rather obvious to me that in a social environment you can’t play it fast and loose with productivity as if it were a property of the individual. It really doesn’t help you to have someone who can code Lisp if you don’t have anyone who can grow wheat. How then, should we compensate the two individuals. Does the Lisp programmer naturally deserve more than the wheat farmer? Graham seems to be arguing for some kind of “ladder of progress”, which is often little more than an attempt at justification of the inequities of the world by the “haves”.

I also found his discussion of “how to detect a hacker” to be interesting. As an example, he listed Trevor Blackwell who coincidently, I’ve met as well. I got a chance to ride Trevor’s Segway Clone at Hackers, and had a long discussion with him. Something was obvious to me that apparently wasn’t obvious to Graham: Blackwell was a good hacker. Graham says that at first he thought he was crazy and an idiot. The hubris is believing that a legitimate dichotomy exists, with idiots and nuts on one side and hackers on the others. Hackers are by and large the nuttiest people I know. After all, what normal person spends $1000 of their money to homebrew their own Segway? Or build a Farnsworth Fusor fusion reactor? Or write their own Unix operating system? Insanity is part and parcel of what most hackers do.

Lots of people have their buttons pushed by Graham. If he poo-poos Java, the Java fanatics come out of the woodwork to call him idiot. If he says he deserves more money because he’s a hacker, people with socialist leanings come out of the woodwork to do the same. I don’t bother getting worked up about it: some of it is obviously true, some of it is insightful, and some of it is probably entirely wrong. But it beats listening to politics…