Quotes from Steven Levy

In June 2009 King Albert II made an official visit. He wasn't allowed in to see the servers.

They were contrarian," Epstein would later say of the Google founders. "They rejected everything that smacked of traditional marketing wisdom." Larry and Sergey had their own spin on spin. In 1999, at Burning Man (the posthippie festival in Death Valley that Page and Brin regularly attended), they'd been impressed that someone had projected a laser image onto a nearby hill. Wouldn't it be great, they asked Epstein, if we could laser google onto the moon?

It would be like trying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love to six other people!

What would you do when you weren't online?" To Schillace and his colleagues, the question was shortsighted. It was like condemning an appliance for using electricity.

Arthur Clarke once remarked that the best technology was indistinguishable from magic.

I don't know Stallman well. I know him well enough to know he is a hard man to like." (And that was in the preface of Stallman's own book!)

still working hard at Google, even though they had the wealth of Saudi princes.

But mostly people hacked Tools to Make Tools. Or games. And they would come into computer stores to show off their hacks.

there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done — things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people.

more than solve them faster. You can tackle problems that haven't even been considered. You can build your own paradigms

Zuckerberg hadn't approached Thefacebook that way. He was building something that he wanted for himself, and people were naturally flocking to it. That had been the story of the giants of tech—Apple, eBay, Yahoo!, Google.

There is nothing more frustrating to a hacker than to see an extension to a system and not be able to keep hands-on.

Mark Zuckerberg allegedly serving Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey an undercooked goat

Even when zeroing in on privacy, they showboated.

There's a very strong belief at Google that if the product is better, people will use it anyway," says Griffin. "You might not like not having support; you might want to talk to somebody. But are you going to stop using it? If we create better products, support isn't a differentiating factor.

Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.

The very best companies in the world are best not only because of their creativity, but because of their ability to implement.

hackerese pejorative.

Ideas... [are] like babies - everything about their environment [says] they shouldn't exist. But they do. You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project. (Attributed to Mike Jones)

project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a "hack.

Well," he said, "we think that companies suck." Yahoo!'s president, Dan Rosensweig, broke the tension with a quip. "At Yahoo!, we like to think we suck less." Everyone had a good laugh.

Google did, however, eventually say that it is the largest computer manufacturer in the world—making its own servers requires it to build more units every year than the industry giants HP, Dell, and Lenovo.

qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity.

Hacker Ethic: like lines of code in a systems program, compromise should be bummed to the minimum.