quotes2

Note: I do NOT agree with some of these!

"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." -- http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

" It is told that even as Varda ended her labours, and they were long, when first Menelmacar strode up the sky and the blue fire of Helluin flickered in the mists above the borders of the world, in that hour the Children of the Earth awoke, the Firstborn of Il\xfavatar. By the starlit mere of Cuivi\xe9nen, Water of Awakening, they rose from the sleep of Il\xfavatar; and while they dwelt yet silent by Cuivi\xe9nen their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight, and have revered Varda Elent\xe1ri above all the Valar. In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuivi\xe9nen there is no returning. But it is said among the Elves that it lay far off in the east of Middle-earth, and northward, and it was a bay in the Inland Sea of Helcar; and that sea stood where aforetime the roots of the mountain of Illuin had been before Melkor overthrew it. Many waters flowed down thither from heights in the east, and the first sound that was heard by the Elves was the sound of water flowing, and the sound of water falling over stone. Long they dwelt in their first home by the water under stars, and they walked the Earth in wonder; and they began to make speech and to give names to all things that they perceived. Themselves they named the Quendi, signifying those that speak with voices; for as yet they had met no other living things that spoke or sang. And on a time it chanced that Orom\xeb rode eastward in his hunting, and he turned north by the shores of Helcar and passed under the shadows of the Orocarni, the Mountains of the East. Then on a sudden Nahar set up a great neighing, and stood still. And Orom\xeb wondered and sat silent, and it seemed to him that in the quiet of the land under the stars he heard afar off many voices singing. Thus it was that the Valar found at last, as it were by chance, those whom they had so long awaited. And Orom\xeb looking upon the Elves was filled with wonder, as though they were beings sudden and marvellous and unforeseen; for so it shall ever be with the Valar. From without the World, though all things may be forethought in music or foreshown in vision from afar, to those who enter verily into E\xe4 each in its time shall be met at unawares as something new and unforetold. In the beginning the Elder Children of Il\xfavatar were stronger and greater than they have since become; but not more fair, for though the beauty of the Quendi in the days of their youth was beyond all other beauty that Il\xfavatar has caused to be, it has not perished, but lives in the West, and sorrow and wisdom have enriched it. And Orom\xeb loved the Quendi, and named them in their own tongue Eldar, the people of the stars; but that name was after borne only by those who followed him upon the westward road. " -- Tolkein, the Silmarillion, "Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor"

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

"The cardinal rule of successful groupware is that those who put information into the system must receive a proportional benefit for their efforts, or those who want to get information out of the system will not see anything coming out." -- PJ Eby

""If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Ah, the original humblebrag." -- kghose

" For me, startups are more than just a clever way to make money. They are machines for harnessing the fire of human self-interest, creating a self-sustaining reaction capable of rapidly transforming the world. Self-interest is often treated as if it were dirty or wrong, but NASA didn't get to the moon by vilifying gravity." -- http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-technology.html

"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." -- Hal Abelson

"We think you can draw a 2\xd72 matrix for venture capital. &And on one axis you could say, consensus versus non-consensus. And on the other axis you can say, successful or failure. And of course, you make all your money on successful and non-consensus. & it s very hard to make money on successful and consensus. Because if something is already consensus then money will have already flooded in and the profit opportunity is gone. And so by definition in venture capital, if you are doing it right, you are continuously investing in things that are non-consensus at the time of investment. And let me translate non-consensus : in sort of practical terms, it translates to crazy. You are investing in things that look like they are just nuts." -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/

" You want to have as much prepared mind as you possibly can. And learn as much as you can about as many things, as much as you can. You want to enter as close as you can to a zen-like blank slate of perfect humility at the beginning of the meeting saying teach me &. We try really hard to be educated by the best entrepreneurs. " -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/

"rather than trying to predict the unpredictable, it is best to purchase a portfolio composed of mis-priced optionality." -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/

"You may consciously purchase a risky investment one that indeed has a significant possibility of causing loss or injury if you believe that your gain, weighted for probabilities, considerably exceeds your loss, comparably weighted, and if you can commit to a number of similar, but unrelated opportunities." -- Warren Buffett, 1993 Chairman s letter

" The great saving grace of venture capital is that our money is locked up. The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a lock up on our money. So we invest in these companies with a ten-year outlook. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it s okay, because we can stay the course.

Another investor who has figured the value of locked up capital from investors is Warren Buffett, who famously closed his partnership and started Berkshire. Unlike a hedge fund, Warren Buffett s capital is locked up protecting him from people trying to redeem after the panic during a market dip. Bruce Berkowitz: That is the secret sauce: permanent capital. That is essential. I think that s the reason Warren Buffett gave up his partnership. You need it, because when push comes to shove, people run. " -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/

"One of the best ways to tell if we're doing something right is when both sides are ticked off at us," Cecil Andrus, President Jimmy Carter's Interior secretary, famously told an assistant. -- http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-03/sally-jewell-obamas-pro-fracking-climate-czar

"I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules." -- maciej, https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/

"Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man's game. Rice farmers don't get burned out and spend long afternoons thinking about whether to switch to sorghum. Most people don't have the luxury of thinking about their lives in those terms. But at the rarefied socioeconomic heights of computerland, it's true that if you run a popular project by yourself for a long time, there's a high risk that it will wear you out....What burns you out is the constant strain of being responsible for a lot of other people's stuff....Perspective does not make you immune to burnout. It just makes burnout less scary. " -- maciej, https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" -- Oscar Wilde

"Every innovative work of mankind has been the product of one sometimes two, rarely three minds." -- http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69

"...electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms)." -- http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/

"...even though multitouch is a good idea (pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte s ARCH-MAC group [a predecessor of MIT's Media Lab] in the late 70s), much of the iPad UI is very poor in a myriad of ways.

There are some elements of the PARC-style GUI that are likely to stick around even if undergoing a few facelifts. For example, we generally want to view and edit more than one kind of scene at the same time this could be as simple as combining pictures and text in the same glimpse, or to deal with more than one kind of task, or to compare different perspectives of the same model. Pointing and dragging are likely to stick, because they are simple extensions of hands and fingers. One would hope that modeless would stick, though there are many more modes now than in the original PARC and Mac interfaces. Undo should stick (for obvious reasons), but it is very weakly present in the iPad, etc.

There is also the QWERTY phenomenon, where a good or bad idea becomes really bad and sticks because it is ingrained in usage. There are many examples of this in today s interfaces.

There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating. We can contrast this with technologies that do have learning curves, but pay off well and allow users to become experts (for example, musical instruments, writing, bicycles, etc. and to a lesser extent automobiles). [Douglas] Engelbart s interface required some learning but it paid off with speed of giving commands and efficiency in navigation and editing. People objected, and laughed when Doug told them that users of the future would spend many hours a day at their screens and they should have extremely efficient UIs they could learn to be skilled in. " -- http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/

"A lion doesn't lose sleep / over the opinion of a sheep / but still the deer / will drink his beer" -- twist on an old saying by tanosthas found at http://instagram.com/p/oz-RtJK6HA/

"Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." -- George Orwell

"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances." -- Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian Party

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard H. Aiken

"Be skeptical but not cynical" -- my high school history teacher

"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out." -- Anton Chekhov

"And the [TCL] book was there 'cause the hardware guys use it for scripting their lovecraftian toolchain." -- http://www.yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html

" One way of beginning to understand privacy is by looking at what happens to people in extreme situations where it is absent. Recalling his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi observed that "solitude in a Camp is more precious and rare than bread." Solitude is one state of privacy, and even amidst the overwhelming death, starvation, and horror of the camps, Levi knew he missed it.... Levi spent much of his life finding words for his camp experience. How, he wonders aloud in Survival in Auschwitz, do you describe "the demolition of a man," an offense for which "our language lacks words."...

    One function of privacy is to provide a safe space away from terror or other assaultive experiences. When you remove a person's ability to sequester herself, or intimate information about herself, you make her extremely vulnerable....
    The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition....
    And even when one shakes real pursuers, it is often hard to rid oneself of the feeling of being watched -- which is why surveillance is an extremely powerful way to control people. The mind's tendency to still feel observed when alone... can be inhibiting. ... Feeling watched, but not knowing for sure, nor knowing if, when, or how the hostile surveyor may strike, people often become fearful, constricted, and distracted.

...

