You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger - especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects.