Quotes from Steven Levy

At one point a research firm was called in to do a study of the excessive, inescapable noise, and they concluded that the hum of the air conditioner was so bothersome because there weren't enough competing noises — so they fixed the machines to make them give off a loud, continual hiss. In Greenblatt's words, this change "was not a win," and the constant hiss made the long hours on the ninth floor rather nerve-racking for some. Add

But people did not warm to Beacon. Instead, they began thinking for the first time that this fun thing called Facebook was something that maybe they could not trust.

From their point of view, it seemed to indicate another hacker sin — inefficiency.

When computers are sold like toasters, programs will be sold like toothpaste.

Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it's very hard to fail completely

Burrell Smith, the designer of the Macintosh computer, said it as well as anyone in one of the sessions at the first Hacker Conference: "Hackers can do almost anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker carpenter. It's not necessarily high tech. I think it has to do with craftsmanship and caring about what you're doing.

In early 2004, she gave a progress report at a Google Product Strategy meeting. Eric Schmidt asked her how many publishers AdSense had signed up. He figured the number would be in the thousands. But she reported a number well up in the hundreds of thousands. "They almost fell off their chairs," she said. But not Brin. "That's pretty good," he said. Later people would explain to Malone that Brin's "pretty good" is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize.

Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.

The high holy day of Google culture is April 1, when imaginations already encouraged to run wild are channeled into elaborate pranks requiring months of work. The effort involves considerable organization, as ideas go through an elaborate approval process to find a place in the company's ever-increasing roster of seasonal spoofs.

Page once said that anyone hired at Google should be capable of engaging him in a fascinating discussion should he be stuck at an airport with the employee on a business trip. The implication was that every Googler should converse at the level of Jared Diamond or the ghost of Alan Turing. The idea was to create a charged intellectual atmosphere that makes people want to come to work.

And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.

Meanwhile, Page pushed for a test that prospective investors would be required to pass: answer three questions about Google, just to make sure that you understand the company and aren't just making a trendy bid. It was the closest he could come to demanding potential investors' SAT scores. The SEC nixed the idea.

Acolyte: Oh machine, would you accept my offer of information so you may run my program and perhaps give me a computation? Priest (on behalf of the machine): We will try. We promise nothing.

and a tendency to take offense at an inefficient, suboptimal way of doing things.

I read it more carefully than anyone had ever read it. . . . Kahn's book to me is like the Vedas," he explains, citing the centuries-old Indian text. "There's an expression I learned: 'If a man loses his cow, he looks for it in the Vedas.

Once he asked a colleague if he had ever heard of a musician named Carlos San-tain-a; Brin had been asked to introduce him at a concert. "Sergey," the Googler said, "everyone knows who Carlos Santana is." "I'll just say he needs no introduction," said Brin.)

but by and large ITS proved that the best security was no security at all.

stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too."??

You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.

engineering comes down to two real principles: The first is that you think of every problem as a system. And every system can be better. No matter how good or bad it is, you can make anything better—

In their view, hacking would be better served by using the best system possible.

The system enforced Google's insistence that advertising shouldn't be a transaction between publisher and advertiser but a three-way relationship that also included the user.

Years of working in the free-flow world of electronics had infused Marsh with the Hacker Ethic, and he saw school as an inefficient, repressive system. Even when he worked at a radical school with an open classroom, he thought it was a sham, still a jail.

A large key is not a guarantee of security," says Hellman, "but a small key is a guarantee of insecurity.