Steven Levy > Quotes

“All good teachers will tell you that the most important quality they bring to their teaching is their love for the children. But what does that mean? It means that before we can teach them, we need to delight in them. Someone once said that children need one thing in order to succeed in life: someone who is crazy about them. We need to find a way to delight in all our students. We may be the only one in their lives to do so. We need to look for the best, expect the best, find something in each child that we can truly treasure.... If children recognize that we have seen their genius, who they really are, they will have the confidence and resilience to take risks in learning. I am convinced that many learning and social difficulties would disappear if we learned to see the genius in each child and then created a learning environment that encourages it to develop.”
― Steven Levy

“Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“We designed Google to be the kind of place where the kind of people we wanted to work here would work for free.
- Urs Hölzle”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Epstein came up with an elaborate plan, including TV ads, and presented it to the board. The board rejected it.

“It really came down to this,” McCaffrey later said. “We have a limited budget. Do we want to put that money into the technology, into the infrastructure, into hiring really great people? Or do we want to blow it on a marketing campaign that we can’t measure?” Larry and Sergey told Epstein that his interim stint was over”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“It is astounding that Google, whose corporate philosophy is ‘don’t be evil,’ would enable evil by cooperating with China’s censorship policies just to make a buck,” he said in a press release. “… Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth—and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“It’s your life story if you’re a mathematician: every time you discover something neat, you discover that Gauss or Newton knew it in his crib.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“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.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“You can’t argue with facts. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“To Dick’s mind, the flow of information should be channeled with discretion, with an unambiguous interpretation controlled by the people at the top.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Even at that early date, the basic building blocks of web search had been already set in stone. Search was a four-step process. First came a sweeping scan of all the world’s web pages, via a spider. Second was indexing the information drawn from the spider’s crawl and storing the data on racks of computers known as servers. The third step, triggered by a user’s request, identified the pages that seemed best suited to answer that query. That result was known as search quality. The final step involved formatting and delivering the results to the user.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“We believe that innovative authors are more likely to come from people who are independent and won’t work in a software ‘factory’ or ‘bureaucracy.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“Mark Pincus smelled the social-game opportunity first. He was the guy who, with Reid Hoffman, had been part of the angel investment that, in his words, was like winning lotto. In late 2006, Matt Cohler tipped him off that Facebook was going to launch a platform and was looking for entrepreneurs to come up with apps. We don’t want any money from you, he told Pincus. Just build cool stuff and we’ll expose you to our traffic.”
― Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story

“People were indeed comfortable with sharing, Zuckerberg told him. A third of his users, he said, share their cell-phone numbers on their profile page. “That’s evidence that they trust us.” Graham was startled at how emotionless and hesitant this kid was. At times, before he’d answer a question—even something that he must have been asked thousands of times, like what percentage of Harvard kids were on Thefacebook—he would fall silent, staring into the ether for thirty seconds or so. Does he not understand the question? Graham wondered. Did I offend him? Nonetheless, before the meeting was over, Graham became convinced that Thefacebook was the best business idea he’d heard in years, and told Zuckerberg and Parker that if they wanted an investor who was not a VC, the Post would be interested.”
― Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story

“[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Kay himself has conceded that technological wizards generally fall into two categories: the Michelangelo types who dream of Sistine Chapels and then actually spend years building them, and the da Vincis, who have a million ideas but seldom finish anything themselves.”
― Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything

“You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“In April 2004, Google had one of its countless minicrises, over an anti-Semitic website called Jew Watch. When someone typed “Jew” into Google’s search box, the first result was often a link to that hate site. Critics urged Google to exclude it in its search results. Brin publicly grappled with the dilemma. His view on what Google should do—maintain the sanctity of search—was rational, but a tremor in his voice betrayed how much he was troubled that his search engine was sending people to a cesspool of bigotry. “My reaction was to be really upset about it,” he admitted at the time. “It was certainly not something I want to see.” Then he launched into an analysis of why Google’s algorithms yielded that result, mainly because the signals triggered by the keyword “Jew” reflected the frequent use of that abbreviation as a pejorative. The algorithms had spoken, and Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. “I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,” he said. “It’s a bad technology practice.”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“To hackers, a program was an organic entity that had a life independent from that of its author.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“toxic addictiveness... news feed and other "infinite scrolls" the worst offenders..”
― Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story

“The bigger threat to Google wouldn’t be measured in dollars, but in the philosophical challenge. Could it be that social networking, rather than algorithmic exploitation of the web’s intelligence, would assume the central role in people’s online lives? Even if that were not the case, Facebook made it clear that every facet of the Internet would benefit from the power of personal connection. Google had been chasing a future forged out of algorithms and science fiction chronicles. Did the key to the future lay in party photos and daily status reports?”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Inherently, Larry & Serge aren't paper-oriented - they're product oriented. If they have another 10 minutes, they want to make something better. They don't want to take 10 minutes to tell you something they did.
- Terry Winograd”
― Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

“Because to hackers, passwords were even more odious than locked doors.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“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!)”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“— the new Atari firm was just beginning to put together a home setup to play that game, in which two people control “paddles” of light”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

“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.”
― Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution