22d70b52c9
I'm considering this essay one of my favorites from Paul Graham. The essay argues that good taste and bad taste exist. Graham argues against relativism in design and cites a variety of examples of architecture, typography, writing, sketching, painting, aircraft design, and others that bolster his opinion. TL;DR - Design should strive to be: - Simple: Prefer simplicity to complexity when possible. - Timeless: Design today for tomorrow by pleasing yesterday. - Pointed: Focus always on the problem; don't work for work's sake. - Suggestive: Constrain usage without suffocating the user. - Humorous: Prefer light-heartedness to sobriety. - Difficult: "Good design" is takes time, effort, and tremendous skill. - Ostensibly effortless: Solutions should look obviously correct. - Symmetric Appreciate symmetry. - Natural: In nature, form ever follows function. - Iterative: Write; rewrite; rewrite; rewrite; throw away; write; publish. - Imitative: Be confident enough to copy others' existing, beautiful ideas. - Communal: Pay attention to "Schelling points" and join the party. Don't be the Milanese Da Vinci. - Fearless: Question the status quo; expect others to challenge your solution.
190 lines
5.7 KiB
Org Mode
190 lines
5.7 KiB
Org Mode
# I'd like to read all of Paul Graham's essays. I cannot rely on my web browser
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# to tell me which I've already read, so I'm resorting to an org file.
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* TODO How to Write Usefully
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* DONE Being a Noob
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* TODO Haters
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* TODO The Two Kinds of Moderate
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* TODO Fashionable Problems
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* TODO Having Kids
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* DONE The Lesson to Unlearn
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* TODO Novelty and Heresy
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* TODO The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
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* TODO General and Surprising
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* DONE Charisma / Power
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* TODO The Risk of Discovery
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* TODO How to Make Pittsburgh a Startup Hub
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* TODO Life is Short
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* TODO Economic Inequality
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* TODO The Refragmentation
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* TODO Jessica Livingston
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* TODO A Way to Detect Bias
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* TODO Write Like You Talk
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* TODO Default Alive or Default Dead?
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* TODO Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
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* TODO Change Your Name
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* TODO What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
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* TODO The Ronco Principle
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* TODO What Doesn't Seem Like Work?
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* TODO Don't Talk to Corp Dev
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* TODO Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In
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* TODO How to Be an Expert in a Changing World
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* TODO How You Know
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* TODO The Fatal Pinch
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* DONE Mean People Fail
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* TODO Before the Startup
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* TODO How to Raise Money
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* TODO Investor Herd Dynamics
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* TODO How to Convince Investors
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* TODO Do Things that Don't Scale
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* TODO Startup Investing Trends
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* TODO How to Get Startup Ideas
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* TODO The Hardware Renaissance
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* TODO Startup = Growth
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* TODO Black Swan Farming
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* TODO The Top of My Todo List
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* TODO Writing and Speaking
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* TODO How Y Combinator Started
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* TODO Defining Property
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* TODO Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
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* TODO A Word to the Resourceful
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* TODO Schlep Blindness
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* TODO Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
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* TODO Why Startup Hubs Work
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* TODO The Patent Pledge
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* TODO Subject: Airbnb
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* TODO Founder Control
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* TODO Tablets
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* TODO What We Look for in Founders
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* TODO The New Funding Landscape
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* TODO Where to See Silicon Valley
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* TODO High Resolution Fundraising
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* TODO What Happened to Yahoo
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* TODO The Future of Startup Funding
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* TODO The Acceleration of Addictiveness
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* TODO The Top Idea in Your Mind
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* TODO How to Lose Time and Money
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* TODO Organic Startup Ideas
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* TODO Apple's Mistake
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* TODO What Startups Are Really Like
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* TODO Persuade xor Discover
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* TODO Post-Medium Publishing
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* TODO The List of N Things
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* TODO The Anatomy of Determination
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* TODO What Kate Saw in Silicon Valley
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* TODO The Trouble with the Segway
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* TODO Ramen Profitable
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* DONE Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
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* TODO A Local Revolution?
