Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Sounds a lot like agile, but worded in a more humane way.

Paul Graham and 37Signals weigh in on the Kiko closure, the web2.0 calendar guys who gave up because they feared competing with Google. Whiners.

Paul Graham on The Power of the Marginal. An interesting essay as always.

Some collaborative notes from Startup School 2006, a very detailed set of notes on the software centred business startup sessions that have included speakers such as Paul Graham and Tim O’Reilly. Good stuff if you think you want to start your own software company.

Paul Graham’s Arc status page, his next-gen Lisp tool.

What business can learn from open source
“At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.” ([Paul Graham])

Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
If it’s hard to change something so simple as a name, imagine how hard it is to garbage-collect an idea. A name only has one point of attachment into your head. An idea for a company gets woven into your thoughts. So you must consciously discount for that. Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at your idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people will pay for? Is this, of all the things we could make, the thing people will pay most for? (By Paul Graham)

Dabblers and Blowhards It’s surprisingly hard to pin Paul Graham down on the nature of the special bond he thinks hobbyist programmers and painters share. In his essays he tends to flit from metaphor to metaphor like a butterfly, never pausing long enough to for a suspicious reader to catch up with his chloroform jar.

Writing, Briefly A lot of people ask for advice about writing. How important is it to write well, and how can one write better? In the process of answering one, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay on the subject.

Return of the Mac All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.