    Safe privacy is an important component of autonomy, freedom, and thus psychological well-being, in any society that values individuals. ... Summed up briefly, a statement of "how not to dehumanize people" might read: Don't terrorize or humiliate. Don't starve, freeze, exhaust. Don't demean or impose degrading submission. Don't force separation from loved ones. Don't make demands in an incomprehensible language. Don't refuse to listen closely. Don't destroy privacy. Terrorists of all sorts destroy privacy both by corrupting it into secrecy and by using hostile surveillance to undo its useful sanctuary.
    But if we describe a standard for treating people humanely, why does stripping privacy violate it? And what is privacy? In his landmark book, Privacy and Freedom, Alan Westin names four states of privacy: solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy. The reasons for valuing privacy become more apparent as we explore these states....
    The essence of solitude, and all privacy, is a sense of choice and control. You control who watches or learns about you. You choose to leave and return. ...
    Intimacy is a private state because in it people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both. They tell personal stories, exchange looks, or touch privately. They may ignore each other without offending. They may have sex. They may speak frankly using words they would not use in front of others, expressing ideas and feelings -- positive or negative -- that are unacceptable in public. (I don't think I ever got over his death. She seems unable to stop lying to her mother. He looks flabby in those running shorts. I feel horny. In spite of everything, I still long to see them. I am so angry at you I could scream. That joke is disgusting, but it's really funny.) Shielded from forced exposure, a person often feels more able to expose himself."

" This type of post often uses the Goldilocks fallacy to appear like it offers advice when it's actually restating the actual problem: the way to achieve Y is with just the right amount of X.

"A successful startup is easy: simply build the right product in the right market with the right team, and don't forget to build it at the right speed!"

" -- timruffles , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210331

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck

"Rich dudes can keep small identities and still make shit happen; poor everyone-else has to form teams, and with a diversity of levels of education, talent, intelligence and common sense, that will invariably mean pandering and WOOOOing a bit. Why? Because not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rhetoric. Ex hypothesis everyone else has already been 'taken', i.e. has considered opinions, so by elimination it's the aggressive, passionate idiots who play kingmaker. Thus explaining US politics." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173523 (note: i think they meant "not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rational argument")

"...what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

"

diydsp 2 days ago

link

The Taoism analogy is an interesting one. Underpinning much of it is the idea that there is a time to move and a time to stand still. iow it's useful to learn when to resist and when to yield.

Many times when people express opinions, they are given with the urgency of "this needs to be done, now!" e.g. we need to stop them from stoning women to death Right Now(!), we need to let gays marry, now.

But the belief that we can do these things right now is an illusion. That would be like me walking out of my office to the airport, buying a ticket in cash to Iran, finding someone who stoned a woman to death, and killing him with my bare hands. It's not strategic.

The Tao is a collection of wisdom of strategy that says, "Don't do everything that you feel right now, right now." Instead, "Find the right time to act." And you don't always act all of the way. You have to figure out how much when to act and how much.

So it seems to crass to sit still while listening to stories of gut-wrenching atrocities, but at least one school of ancient wisdom teaches us we have to be strategic and flow when the time is right, when others are moving at the same time and our force is multiplied, when the "bad guys" have their guard down, etc. And we need to learn to perceive these conditions.

And we need to tame this urge to railroad our opinions into other's actions and forced agreement. In the slavery and suffragist examples, their opinions were much more powerful as they gained domain knowledge and when they coordinated their efforts, becoming the smoothly flowing, powerful water, instead of a disparate cloud of angry electrons. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173587

" I hope as well, but I doubt it. That kind of secret power begs to be abused. The system of checks and balances that we learned about in civics class is simply gone. A willful executive with these powers at hand can sway the outcome of any congressional vote, any Supreme Court decision, or any media story. Our immune system against tyranny has been compromised and irrevocably so. We haven't yet descended into despotism but it is inevitable once a strong enough individual rises. To carry the analogy further, it's 1984 and we've just contracted HIV." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6151030

"

 Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
  Michael Crichton "

"the trick with habit forming is to not give up after you miss a day" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145818

"If you beat yourself up over procrastination, you're just subconsciously teaching yourself to not even think about whether you're procrastinating or not." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145261

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145261

" Those Nigerian prince scams are not very convincing, he adds, but they re meant not to be. If you re a skeptical person, the scammers want to spend as little time with you as possible. " -- http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/07/how_one_weird_trick_conquered_the_internet_what_happens_when_you_click_on.single.html

"Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds" - Orison Swett

" I think the trick with knowledge is to "acquire it, and forget all except the perfume" -- because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own "brain voices". The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick." -- Alan Kay via http://worrydream.com/dbx/

" The National Science Foundation continued to exist as a basic-science funding agency. But unlike ARPA, the NSF funds projects, not people, and project proposals must be accepted by a peer review board. Any sufficiently-revolutionary project, especially at the early stages, will sound too crazy for a board to accept. Worse, requiring a detailed project proposal means that the NSF simply can't fund truly exploratory research, where the goal is not to solve a problem, but to discover and understand the problem in the first place." -- http://worrydream.com/dbx/

" In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state." -- Richard Hamming

" In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we [Hillis and Feynman] worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress." -- Danny Hillis

"Disclaimer

David Merkel is an investment professional, and like every investment professional, he makes mistakes. David encourages you to do your own independent "due diligence" on any idea that he talks about, because he could be wrong. Nothing written here, at RealMoney?, Wall Street All-Stars, or anywhere else David may write is an invitation to buy or sell any particular security; at most, David is handing out educated guesses as to what the markets may do. David is fond of saying, "The markets always find a new way to make a fool out of you," and so he encourages caution in investing. Risk control wins the game in the long run, not bold moves. Even the best strategies of the past fail, sometimes spectacularly, when you least expect it. David is not immune to that, so please understand that any past success of his will be probably be followed by failures.

Also, though David runs Aleph Investments, LLC, this blog is not a part of that business. This blog exists to educate investors, and give something back. It is not intended as advertisement for Aleph Investments; David is not soliciting business through it. When David, or a client of David's has an interest in a security mentioned, full disclosure will be given, as has been past practice for all that David does on the web. Disclosure is the breakfast of champions.

Additionally, David may occasionally write about accounting, actuarial, insurance, and tax topics, but nothing written here, at RealMoney?, or anywhere else is meant to be formal "advice" in those areas. Consult a reputable professional in those areas to get personal, tailored advice that meets the specialized needs that David can have no knowledge of." -- http://alephblog.com/2012/10/13/book-review-how-to-really-ruin-your-financial-life-and-portfolio/

"Willpower is a depleting resource. We should focus on setting up systems, automating behaviors we want to happen." -- Ramit Sethi, http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2013/06/05/ramit-sethi-how-to-force-yourself-to-go-to-the-gym/

"Don't they play tapes of McCarthy? explaining recursion to foetuses in utero?" -- http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754#comment-75563

"I believe in the concept of America, [But] not its current execution." -- Clayton Seymour

"If there were a policy that saved over 20,000 lives, reduced carbon emissions by 20 percent, reduced gasoline usage by 20 percent, decreased average insurance costs by 75 percent, and which would increase revenues to the federal government and not cost any additional money to implement -- who in this room would support this policy?" -- http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/if-prism-is-good-policy-why-stop-with-terrorism/277531/?

"Most of the innovation of Bitcoin must happen outside the US because the US does not tolerate innovation" -- Erik Voorhees, Coinapult

"...it is genuinely normal for senior scientists to stay one step ahead of the system by essentially applying for money to do work that is already largely complete, and thus bears no risk of failing to be delivered on time." -- Aubrey De Grey, http://edge.org/responses/what-should-we-be-worried-about

" The real quest in computer architecture is a model for computation that does not inherently have the vonNeumann bottleneck. This is a pie-in-the-sky arena for computer architecture." -- Mitch Alsup

"Getting rid of a delusion makes one wiser than getting hold of a truth." -- Ludwig B\xf6rne

"Life isn't fair, but government must be," -- Ann Richards

"Journalist: What do you think of western civilization? Ghandi: I think it would be a good idea." -- Ghandi, maybe: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/

"The common law consists of about half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately nobody knows what they are." -- Lord Sterndale

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -- T. S. Eliot (interesting discussion at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ )

" A man said to the universe "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "That fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." " -- Stephen Crane

"All I can say is that this is Bitcoin. I don't believe it until I see six confirmations." -- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=ll6ndo095u33p2ebut6kckro40&action=profile;u=34137

"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." -- Linus Pauling

" For the same reason the idea of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is not accepted in the world of copyright today anymore - corporate greed. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687804