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* TODO Why Twitter is a Big Deal
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* TODO The Founder Visa
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* TODO Five Founders
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* TODO Relentlessly Resourceful
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* TODO How to Be an Angel Investor
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* TODO Why TV Lost
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* TODO Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.
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* TODO What I've Learned from Hacker News
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* TODO Startups in 13 Sentences
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* TODO Keep Your Identity Small
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* TODO After Credentials
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* TODO Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession?
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* TODO The High-Res Society
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* TODO The Other Half of "Artists Ship"
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* TODO Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy
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* TODO A Fundraising Survival Guide
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* TODO The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company
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* TODO Cities and Ambition
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* TODO Disconnecting Distraction
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* TODO Lies We Tell Kids
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* TODO Be Good
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* TODO Why There Aren't More Googles
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* TODO Some Heroes
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* TODO How to Disagree
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* TODO You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss
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* TODO A New Venture Animal
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* TODO Trolls
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* TODO Six Principles for Making New Things
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* TODO Why to Move to a Startup Hub
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* TODO The Future of Web Startups
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* TODO How to Do Philosophy
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* TODO News from the Front
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* TODO How Not to Die
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* TODO Holding a Program in One's Head
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* TODO Stuff
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* TODO The Equity Equation
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* TODO An Alternative Theory of Unions
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* TODO The Hacker's Guide to Investors
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* TODO Two Kinds of Judgement
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* TODO Microsoft is Dead
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* TODO Why to Not Not Start a Startup
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* TODO Is It Worth Being Wise?
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* TODO Learning from Founders
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* TODO How Art Can Be Good
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* TODO The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups
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* TODO A Student's Guide to Startups
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* TODO How to Present to Investors
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* TODO Copy What You Like
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* TODO The Island Test
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* TODO The Power of the Marginal
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* TODO Why Startups Condense in America
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* TODO How to Be Silicon Valley
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* TODO The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn
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* TODO See Randomness
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* TODO Are Software Patents Evil?
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* TODO 6,631,372
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* TODO Why YC
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* TODO How to Do What You Love
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* TODO Good and Bad Procrastination
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* TODO Web 2.0
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* TODO How to Fund a Startup
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* TODO The Venture Capital Squeeze
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* TODO Ideas for Startups
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* TODO What I Did this Summer
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* TODO Inequality and Risk
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* TODO After the Ladder
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* TODO What Business Can Learn from Open Source
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* TODO Hiring is Obsolete
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* TODO The Submarine
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* TODO Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
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* TODO Return of the Mac
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* DONE Writing, Briefly
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* TODO Undergraduation
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* TODO A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
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* TODO How to Start a Startup
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* TODO What You'll Wish You'd Known
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* TODO Made in USA
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* TODO It's Charisma, Stupid
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* TODO Bradley's Ghost
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* TODO A Version 1.0
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* TODO What the Bubble Got Right
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* TODO The Age of the Essay
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* TODO The Python Paradox
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* TODO Great Hackers
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* TODO Mind the Gap
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* TODO How to Make Wealth
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* TODO The Word "Hacker"
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* TODO What You Can't Say
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* TODO Filters that Fight Back
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* TODO Hackers and Painters
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* TODO If Lisp is So Great
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* TODO The Hundred-Year Language
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* TODO Why Nerds are Unpopular
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* TODO Better Bayesian Filtering
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* TODO Design and Research
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* TODO A Plan for Spam
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* TODO Revenge of the Nerds
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* TODO Succinctness is Power
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* TODO What Languages Fix
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* DONE Taste for Makers
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* TODO Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented
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* TODO What Made Lisp Different
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* TODO The Other Road Ahead
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* TODO The Roots of Lisp
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* DONE Five Questions about Language Design
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* DONE Being Popular
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* DONE Java's Cover
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* DONE Beating the Averages
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* DONE Lisp for Web-Based Applications
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* TODO Chapter 1 of Ansi Common Lisp
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* TODO Chapter 2 of Ansi Common Lisp
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* DONE Programming Bottom-Up
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* DONE This Year We Can End the Death Penalty in California
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