Revenge of the Nerds
We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who the pointy-haired boss is, right? The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in.
- ▪We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-hai
- ▪Everyone knows who the pointy-haired boss is, right?
- ▪The pointy-haired boss has no idea how this software has to work, and can't tell one programming language from another, and yet he knows what language you should write it in.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:32.290Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who the pointy-haired boss is, right? I think most people in the technology world not only recognize this cartoon character, but know the actual person in their company that he is modelled upon.The pointy-haired boss miraculously combines two qualities that are common by themselves, but rarely seen together: (a) he knows nothing whatsoever about technology, and (b) he has very strong opinions about it.Suppose, for example, you…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.