" This is best encapsulated in an anecdote from my visit to Athens. A friend and I met up at a new bookstore and caf\xe9 in the centre of town, which has only been open for a month. The establishment is in the center of an area filled with bars, and the owner decided the neighborhood could use a place for people to convene and talk without having to drink alcohol and listen to loud music. After we sat down, we asked the waitress for a coffee. She thanked us for our order and immediately turned and walked out the front door. My friend explained that the owner of the bookstore/caf\xe9 couldn t get a license to provide coffee. She had tried to just buy a coffee machine and give the coffee away for free, thinking that lingering patrons would boost book sales. However, giving away coffee was illegal as well. Instead, the owner had to strike a deal with a bar across the street, whereby they make the coffee and the waitress spends all day shuttling between the bar and the bookstore/caf\xe9. My friend also explained to me that books could not be purchased at the bookstore, as it was after 18h and it is illegal to sell books in Greece beyond that hour. I was in a bookstore/caf\xe9 that could neither sell books nor make coffee. " -- http://economistmeg.com/2012/02/27/note-from-athens-feeling-on-the-ground-has-palpably-changed/

"CAUTION: CUTTING EDGE IS SHARP, AVOID CONTACT." -- notice on kitchen aluminum foil from Ralph's

"(To me, fighting null is the epitome of why i struggled to be a programmer. I am not a natural at it, but I wanted very much to be - and I found no use for NULL. I never needed it, but it was always there. I kept pushing it down, painting over it, shutting it up, constantly checking for it - "Are you NULL? are you NULL? what about you?" - and sometimes I would deceive myself, that my problems were other things, but then NULL would pop up, I would find that it was the cause - however, NULL is never really the cause. It is someone you always run into in bad situations, someone you never want to see. NULL penetrates all the layers to find you, and can only say, helplessly, "Looks like you're having a problem." Endemic to the problem, complicit, and might be the problem.)" -- _why, http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/-why-s-complete-printer-spool-as-one-book

"As a programmer, my core strengths have always been knowing how to apologize to users, and composing funny tweets." -- http://blog.pinboard.in/2013/04/the_matasano_crypto_challenges/

"...being perpetually rude and having terrible people skills isn't a deal-breaker in corporate America." -- Paul Lutus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579102

"You have a problem and decide to hire an executive...." -- http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/#comment-3314

" Those phases of human make-up which build habit in the individual and institutions in the group &[are] laziness as to the reworking of a problem once solved; the time and energy saved by routine, especially under any pressure of business; the values of routine as a curb on arbitrariness and as a prop of weakness, inexperience and instability; the social values of predictability; the power of whatever exists to produce expectations and the power of expectations to become normative. The force of precedent in the law is heightened by an additional factor: that curious, almost universal sense of justice which urges that all men are properly to be treated alike in like circumstances. As the social system varies we meet in.finite variations as to what men or treatments or circumstances are to be classed as "like"; but the pressure to accept the views of the time and place remains. " -- Llewellyn

"When you see a four-year-old bossing a two-year-old, you are seeing the fundamental problem of the human race and the reason so many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create "social justice" is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity. " -- Thomas Sowell

"History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." -- Ambrose Bierce

"Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." -- Louis D Brandeis

" By contrast, it is not a huge exaggeration to point out that electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms). " -- Alan Kay

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- Alan Kay "Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born" -- Alan Kay "If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." -- Alan Kay

"Hodor said only, 'Hodor'" -- A Clash Of Kings

"Branding is not anymore about what we want people to believe. It is more about adjusting to what people think about us. It is also about the tension between what we really want to be and what people want us to become. " -- Tiberius Brastaviceanu (by the way i know Tiberius and out of all of the deep issues that he's said insightful things about, branding is one of the least deep -- i just liked this quote, that's all)

"[Section] One hundred and fourteen. All wrecks, mines, minerals, quarries of gems, and precious stones, with pearl-fishing, whale-fishing, and one-half of all ambergris, by whomsoever found, shall wholly belong to the lords proprietors." -- http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp

"it is the reflective part of the public which tends to determine public policy" -- http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/edmund-burke-and-constitution/#.UUPnuVHaozM

"Si vis pacem, para bellum" -- Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

"Your cyber systems continue to function and serve you not due to the expertise of your security staff but solely due to the sufferance of your opponents." -- NSA Information Assurance Director Brian Snow

"It's a fiscal bromance." -- Maya MacGuineas?

"A manager knows that he will be vulnerable to the charge of mismanagement if he misses his schedule without having applied all his resources. This knowledge creates a strong pressure on the initial designer who might prefer to wrestle with the design rather than fragment it by delegation, but he is made to feel that the cost of risk is too high to take the chance. Therefore, he is forced to delegate in order to bring more resources to bear.

The following case illustrates another but related way in which the environment of the manager can be in conflict with the integrity of the system being designed.

A manager must subcontract a crucial and difficult design task. He has a choice of two contractors, a small new organization which proposes an intuitively appealing approach for much less money than is budgeted, and an established but conventional outfit which is asking a more "realistic" fee. He knows that if the bright young organization fails to produce adequate results, he will be accused of mismanagement, whereas if the established outfit fails, it will be evidence that the problem is indeed a difficult one.

What is the difficulty here? A large part of it relates to the kind of reasoning about measurement of resources which arises from conventional accounting theory. According to this theory, the unit of resource is the dollar, and all resources must be measured using units of measurement which are convertible to the dollar. If the resource is human effort, the unit of measurement is the number of hours worked by each man times his hourly cost, summed up for the whole working force.

One fallacy behind this calculation is the property of linearity which says that two men working for a year or one hundred men working for a week (at the same hourly cost per man) are resources of equal value. Assuming that two men and one hundred men cannot work in the same organizational structure (this it intuitively evident and will he discussed below) our homomorphism says that they will not design similar systems; therefore the value of their efforts may not even be comparable. From experience we know that the two men, if they are well chosen and survive the experience, will give us a better system. Assumptions which may be adequate for peeling potatoes and erecting brick walls fail for designing systems.

Parkinson's law[4] plays an important role in the overassignment of design effort. As long as the manager's prestige and power are tied to the size of his budget, he will be motivated to expand his organization. This is an inappropriate motive in the management of a system design activity. Once the organization exists, of course, it will be used. Probably the greatest single common factor behind many poorly designed systems now in existence has been the availability of a design organization in need of work.

The second step in the disintegration of a system design -- the fragmentation of the design organization communication structure -- begins as soon as delegation has started. Elementary probability theory tells us that the number of possible communication paths in an organization is approximately half the square of the number of people in the organization. Even in a moderately small organization it becomes necessary to restrict communication in order that people can get some "work" done. Research which leads to techniques permitting more efficient communication among designers will play an extremely important role in the technology of system management. ... Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.

Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible. There is need for a philosophy of system design management which is not based on the assumption that adding manpower simply adds to productivity. " -- http://melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

"there's never enough time to do something right, but there's always enough time to do it over." -- http://melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html

"Something that's fascinating about Twitter is that everyone's experience is different. Some people subscribe to 100 people, others 5000, I've even seen people who follow 0 people. No one subscribes to exactly the same people you do. And just because you listen to someone doesn't mean they listen to you, and vice versa. There's a tremendous variety of different experiences. Yet each of us feels as if we're in a chatroom. That's the paradox of Twitter. It kind of feels like IRC while it is nothing like IRC.

What Twitter is most like, imho, is an RSS aggregator. The people who work on Twitter call it a micro-blogging system, because to them, that's what it's like, even if the users don't see it that way. I understand what they're saying, as I think through the possible ways to decentralize it, invariably I'm led down paths I've already walked in implementing blogging software and RSS software.

But IRC is very symmetric -- if I listen to you, then you listen to me. And vice versa. There are ways to block someone in IRC, but it's an opt-out, where in Twitter listening to someone is by default off, and you have to opt-in. Very different experience. In IRC it would be considered a drastic measure to block someone. In Twitter, there's nothing offensive about not subscribing to someone.

Further, you rarely see trolls or flaming in Twitter, because it doesn't work, just as it doesn't work in blogging. Unless you flame someone in an interesting or funny way, you're not going to get many followers. So guys like Loren Feldman, who is funny, gets a lot of followers on Twitter. And the normal grouchy and anonymous trolls who dominate mail lists rarely gain followers on Twitter (or blogs). " -- http://scripting.com/stories/2008/01/18/faqIsDecentralizedTwitterJ.html

"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute"

"Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The down side is that it's difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled." -- http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

"A common cry, outside the field. People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride." -- http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

 "Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." --Robert Jarvik

"In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else." - George Orwell

"...the larval stage in which the company focuses on the consumer experience while adopting a pose of apathy toward the brands and marketers it will court when it someday gets around to making money." -- http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/snapchat-and-the-erasable-future-of-social-media#p2

" Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink. " -- Don Lancaster, Incredible Secret Money Making Machine

"At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could." -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html

"The Empire is evil. The Federation is generally good, often neutral and occasionally evil. The Kingdom, on the other hand, is almost always good." -- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheKingdom

" Jackson: I'm energy now. O'Neill: (sarcastically) How's that working out for you? Jackson: Good, actually. " -- Stargate SG-1

"Always forbidden, on occasion mandatory." -- Songs of Earth and Power, Greg Bear

"Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part." -- William Somerset, Se7en

"Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski%27s_law_of_software_envelopment#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment

" > So are you saying that you can determine in advance whether the program will > terminate? If so, how?

