When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside stores at midnight to buy the first copies. None of them would have been there without PR firms, who generated such a buzz in the news media that it became self-reinforcing, like a nuclear chain reaction.

Like a lot of people, I was mathematically abused as a child. I learned to think of math as a collection of formulas that were neither beautiful nor had any relation to my life (despite attempts to translate them into “word problems”), but had to be memorized in order to do well on tests.

In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world. They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.

Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers.

Sometimes the VCs want to install a new CEO of their own choosing. Usually the claim is that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business background. Maybe in some cases this is true. And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys “newscasters,” because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.

But it's possible to be part of a startup and stay in grad school, especially at first. Two of our three original hackers were in grad school the whole time, and both got their degrees. There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.

Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight through his neck and throttled his brain.

3. Act more like a particle and less like a wave. When you're weaving all over the platform like a drunken sinusoidal, energetic particles like myself — who, in keeping with Newton's first law of motion, like to remain in a uniform state of motion until acted upon by an outside force — cannot easily get past you.

The night drags along. In their wandering, the two men encounter their friend Adriana, a toothless woman, old beyond her age. She runs towards the doors of La Chapelle carrying two parcels of leather bags and perfume bottles she tries to sell to passerbys. To summarize her life, Adriana says simply: “I'm a hooker and a thief, and everything for the crack.” She can afford a hotel room, but finds no rest there: “I'm afraid of loneliness. I need to see the world.” As she leaves, she bends down as if to pick up something, but returns everytime emptyhanded. Laurent explains: “It's the 'pecking'. The big smokers have hallucinations, they think they see the cookie in the floor and bend down to get it. With prostitution, the girls always have money and thus consume more than men, they waste themselves very fast.”

Sown in the days manure
I watch my love grow

I want to talk about you nonstop
in a congress for the deaf,
show your portrait to every blind person I find.
I want to give you to nobody
so that you return to me; without having left.

As you're writing a program you may think “I wish Lisp had such-and-such an operator.” So you go and write it. Afterward you realize that using the new operator would simplify the design of another part of the program, and so on. Language and program evolve together. Like the border between two warring states, the boundary between language and program is drawn and redrawn, until eventually it comes to rest along the mountains and rivers, the natural frontiers of your problem.

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a “machine for turning coffee into theorems”. In much the same way, genes are machines for turning stars into a bird's compass; carotenoids into males of dazzling beauty; smells into love-potions; facial muscles into signals of friendship; a glance into uncertainty of paternity; and oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells. More strictly, genes are machines for turning stars into birds and thereby into more genes.

Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.

He often struggles for words, sounding like a man trying to describe God to a world without religion.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

So Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod and struck the dust of the earth, and the gnats came to be on man and beast. All the dust of the earth became gnats in all the land of Egypt.