quotes3

Note: I do NOT agree with some of these!

Note: I didn't factcheck these, they may be misattributed

https://mobile.twitter.com/omarnajam/status/935626720408768512?lang=en

"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." -- Jacques Mallet du Pan

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." -- Thoreau

"the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me" -- Blaise Pascal

"Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. What will the expected waiting time be? What happens if you add another teller? We assume customer arrivals and customer service times are random (details later). With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. But if you add a second teller, the average waiting time is not just cut in half; it goes down to about 3 minutes. The waiting time is reduced by a factor of 93x" [1] via [2]

"Col. T. P. Dowly, a 49er, Pike s Peaker, of 56; a Black Hill s boomer, of 76, and a Leadville hustler, of 78, is among the guests of the Ebbitt. Colonel Dowly is a telegraph genius and labored upon the construction of the Union Pacific telegraph line west from Omaha in 69. The greatest difficulty we encountered, says the colonel, was from the buffalos. They used the poles for scratching posts, and rallied from all parts of the bare plain to these what they regarded Godsends of comfort. A young Yankee with us invented a sharp brad-awl about three inches long to run into the poles with the points outward. It was thought sure that these ugly spikes would fend off the uneasy buffalo. It proved that the sharp points only made the sensation more grateful to the lordly bison, and down went every pole for fifty miles out of Omaha that night. " -- [3]

"it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other" -- Freud . See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences

"Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time." - Kenneth Arrow

"There was an AI made of dust, whose poetry gained it man's trust..." -- http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html (Universal Paperclip game)

"In public relations, there is a special term for the dumbest thing you say in a press interview. They call it the headline ." -- Tim Sweeney [4]

"in 2050, 70 percent of Americans will be living in just 15 states. That 70 percent will then have 30 senators, and the remaining 30 percent of the people, mainly those living in the smallest and poorest states, will have 70 senators." -- -- Norm Ornstein

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." -- Thomas Jefferson

"In primaries, the vocal rump of a minority of obnoxious asses can hold the entire country hostage to extremist views" -- John D. Dingell

"Whenever I see people comparing C to assembly I automatically assume they don't know anything about (a) C or (b) any kind of assembly." -- sanskritabelt

"I deal with a number of smart C (and even C++) programmers who view it as assembly with macros. But I've yet to meet any assembly programmers who view C as just a more succinct way to write assembly. Maybe it can be phrased as "Anyone who conflates C and assembly has probably never compared the output of their compiler with the code they think they wrote"." -- nkurz

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -Dick Guindon, via Leslie Lamport

"Even the quest for justice can turn into barbarism if it is not infused with a quality of mercy, an awareness of human frailty and a path to redemption. The crust of civilization is thinner than you think." -- David Brooks

"Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. ...Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. ...Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. ...Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. ...This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life." - Kierkegaard, Either/Or

"Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival" -- George Orwell

"You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic." -- a navigation device company's billboard

"Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure." -- Hannah Arendt

"Mathematics is the only totally clear, utterly unambiguous language in the world; yet it cannot say anything very interesting about anything very important" -- Peter Kreeft, in Socratic Logic

    "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false." -- Alan M. Turing

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". [5]

"If you don't own a home, you are effectively short the housing market. If you own one home you are neutral: you can't sell it to make a profit because you always need one roof over your head. If you own more than one house, you are a landlord/investor and I don't know why we are giving you special treatment relative to other asset classes.

It would be better for everyone if housing was not an investment. " -- dangjc

"In his commands let him be prudent and considerate; and whether the work which he enjoins concerns God or the world, let him be discreet and moderate, bearing in mind the discretion of holy Jacob, who said, If I cause my flocks to be overdriven, they will all die in one day. Taking this, then, and other examples of discretion, the mother of virtues, let him so temper all things that the strong may have something to strive after, and the weak may not fall back in dismay." -- St. Benedict

"Let him not be excitable and worried, nor exacting and headstrong, nor jealous and over-suspicious; for then he is never at rest." -- St. Benedict

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery to think one can be happy without money." -- Camus

"The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. " -- Tim Wu

"The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure." -- Tim Wu

" "The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success.