   Can you? If not, why are you writing this program?" - Matthias Blume, http://groups.google.com.br/group/comp.lang.functional/browse_thread/thread/1f0b2d3bff830c6e/a885a14003d27143?lnk=st#a885a14003d27143

Yet here s the thing to remember on MLK weekend (even though my saying this violates a rule I believe in firmly, a kind of inverse to Godwin s law, because though I believe these two great souls were motivated by exactly the same kind of justice, King s cause was greater): How many felonies was Martin Luther King, Jr., convicted of? King, whose motives were political too, but who, unlike Aaron, triggered actions which caused real harm (as in physical damage). What s that number?

Zero.

And how many was he even charged with in the whole of his career?

Two. Two bogus charges (perjury and tax evasion) from Alabama, which an all-white jury acquitted him of.

This is a measure of who we have become. And we don t even notice it. We can t even see the extremism that we have allowed to creep into our law. And we treat as decent a government official who invokes her family while defending behavior which in part at least drove this boy to his death. " -- http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40845525507/a-time-for-silence

"People who find kidney sales repugnant don't just think it's a bad idea, but think it's the kind of bad idea that only bad people have" -- Al Roth, http://www.stanfordmag-digital.com/stanfordmag/20130102?pg=68#article_id=249248 (bayle: i think this would be a informal definition of 'taboo')

"There seems to be a long period of initial obscurity for any new language. Then after that comes a long period of semi-obscurity, followed by total obscurity." -- Paul Bissex

" When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don't think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn't more talented. And I definitely can't claim I was a harder worker -- I've never worked particularly hard, I've always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious -- but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you'll get in trouble. Very few people's curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity." " -- Aaron Swartz

"I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing." -- Alan Kay

"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." -- George Bernard Shaw

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later." -- Hunter S. Thompson

" Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use X." Now they have two problems." -- old quote about programming.

"What separates the talkers from the doer's?

Here's what I think it is. It's not about "talking is evil." Rather, it's about DECISION.

If poeple have not DECIDED to do a thing, then the people will just talk endlessly.

The enemy is not talking! The enemy is INDECISION. " -- Lion Kimbro

"People never trust an accommodating man with important things. That may sound harsh and cynical, but check it up in your own experience. If you have a severe illness, for example, you turn to the busiest, most exacting doctor in town. The fact that he is busy and can t be bothered by little things gives you confidence in his ability and judgment." -- http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/1922-why-i-quit-being-so-accommodating/

"I suspect that genius is made up almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924641

"In science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts." -- Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan

"Nobody wants to be dubbed the future king while the current king is still on the throne. It's the quickest way to the dungeon." -- http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-next-ceo-of-microsoft-steven-sinofsky-is-the-heir-apparent-2012-2#ixzz2C4fOqBTv

"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this -- who will count the votes, and how." -- Stalin (often shortened to the aphorism 'It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes')

"As the founder and CEO of a startup, VCs would always ask me, 'What keeps you up at night?' It as a tedious question with only one honest answer: raising more money from you guys." -- Lewis D'Vorkin

"Practical politics consists of ignoring facts." -- Henry Adams

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." -- Henry Adams

"Bob Barton [said] "The basic principle of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer, and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers... Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?" -- Alan Kay

"The basic principle of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." -- Bob Barton

"Vigor is more useful than rigor, unless you're dead." -- Larry Wall's sig ( http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/95-04-013 )

"Wondering why I signed up for a twitter account." -- my friend P.R. (first of 197 tweets and counting)

"of course not. We would never discuss your paranoia in your absence. " --- my friend P.R.

" Pair-brogramming combines the gym and the office. The bro-navigator does reps while the bro-driver writes code. Arms tired? Switch. " -- Startup L. Jackson

"

If you can't make fun of yourself who can you make fun of? Trick question: Microsoft. Always Microsoft. " -- Startup L. Jackson

"You're missing the point. We want the guarantee enforced at compile time that parallel code doesn't share mutable memory. What you're talking about is enforcing the discipline of not sharing memory in your parallel code. This goes against nature: Humans are supposed to be creative, computers are supposed to be reliable; not the other way around." -- DrBartosz?, http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/s112h/the_downfall_of_imperative_programming_functional/c4abv4u

"I like to think that the bad ideas I describe in this blog might someday inspire one of you to come up with actual good ideas. That's how ideas evolve; you start with bad ones then tweak them. If I may borrow and modify a quote from Isaac Newton: If you can see further it is only because you're standing on the pile of manure I so generously provided. Bad ideas are the raw materials for good ideas...Sometimes the end product retains the germ of the original idea, sometimes it drifts into something entirely different. One of the big secrets to creativity is that you have to start walking before you decide where you're going. It's opposite of how you're raised to think." -- scott adams

“nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do. Most people think the opposite – that all things are withheld from them which they have conceived to do and they end up doing nothing.” -- Russell Kirsch

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are filled with passionate intensity,” -- .B. Yeats in The Second Coming

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards." - Vernon Law

"A lot of money does not make anyone more often right. It just makes him harder to correct." -- Malcom Forbes

"I do not understand the concept of after-hours trading. What's the point of closing markets if you're going to let people trade afterward? Is that loud clanging bell just a suggestion bell? If so, instead of a bell, shouldn't a middle-aged woman come to the floor of the exchange and say that it's starting to get dark out?" -- http://www.smartmoney.com/invest/stocks/book-takes-a-look-inside-professional-day-traders-1339513989350/

"Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen." -- Seb Paquet

"Now, the kind of change I like to help happen is a change that helps make more aliveness or make room for more aliveness.... I intend to personally assess whether I am creating value, based on whether it helps bring into existence promising new systems that serve life, and generates more aliveness in myself and the world." -- Seb Paquet

"An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted" -- Arthur Miller

"Socialist governments...always run out of other people's money" -- Margaret Thatcher

"There is no subtler, or surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debase the currency...not one man in a million is able to diagnose." --John Maynard Keynes

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debase the currency." --Nikolai Lenin

"What's interesting is that, the concept has been around since the very first webserver which Tim Berners-Lee created at European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva:

"...anywhere on the CERN server that we created a subdirectory called Discussion, a new interactive forum would exist. It allowed people to post questions on a given subject, read, and respond. A person couldn't just "reply." He had to say whether he was agreeing, disagreeing, or asking for clarification of a point. The idea was that the state of the discussion would be visible to anyone involved." Weaving the Web (1999) p172. " -- web.archive.org/web/20100328194304/http://civilities.net/ViewPoints (Jon Garfunkel, http://www.linkedin.com/in/jongarfunkel)

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." -- John Adams

"It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." -Warren Buffett

"The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage." -Warren Buffett

"Mr Thaler concedes that in some ways the events of the past couple of years have strengthened the EMH. The hypothesis has two parts, he says: the no-free-lunch part and the price-is-right part, and if anything the first part has been strengthened as we have learned that some investment strategies are riskier than they look and it really is difficult to beat the market. The idea that the market price is the right price, however, has been badly dented."

"Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us 3 laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac s talents didn t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, 'I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.' If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the 4th Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases." - Warren Buffett

"So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

...

He says, ``Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?

``Hah! I say. ``There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it. His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.

...

There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate. " -- Richard Feynmann, http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html

"Google, he insists, has never aggressively enforced its own patents in search, and he blasts the aggressors engaging in warfare in the mobile arena. "I think that companies usually get into that when they're towards the end of their life cycle or they don't have good confidence in their abilities to really compete naturally."" -- http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-04/the-education-of-googles-larry-page

" The high-modernist reformer is driven by a naive-scientific Utopian vision that does not tolerate dissent, because it believes it is dealing in scientific truths." -- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/

" Omega is interesting because it appears to fit in that subtle zone of nameable but not computable. You can clearly define it as a property (stateable in some finite symbol system) but you can t compute it. It is, in a sense, the first sign of the last frontier of knowable numbers. Beyond lies a ridiculously larger ocean of entities so elusive, you have to wonder, why keep them around in your conceptual framework at all? " -- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/08/16/digital-philosophy-i/

"[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- there are things we do not know we don't know." -- Donald Rumsfeld

Galen: ". . . so long as we are ignorant of the true essence of the cause which is operating, we call it a faculty." On the Natural Faculties, trans. A. J. Brock (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 17.

