Paul Graham on why research should be communicated through working systems (hacks) rather than through research papers:

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

and why adaptive design works:

The only external test is time. Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive, and ugly things tend to get discarded.

From Graham’s Hackers and Painters, which I re-discovered recently. Good stuff on entrepreneurship, too:

If you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they’ll never be able to keep up with you… The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one has yet managed to establish any fortifications. That’s where you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and having the same people both design and implement the product.