But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - often considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes."

I would highly recommend people here to take a look at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 " -- DecayingOrganic

"May you live all the days of your life." -- Jonathan Swift

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed." -- Jonathan Swift

"Men nowadays Worship the Rising Sun, and not the Setting." -- Jonathan Swift

"Laws are like Cobwebs which may catch small Flies, but let Wasps and Hornets break through. But in Oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art." -- Jonathan Swift

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired" -- Jonathan Swift

"And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid" -- Jonathan Swift

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect" -- Jonathan Swift

"If you don't want to legislate, maybe you shouldn't run for the legislature," -- Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma. [6]

"The true optimists are the conspiracy theorists, because they believe the people in charge actually have a plan." -- [7]

"Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." -- Richard Feynman

"A pessimist says the glass is half-empty. An optimist says it's half full. An engineer says the glass is too big." -- [8]

"If I had it all to do over again, I'd spell creat with an "e"." - Kernighan [9]

"Why did the programmer quit his job? Because he didn't get arrays" [10]

"There are 10 types of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that don't."

"If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime." -- [11]

[Brooks s Law of Prototypes] "Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow." -- Fred Brooks University of North Carolina

"Less than 10 percent of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure mainte- nance, and other housekeeping." -- May Shaw Carnegie-Mellon University

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." -- Fred Brooks University of North Carolina

"The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it. " -- Richard E. Fairley Wang Institute

[Little s Formula] "The average number of objects in a queue is the product of the entry rate and the average holding time." -- Peter Denning RL4cs

Of all my programming bugs, 80 percent are syntax errors. Of the remaining 20 percent, 80 percent are triv- ial logical errors. Of the remaining 4 percent, 80 per- cent are pointer errors. And the remaining 0.8 percent are hard." -- Marc Donner IBM T. 1. Watson Research Center

"Before optimizing, use a profiler to locate the hot spots of the program." -- Mike Morton Boston, Massachusetts

(The Principle of Least Astonishment) "Make a user interface as consistent and as predictable as possible" -- [12]

"Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write itself. David Iones Assert, The Netherlands" -- [13]

"On some machines indirection is slower with displace- ment, so the most-used member of a structure or a record should be first. " -- Mike Morton Boston, Massachusetts

" There is a trade off between flat and deep org structure. Deeper org structures build familiarity, process, etc. It works when there is a stable process, but doesn t turn well.

Shallow orgs can move quicker, but that isn t free. Because the designated leaders cannot actually manage up to dozens of direct reports, you end up with what I call a circle org structure. People get voted on/off the inner circle, and the downstream leaders get disempowered.

I ve never worked in a place with no explicit command structure. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I cannot see that ever working. Fundamentally it s a lie, because some individuals have to control the money.

In my experience, shallow orgs also have a half life. They need to be purged every 18-24 months." Spooky23

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"Any sufficiently complicated company [without] management contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of management." Yehuda Katz

"Value created the 2nd greatest lie in tech about "not having a boss is cool" because it attracts people who think they're too smart to be working for someone else. But if you're working for no-one in the company, you're practically working for everyone. " esturk

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." -- Knuth

"@Nate @Tejinder: I can tell you that 34 years ago when I was clerking, the Justices actually considered quite seriously whether to include the "respectfully" or not. Omitting it signalled really serious disagreement and, frankly, disrespect."

"@Tejinder, I took con law from a former SCOTUS clerk who wrote a major dissenting opinion a few years ago. At least in his experience, quite a lot of thought went into whether the last sentence was "I dissent" versus "I respectfully dissent."

"The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary." -- Ben Graham

"Wealth, in fact, is what you don t see. It s the cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The renovations postponed, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. It s assets in the bank that haven t yet been converted into the stuff you see." [14]

"Harry Markowitz won the Nobel Prize in economics for creating formulas that tell you exactly how much of your portfolio should be in stocks vs. bonds depending on your ideal level of risk. A few years ago the Wall Street Journal asked him how, given his work, he invests his own money. He replied: I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn t in it or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities." [15]