"Men occasionally stumble over truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Winston Churchill

"Revolutions are always verbose" -- Leon Trotsky

"EVERYONE GOOD AT SEE CAN'T. EVERYONE LIVE IN WORLD FULL OF IMPOSSIBLE. EVERYTHING THAT MATTER IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL SOMEONE DO IT ANYWAY." -- FAKEGRIMLOCK

"You will pay the price for your lack of vision!" -- Emperor, Star Wars

"'People s money is so safe here at Wells Fargo, even our sworn enemies use us for their banking needs!'" -- http://twitter.com/#!/davidcolburn/status/133776301877235712 (see http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Occupy-Oakland-Banks-With-Wells-Fargo----Temporarily-133558913.html for context)

"if you don't take care of yourself someone will take of you... and they'll expect something in return." -- http://thinklikeablackbelt.org/2011/11/09/occupy-wall-street-sex-drums-and-anarchy/

"to express something of what [you] perceive to be the truth aronud [you] so that others can benefit from it" -- Steve Jobs, quoted in Chapter 2 of The Apple Way

"The higher you go in a company, the less oxygen there is, so supporting intelligent life becomes difficult." -- Guy Kawasaki, Rules for Revolutionaries, Chapter 2, section Ignore naysayers, page 42.

" Apple's Three Laws of Developers.

        A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
        A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
        A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. " -- http://yourhead.tumblr.com/post/3320228508/apples-three-laws-of-developers

" rachelbythebay 1 day ago

link

I have an acid test for any place which claims to be a startup. When someone proclaims this, ask them to answer any two of the following questions:

If the bigwigs can't answer that, I'm sorry, you've moved past actual startup-dom and you're just in la-la land where you just think you are one.

Unfortunately, I only thought of this acid test after leaving a place with 30K employees which had started proclaiming it semi-regularly during their Friday get-togethers.

nirvana 1 day ago

link

My benchmark is this: If they're a startup, then I want at least %1 equity on a fully diluted basis in stock options!

Also, if they're public, they're not a startup!

phillmv 1 day ago

link

Uhm, I think you lost the game when you had a BADGE to cover up.

Sukotto 1 day ago

link

If you have a name badge, it's not a startup.

nostrademons 1 day ago

link

Google never actually claims they're a startup, they just say they want to be like a startup.

There're varying degrees of success at this, ranging from "if I squint really hard, I could almost see it" to "Yeah...I don't think so." But I give 'em props for trying, as most companies with 30k employees don't even make the effort.

BTW, I could go all the way up to the VP level within the Search bigwigs and they'd be able to answer this. " -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876

"

Even more important is the social need for executive effectiveness. The cohesion and strength of our society depend increasingly on the integration of the psychological and social needs of the knowledge worker with the goals of organization and of industrial society.

The knowledge worker['s] .... psychological needs and personal values need to be satisfied in and through his work and position in the organization. He is considered and considers himself a professional. Yet he is an employee and under orders. He is beholden to a knowledge area, yet he has to subordinate the authority of knowledge to organizational objectives and goals. In a knowledge area there are no superiors or subordinates, there are only older and younger men. Yet organization requires a hierarchy. These are not entirely new problems, to be sure. Officer corps and civil service have known them for a long time, and have known how to resolve them. But they are real problems. The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.

Just as the economic conflict between the needs of the manual worker and the role of an expanding economy was the social question of the nineteenth century in the developing countries, so the position, function and fulfillment of the knowledge worker is the social question of the twentieth century in these countries now that they are developed.

It is not a question that will go away if we deny its existence. To assert (as do in their own way both orthodox economists and Marxists) that only the objective reality of economic and social performance exists will not make the problem go away. Nor, however, will the new romanticism of the social psychologists (e.g., Professor Chris Argyris at Yale) who quite rightly point out that organizational goals are not automatically individual fulfillment and therefrom conclude that we had better sweep them aside. We will have to satisfy both the objective needs of society for performance by the organization, and the needs of the person for achievement and fulfillment.

Self-development of the executive toward effectiveness is the only available answer. It is the only way in which organization goals and individual needs can come together. The executive who works at making strengths productive his own as well as those of others works at making organizational performance compatible with personal achievement. He works at making his knowledge area become organizational opportunity. And by focusing on contribution, he makes his own values become organization results. " -- Peter F Drucker, The Effective Executive

"Philosophers typically take ancient skeptical arguments to challenge the possibility of knowledge. I don t think they do. What they challenge is the possibility of ever defending and articulating our knowledge to those who see things differently." -- michael p. lynch, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/reasons-for-reason/?ref=global-home#_ftn1

"...the effective decision-maker always tries to put his solution on the highest possible conceptual level. He does not solve the immediate financing problem by issuing whatever security would be easiest to sell at the best price for the next few years. If he expects to need the capital market for the foreseeable future, he invents a new kind of investor and designs the appropriate security for a mass-capital market that does not yet exist." -- Peter F. Drucker, The Effective Executive

"what is the purpose of protest? As history shows, protests can certainly be effective in winning concessions from those in power, but only to the extent that they are representative of broader movements. When it is effective, protest itself is little more than the public expression of a major social mobilisation already organised." -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/29/occupy-wall-street-protest?newsfeed=true

"If you define yourself in relation to others you constrain yourself to existing categories." -- me, in relation to not worrying too much about the competition when designing a product in a startup (just make sure they're not doing exactly the same thing as you)

"Never Write a Letter and Never Destroy One" -- Cardinal Richelieu

"In theory it would be possible to do without theory, but in practice it's never been tried." -- me

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." [Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." [Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]

*

"I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids." [Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]

*

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." [Steve Jobs, [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

*

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle." [[Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

*

"When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." [[Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

*

"I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next." [Steve Jobs, [NBC Nightly News, May 2006]

Q: There's a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?

"You're missing it. This is not a one-man show. What's reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now." [Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek?, May 25, 1998]

*

"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." [Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998]

*

"The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament." [Steve Jobs, Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer Inc., May 1999]

*

"The problem with the Internet startup craze isn't that too many people are starting companies; it's that too many people aren't sticking with it. That's somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That's when you find out who you are and what your values are.

"So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they're gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective." [Steve Jobs, Fortune, Jan. 24, 2000]

*

"The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.

"But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

"And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. [Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek?, Oct. 12, 2004]

"Look at the design of a lot of consumer products they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through." [Steve Jobs, MSNBC and Newsweek interview, Oct. 14, 2006]

" "This is what customers pay us for to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, Oh my God, that's great!'" [Steve Jobs, Fortune, January 24 2000] "

" For something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. " -- Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek?, May 25, 1998

" Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have. [Wired, February 1996]

"

" We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985 "

"The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.

I'm sorry, it's true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We're born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It's been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much -- if at all.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I'm not downplaying that.

"But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light -- that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important." Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1996

"I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television -- but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent." Steve Jobs, Rolling Stone, Dec. 3, 2003

"

"The French revolutionary thought leaders were wealthy salon denizens, although far from the court at Versailles, and therefore increasingly out-of-power as the clouds darkened over France. History describes such revolutionaries, radicals, and agitators as "middle class" in hindsight (they're our heroes, and the U.S. associates "middle class" reflexively with virtue) but these people did, in fact, come overwhelmingly from the richest ~5 percent."

Actually, by the traditional definition, they were still middle class, as higher classes were defined by more than just money (royalty, political position, etc.)

Paul Graham goes into detail on this very issue in his "Mind the Gap" essay: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html" -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845844

"It is not given to us to know whether we shall succeed or not. In failure there is no disgrace. There can be but one ultimate shame... the cowardice of not having tried." -- Silver Surfer, written by Stan Lee and Jean Giraud

"I don't know the secret to success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everyone" - Bill Cosby.

"Everyone just wants validation, love, security, enjoyment and hopes for a better future. The way they verbalise this and work towards it is where things branch off, but we all have the same basic desires. " -- http://www.fluentin3months.com/life-lessons/

"The data [..the applications we fill out, the taxes we pay, the licenses we use, the credit-card purchases we make, and even our credit reports] are responsible for the offers that arrive in our mailboxes, as well as the language that's used in them... It's a way to treat us as a mob, individually. The programs give corporations direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotiont, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons. Address in this one-to-one fashion, we respond mechanically. The computer program adjusts and improves, learning to predict our next evasive maneuver and then presenting us with a product, a brand, or even a candidate that embodies our resistance." -- Life, Inc., Douglas Rushkoff.

