Quotes from Steven Levy

All information should be free. If you don't have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them? A free exchange of information, particularly when the information was in the form of a computer program, allowed for greater overall creativity.

people are more voyeuristic than i would have thought

Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

Mesmo se você falhar em meio a algo ambicioso, é muito difícil falhar por completo"

subtle way of helping to identify a user's interests without the user conspicuously sharing them with facebook. (regarding the like button)

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked.

growth. he said that if any feature didnt do that, he was not interested.

it is okay to make exceptions to the letter of the policy to maintain the spirit of the policy

No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there

if you're not the customer, you're the product

there is something really optimistic and inspiring about waking up every day as if it's a new day, and not being defined in terms of who you were yesterday

The meeting was just ending when Doerr asked a final question: "How big do you think this can be?" "Ten billion," said Larry Page.

Or, as Eric Schmidt told a reporter when asked just how Google determines the application of its famous unofficial motto, "Evil is what Sergey says is evil.

the idea to other handset manufacturers. Even though he was offering something for free, it was a tough sell. The mobile phone world had

It sort of violates every known principle that we have," he admitted. "But every once in a while, you should test that you really have the right principles. You don't want to end up too rigid.

simply because his mind aligned perfectly with the nexus of logic and technology (which it did) but because, he says, "I really wanted to change the world.

He had no sympathy for people who wanted to know how things worked, people who wanted to explore things, people who wanted to improve the systems they studied and dreamed about.

fragile. So that to be able to defy a culture which states that 'Thou shalt not touch this,' and to defy that with one's own creative powers is . . . the essence." The essence, of course, of the Hacker Ethic.

I think that hackers — dedicated, innovative, irreverent computer programmers — are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution

in keeping with the Hacker Ethic, no artificial boundaries were maintained.

The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Gates's implicit criticism of Gmail was that it was wasteful in its means of storing each email. Despite his currency with cutting-edge technologies, his mentality was anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved. He had written his first programs under a brutal imperative for brevity. And Microsoft's web-based email service reflected that parsimony. The young people at Google had no such mental barriers.

central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems.

There are fun programs with jokes in them, there are exciting programs which do The Right Thing, and there are sad programs which make valiant tries but don't quite fly.