Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot.

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

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

Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.