"It's part of the offical advertising worldview that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds, and nobody can really understand kids but the corporate sponsor." -- Mark Crispin Miller, via Life, Inc., Douglas Rushkoff.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -- Buckminster Fuller

"Thanks to nerds, the sparkly stones are even sparklier" -- Some girl

"You can talk anyone out of a good reason." -- Katherine

"Finally, and most importantly, sociopaths do not seek legitimacy for their private morality from the group, justify it, or apologize for it." -- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/21/morality-compassion-and-the-sociopath/on-trail/the-way-of-the-sociopath/ (note: he is using the word "sociopath" is a manner different from its typical usage)

"In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he's tired. Everyone is. That's not the point. The point is to run." -- Seth Godin

"The critical link that is ignored in nearly all discussion of tribes and movements is the proposed solution. This omission is predictable because it deemphasizes the role of the tribe. A tribe with no productive solutions is just a mob. The "organize first, think later" formula is a recipe for extremism, not productive solutions." -- Gregory Rader, http://onthespiral.com/start-a-movement-lead-a-tribe-but-only-as-a-last-resort

"Belief that a social transformation is happening serves to keep it from happening." -- I strongly agree. There are regularly bubbles of speculation (2012 anyone?) that people use to ride enthusiasm, but when you look at the movement over time, very little of significance is happening. Yes, what Willow calls "backstory" can develop, and distribution of ideas and such, and yes, that is very valuable, but in terms of actual movement, nothing is happening. But people keep saying: "Oh, it's happening now, the troops are moving." But nothing is moving. Nothing is moving at all." -- http://posterous.com/explore/tag/missionbroadcast

"What is the dream in the greatest realm I can see?" -- Lion Kimbro

"When making absurd, nonsensical, insensitive statements on the Internet, one ought not expect them to remain in obscurity." -- Peter Finocchiaro

"What lovely music the birds make! what do they ask... and where do they go? Up there they sing their freedom, launched into the sky like arrows, following their freedoms through the golden clouds." -- Marc Andreyko's translation of I Pagliacci by Leoncavallo, adapted for The Clowns by P Craig Russell and Galen Showman. Obviously, this must have been the inspiration for Angry Birds

I have not looked up all of these myself, and some of them may be mere rumor.

"We're against complexity. We believe designing systems is a fight against complexity. We'll accept to fight the complexity when it's worthwhile but we'll try hard to recognize when a small feature is not worth 1000s of lines of code. Most of the time the best way to fight complexity is by not creating it at all." -- http://antirez.com/post/redis-manifesto.html

"We optimize for joy. We believe writing code is a lot of hard work, and the only way it can be worth is by enjoying it. When there is no longer joy in writing code, the best thing to do is stop. To prevent this, we'll avoid taking paths that will make Redis less of a joy to develop." -- http://antirez.com/post/redis-manifesto.html

" Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than *right* now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!" -- Tim Peters, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." -- Thoreau

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail."

"A dream is an answer to a question that we don't know how to ask." -- Adeodato Simo

" "the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints." "

"The Arch Way

The design principles behind Arch are aimed at keeping it simple.

'Simple', in this context, shall mean 'without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications'. In short; an elegant, minimalist approach.

Some thoughts to keep in mind as you consider simplicity:

    " 'Simple' is defined from a technical standpoint, not a usability standpoint. It is better to be technically elegant with a higher learning curve, than to be easy to use and technically [inferior]." -Aaron Griffin
    Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem or "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." -Occam's razor. The term razor refers to the act of shaving away unnecessary complications to arrive at the simplest explanation, method or theory.
    "The extraordinary part of [my method] lies in its simplicity..The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity." - Bruce Lee " -- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners%27_Guide#The_Arch_Way

"As simple as possible but no simpler" -- einstein

"lightweight, simple attributes applied to one's preferred solution. For solutions preferred by others, see heavyweight, complex." -- Malcolm Reynolds, http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/2011/03/computer-science-terminology.html

"Online, everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom. If you've ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we've theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it's because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing." --http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

" Q: Given the nature of current operating systems and applications, do you think the idea of "one tool doing one job well" has been abandoned? If so, do you think a return to this model would help bring some innovation back to software development?

(It's easier to toss a small, single-purpose app and start over than it is to toss a large, feature-laden app and start over.)

A (Rob Pike): Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl. " -- http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds

"If language doesn't allow side-effects without letting the type system know, it's pure. Otherwise it's impure." -- Rahul Goma Phulore, http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/25062

" Wired: How has your thinking about design changed over the past decades?

    Brooks: When I first wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, I counseled
    programmers to “throw the first version away,” then build a second one.
    By the 20th-anniversary edition, I realized that constant incremental
    iteration is a far sounder approach. You build a quick prototype and
    get it in front of users to see what they do with it. You will always
    be surprised." -- http://www.wired.com/2010/07/ff_fred_brooks/

in the following passage from a fictional book, Ransom, a human, is asked by two angels (eldil; named Perelandra and Malacandra) for assistance in choosing what form they should apear to some other humans (a King and Queen whom they wish to honor). Ransom is standing in a valley containing a lake and surrounded by mountains. The angels currently appear to Ransom as a very faint and hard to see visual disturbance, and they want to choose another form that will be easier for humans to see and more pleasing to the eye:

" And while (the man named Ransom) thought of this he became gradually aware that there was something odd about the flowers at two places in his immediate neighbourhood. Next, he perceived that the oddity was an oddity in the light; thirdly, that it was in the air as well as on the ground. Then, as the blood pricked his veins and a familiar, yet strange, sense of diminished being possessed him, he knew that he was in the presence of two eldila. ... "Let us prepare our shapes. We are hard for them to see while we remain in ourselves."

"It is very well said," answered Malacandra. "But in what form shall we show ourselves to do them honour?"

"Let us appear to the small one here," said the other. "For he is a man and can tell us what is pleasing to their senses."

"I can see--I can see something even now," said Ransom.

"Would you have the King strain his eyes to see those who come to do him honour?" said the archon of Perelandra. "But look on this and tell us how it deals with you."

The very faint light--the almost imperceptible alteration in the visual field--which betokens an eldil vanished suddenly. The rosy peaks and the calm pool vanished also. A tornado of sheer monstrosities seemed to be pouring over Ransom. Darting pillars filled with eyes, lightning pulsations of flame, talons and beaks and billowy masses of what suggested snow, volleyed through cubes and heptagons into an infinite black void. "Stop it . . . stop it," he yelled, and the scene cleared. He gazed round blinking on the field of lilies, and presently gave the eldila to understand that this kind of appearance was not suited to human sensations. "Look then on this," said the voices again. And he looked with some reluctance, and far off between the peaks on the other side of the little valley there came rolling wheels. There was nothing but that--concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other. There was nothing terrible about them if you could get used to their appalling size, but there was also nothing significant. He bade them to try yet a third time. And suddenly two human figures stood before him on the opposite side of the lake.

...They were perhaps thirty feet high. They were burning white like white-hot iron. The outline of their bodies when he looked at it steadily against the red landscape seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, co-existed with a rushing movement of the matter it contained. For a fraction of an inch inward from this outline the landscape was just visible through them: beyond that they were opaque.

...Their bodies, he said, were white. But a flush of diverse colours began at about the shoulders and streamed up the necks and flickered over face and head and stood out around the head like plumage or a halo. He told me he could in a sense remember these colours--that is, he would know them if he saw them again--but that he cannot by any effort call up a visual image of them nor give them any name. ... "Am I then seeing only an appearance? Is it not real at all?"

"You see only an appearance, small one. You have never seen more than an appearance of anything--not of Arbol, nor of a stone, nor of your own body. This appearance is as true as what you see of those."

"But . . . there were those other appearances."

"No. There was only the failure of appearance."

"I don't understand," said Ransom. "Were all those other things--the wheels and the eyes--more real than this or less?"

"There is no meaning in your question," said Mars. "You can see a stone, if it is a fit distance from you and if you and it are moving at speeds not too different. But if one throws the stone at your eye, what then is the appearance?"

"I should feel pain and perhaps see splintered light," said Ransom. "But I don't know that I should call that an appearance of the stone."

"Yet it would be the true operation of the stone. And there is your question answered. We are now at the right distance from you."

"And were you nearer in what I first saw?"

"I do not mean that kind of distance."

"And then," said Ransom, still pondering, "there is what I had thought was your wonted appearance--the very faint light, Oyarsa, as I used to see it in your own world. What of that?"

"That is enough appearance for us to speak to you by. No more was needed between us: no more is needed now. It is to honour the King that we would now appear more. That light is the overflow or echo into the world of your senses of vehicles made for appearance to one another and to the greater eldila."

" -- Perelandra by C.S. Lewis, Chapters 15 and 16

"

"Let us prepare our shapes. We are hard for them to see while we remain in ourselves."

"It is very well said," answered Malacandra. "But in what form shall we show ourselves to do them honour?"

"Let us appear to the small one here," said the other. "For he is a man and can tell us what is pleasing to their senses."

"I can see - I can see something even now," said Ransom.

"Would you have the King strain his eyes to see those who come to do him honour?" said the archon of Perelandra. "But look on this and tell us how it deals with you."

The very faint light the almost imperceptible alterations in the visual field which betokens an eldil vanished suddenly. The rosy peaks and the calm pool vanished also. A tornado of sheer monstrosities seemed to be pouring over Ransom. Darting pillars filled with eyes, lightning pulsations of flame, talons and beaks and billowy masses of what suggested snow, volleyed through cubes and heptagons into an infinite black void. "Stop it ... stop it," he yelled, and the scene cleared. He gazed round blinking on the fields of lilies, and presently gave the eldila to understand that this kind of appearance was not suited to human sensations. "Look then on this," said the voices again. And he looked with some reluctance, and far off between the peaks on the other side of the little valley there came rolling wheels. There was nothing but that - concentric wheels moving with a rather sickening slowness one inside the other. There was nothing terrible about them if you could get used to their appalling size, but there was also nothing significant. He bade them to try yet a third time. And suddenly two human figures stood before him on the opposite side of the lake.

...They were perhaps thirty feet high. They were burning white like white-hot iron. The outline of their bodies when he looked at it steadily against the red landscape seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, co-existed with a rushing movement of the matter it contained. For a fraction of an inch inward from this outline the landscape was just visible through them: beyond that they were opaque.

Whenever he looked straight at them they appeared to be rushing towards him with enormous speed: whenever his eyes took in their surroundings he realised that they were stationary. This may have been due in part to the fact that their long and sparkling hair stood out straight behind them as if in a great wind. But if there were a wind it was not made of air, for no petal of the flowers was shaken. They were not standing quite vertically in relation to the floor of the valley: but to Ransom it appeared (as it had appeared to me on Earth when I saw one) that the eldils were vertical. It was the valley - it was the whole world of Perelandra - which was aslant. He remembered the words of Oyarsa long ago in Mars, "I am not here in the same way that you are here." It was borne in upon him that the creatures, were really moving, though not moving in relation to him. This planet which inevitably seemed to him while he was in it an unmoving world - the world, in fact - was to them a thing moving through the heavens. In relation to their own celestial frame of reference they were rushing forward to keep abreast of the mountain valley. Had they stood still, they would have flashed past him too quickly for him to see, doubly dropped behind by the planet's spin on its own axis and by its onward march around the Sun.

Their bodies, he said, were white. But a flush of diverse colours began at about the shoulders and streamed up the necks and flickered over face and head and stood out around the head like plumage or a halo. He told me he could in a sense remember these colours - that is, he would know them if he saw them again - but that he cannot by any effort call up a visual image of them nor give them any name " -- Perelandra, C.S. Lewis

"Woman call me ugly until they find how much money i make. When they find out, they call me ugly and poor." -- unknown

"It is very scary not to be able to trust the compiler. Even brave men are reduced to quivering jelly by this feeling. The young and the weak - they simply give up and die." -- Curtis Yarvin

"Most languages which achieve adoption do not do so because of their excellence as languages, they do so because they are the default language of a platform which achieves adoption." -- Curtis Yarvin

"Urbit at present is not good for anything but screwing around. For screwing around, it answers all your needs and is happy to consume any amount of unwanted time... It does basically work as described above, though. " -- http://urbit.org/

"Nothing clarifies your ideas like trying to write them down" -- Paul Graham

"What one fool can do, another can." - Ancient Simian proverb ( http://urbit.org/doc/nock/tut/1/ )

"But are you crazy enough?" - Point Break

"Like all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, a slave." - The Lottery in Babylon

"What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?" - The Matrix

"Anyone who thinks he's original is merely ignorant." - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“In my youth, fooled by the illusory theories of the Xhystos and Tharo architects, I momentarily succumbed to the turbid charms of the arabesque. However, I soon regained my sense and discovered the profound nature of our art. I realized that in every circumstance, simplicity is preferable to affectation, steadfast attention to a single effect is better than a thousand strokes of inspiration, and at every moment the conception of the whole must prevail over obsession with detail.” -- Eugen Robick, Fever in Urbicand

"I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible to hear them so to speak." -- C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 27.

"We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be." ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." ― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

"This “uncanny valley” of trivial ownership is, in my opinion, worse than the total (and mutually understood) non-ownership of an employee in a traditional corporation." -- Michaelo Church

"Beauty before definition, definition before truth. (Ugly definitions are hard to work with. And a proposition that contains an undefined term might be true with one definition of that term and false with another.)" -- Vaughan Pratt

"The only thing we have to fear is the Homeland Security threat level itself." -- Vaughan Pratt

"I neither believe nor disbelieve the logical principle of excluded middle." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Why must there be beauty in truth? An ugly rumor confirmed by investigation remains ugly. And why must there be truth in beauty? Most beautiful stories are too good to be true. In life as in mathematics, judge definitions by their beauty and propositions by their truth." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Any sufficiently advanced mathematics is indistinguishable from gibberish. I went into technology because I didn't know anyone who preferred gibberish to magic." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Social structure is all about lawn ornaments. The proletariat seek to improve their lot so they can afford them. The bourgeoisie spread them around ostentatiously. And the intelligentsia decry the moral decay they bring about." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Does my body love me, or is it just using me for food?" -- Vaughan Pratt

"A fallacy is worth a thousand steps." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Time flies when you're getting old, whether or not you're having fun." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Retaining your password has much in common with retaining your virginity. However earnestly you are counseled early on to guard it at all times, and however diligently you heed that counsel, the time will come when you learn the hard way how social engineering works." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Don't shoot the messenger. Exception: spam." -- Vaughan Pratt

"Arthur C. Clarke's laws of prediction (normal form): Any sufficiently difficult goal is easier to prove impossible than possible. Any sufficiently clear grasp of an obstacle will overcome it. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (People only remember Clarke's third law. He neglected to put the first two in normal form, making them impossible to remember.) " -- Vaughan Pratt

"Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change" -- saying on LessWrong?, according to http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-must-read-Less-Wrong-sequences/answer/George-Koleszarik

"Think for yourself" sounds vaguely reasonable only because of the abominable incompetence of those tasked with thinking for us." -- Steven Kaas

"Forming your own opinion is no more necessary than building your own furniture." -- Peter de Blanc

" 'How are you doing, Dixie?' 'I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.' 'How's it feel?' 'It doesn't.' 'Bother you?' 'What bothers me is, nothin' does.' 'How's that?' 'Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he's tossin' all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy?, he says, it's the other goddam thumb.' When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case's spine. 'Do me a favor, boy.' 'What's that, Dix?' 'This scam of yours, when it's over, you erase this goddam thing.'" .... "Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with an Al. Not human, see?" "Well, yeah, obviously." "Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?" "Wait a sec," Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?" "Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...." The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. "But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human." " -- Neuromancer, William Gibson

"A) SHOULD I DAYTRADE?

Only if you are also willing to take all of your money, rip it into tiny pieces, make cupcakes with one piece of money inside each cupcake and then eat all of the cupcakes.

Then you will get sick, and eat all of your money, but it will taste thrilling along the way. Which is what daytrading is. " -- http://www.businessinsider.com/money-cheat-sheet-2014-4?utm_content=bufferb4ee0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

movie review about real life: "gritty, yes, but mainly.. incredibly dull. there were some laughs, but i felt more pity for him than anything else."

"...the {academic} superstars I know best are extraordinarily competitive/driven and tend to think of the whole world as consisting of other high-achieving academics and assorted debris, thus reducing the "world" literally to a few hundred monkeyspheres in size." -- http://lesswrong.com/lw/x9/dunbars_function/q2r

" First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, but we had already abandoned the only defensible Schelling point " -- http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slopes/

"Everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do." -- Vlad Taltos (Issola, Steven Brust)

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” -- Richard Feynman

"The rich vote with money and always get what they want. The middle classes vote at the polls and never get what they want. The poor vote with violence and sometimes get what they want. A brief summary of history." -- geogra4 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7486421

“I don’t know how you get fringe technology without fringe people and politics … You just need to go through a maturation process where the technology emerges as mainstream at the other end. Along the way the fringe politics will move on.” -- Marc Andreessen

“You’re searching for patterns among outliers,” says one skeptical V.C. “The whole exercise on its face is logically absurd.” -- http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -- Cardinal Richelieu

Zawinski's law – Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Wirth's law – Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Tobler's first law of geography – "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." Coined by Waldo R. Tobler (b. 1930). -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

Thomas theorem – "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences," ... (After W.I. Thomas and D.S. Thomas.) -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"Ninety percent of everything is crud." (Sturgeon's law) Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

Sutton's law – "Go where the money is". Often cited in medical schools to teach new doctors to spend resources where they are most likely to pay off. The law is named after bank robber Willie Sutton, who when asked why he robbed banks, is claimed to have answered "Because that's where the money is." -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

Stigler's law – No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer, named by statistician Stephen Stigler who attributes it to sociologist Robert K. Merton, making the law self-referential. -- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X." -- Sowa's law of standards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

"Equality. Fairness. Opportunity. Pick Two." -- Shirky's Law, as described by http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002238.html (the idea being that fairness and opportunity in a networked world leads to a rich-get-richer model where the chance of any node receiving an additional connection is proportional to the number of connections that it already has, which as we know leads to a power-law network, therefore you don't have equality)

"Rothbard's law – Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure." -- Segal's law

Sarnoff's law states that the value of a broadcast network is directly proportional to the number of viewers. It is attributed to David Sarnoff. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarnoff%27s_law

"Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it." -- Schneier's law

Postel's law – Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others. Derived from RFC 761 (Transmission Control Protocol, 1980) in which Jon Postel summarized earlier communications of desired interoperability criteria for the Internet Protocol (cf. IEN 111)[8] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

Peter principle – "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) in his book The Peter Principle. In his follow-up book, The Peter Prescription, he offered possible solutions to the problems his principle could cause. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

Parkinson's law – "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." Coined by C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993), who also coined its corollary, "Expenditure rises to meet income." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"Pareto principle – States that for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes. Named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, but framed by management thinker Joseph M. Juran." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"It is easier to destroy than create." -- Larry Niven (and others?)

"There is a time and place for tact. And there are times when tact is entirely misplaced." -- Larry Niven

"The world's dullest subjects, in order:

    Somebody else's diet.
    How to make money for a worthy cause.
    Special Interest Liberation." -- Larry Niven

"Old age is not for sissies." -- Larry Niven

"Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n^2)", however, "Within the context of social networks, many...have proposed modified models using (n × log n) proportionality rather than n^2 proportionality." (such as Briscoe, Odlyzko, and Tilly) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

"Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed." -- Neuhaus’ Law. "Orthodoxy, no matter how politely expressed, suggests that there is a right and a wrong, a true and a false, about things. When orthodoxy is optional, it is admitted under a rule of liberal tolerance that cannot help but be intolerant of talk about right and wrong, true and false." -- http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/the-unhappy-fate-of-optional-orthodoxy, Richard John Neuhaus

"it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility." -- Hans Moravec, Moravec's paradox

"Lotka's law – In infometrics, states that the number of authors publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the number of authors publishing a single article. As the number of articles published increases, authors producing that many publications become less frequent. For example, there may be 1/4 as many authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as there are single-publication authors, 1/9 as many publishing three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc. Though the law itself covers many disciplines, the actual ratios involved are very discipline-specific." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"Littlewood's law, or adage, states that an individual can expect to experience "miracles" at the rate of about one per month." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." -- Linus' law, Named for Linus Torvalds.

"Leibniz's law – A principle in metaphysics also known as the Identity of Indiscernibles. It states: "If two objects have all their properties in common, then they are one and the same object." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"Kerckhoffs' principle of secure cryptography – A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"In economics, the Jevons paradox is the proposition that as technology progresses, the increase in efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

"Humphrey's law – conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance. Described by psychologist George Humphrey in 1923." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law" (Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979) -- Hofstadter's law

"Neurons that fire together wire together." -- Hebb's law

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's razor

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." -- Greenspun's tenth rule, Philip Greenspun

"You can't win. You can't break even. You can't even get out of the game" -- Ginsberg's theorem, restatement of second law of thermodynamics by Allen Ginsberg

"Winner-take-all (or first-past-the-post) electoral systems tend to create a 2 party system, while proportional representation tends to create a multiple party system." Duverger's law – After Maurice Duverger. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer." -- Cunningham's law, attributed to Ward Cunningham by Steven McGeady?. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

"Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it." -- Conway's law

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- ("Who watches the watchmen?"), Juvenal

"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity" -- Hagbard Celine, Celine's First Law, in Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminati Papers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws

"Communication occurs only between equals." or more specifically "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation." -- Hagbard Celine, Celine's First Law, in Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminati Papers, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." -- Brooks' law

"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." -- Amara's law

"Dire legal notice" -- http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006697.html

"Written comments in a public forum are a really terrible way to have an emotionally charged discussion!" -- Tim O'Reilly, http://web.archive.org/web/20070409153021/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/call_for_a_blog_1.html#comments

"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." -- ?

"It was far easier for you as civilised men to behave like barbarians, than it was for them to behave like civilised men." -- Spock, Mirror Mirror, Star Trek

"The plural of anecdote is data." -- Ray Wolfinger (see http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data-after-all.html )

"That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously, because I think our opposition, whoever they may be, in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humor. You know, and we are humorous, we are, what are they, Laurel and Hardy. That's John and Yoko, and we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people, like Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, and Gandhi, got shot." -- John Lennon

"Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it'll always get you the right ones" -- John Lennon

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones." -- Marcus Aurelius

" We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas." -- Alan Watts

" Calvin: We have houses, electricity, plumbing, heat ... maybe we're so sheltered and comfortable that we've lost touch with the natural world and forgotten our place in it. Maybe we've lost our awe of nature.

    That's why I want to ask you, as a tiger, a wild animal close to nature, what you think we're put on Earth to do. What's our purpose in life? Why are we here?
    Hobbes: We're here to devour each other alive." -- Calvin and Hobbes, January 6th, 1991

“Anyone who thinks he’s original is merely ignorant.” -- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

" I thought the judge's name sounded familiar, so I checked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Haskell_Alsup

Yup. This was the guy who learned Java because he felt he needed to know how to program to be qualified to make a ruling in Oracle v Google. I usually dislike criticizing or praising individual judges (unlike politicians, it's not for the public to pick and choose -- nor should it be), but this one is really remarkable.

In one episode, Oracle's star lawyer... was arguing that Google copied the nine lines of rangeCheck code to accelerate development to gain faster entry into the mobile phone market.

Alsup told Boies, "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America --how could you even make that kind of argument?" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061788 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7061890

"Ido is superior to Esperanto in pretty much everything, but Esperanto recruits among the speakers of national languages, while Ido recruits only among Esperantists. The rules of osmosis suggest that therefore Esperanto will always have a much greater population base than Ido." -- http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qtevg/zerocoin_reduces_proof_size_by_98_plans_to/cdgbozf

"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." -- Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP)

"For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)" -- Rasmus Lerdorf

" Consider the plane figure Q, defined as the 8 by 8 square from which, at two opposite corners, two 1 by 1 squares have been removed. The area of Q is 62, which equals the combined area of 31 dominos of 1 by 2. The theorem is that the figure Q cannot be covered by 31 of such dominos.

Another way of stating the theorem is that if you start with squared paper and begin covering this by placing each next domino on two new adjacent squares, no placement of 31 dominos will yield the figure Q.

So, a possible way of proving the theorem is by generating all possible placements of dominos and verifying for each placement that it does not yield the figure Q: a tremendously laborious job.

The simple argument, however is as follows. Colour the squares of the squared paper as on a chess board. Each domino, covering two adjacent squares, covers 1 white and 1 black square, and, hence, each placement covers as many white squares as it covers black squares. In the figure Q, however, the number of white squares and the number of black squares differ by 2 —opposite corners lying on the same diagonal— and hence no placement of dominos yields figure Q. " -- http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

"The best time to do anything was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now." -- Harry Cornell

"They focused on what the technology could not do at the time rather than what it could do and might be able to do in the future. This is the most common mistake that naysayers make." -- Ben Horowitz

"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection." -- David Wheeler

"The first sign of someone who can't be trusted with power is that they ask for more of it." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911078

"...The system exists solely within the RAM of an abandoned Nokia 3310 mobile phone which was left in a subway station in Tokyo, and powers itself by feeding off the ghost of the late Satoshi Nakamoto (who was in fact a super hot 20 yr old female Japanese programmer and exotic animal collector)." -- funny quote from SatoshiDice?

“Money is like gas in the car – you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road – but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!” -- Tim O’Reilly?

"I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing" -- Alan Kay

"In any economy, there exists no less than one commodity or security of inelastic volume which is overvalued due to reservation demand. Ie: one scarce good which is money....The pons asinorum to success in the Flucht is to reverse the normal investor psychology of avoiding the crowded trade, and crowd instead into the most popular trade, finding the most overvalued good. This will become the standard trade: money, which is the bubble that never has to pop. The strategy is a Nash equilibrium: the correct strategy for everyone to follow, if everyone follows it." -- http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-monetary-restandardization.html

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. -- Theodore Roosevelt

"your product should be cutting edge, not your tech" -- Zach Holman, Github

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

"There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things." -- Phil Karlton

"The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason." -- Mike Hearn

"There are two kinds of fool. The first says 'this is old, and therefore good.' The other says 'this is new, and therefore better." -- Dean Inge

"There has never been a good product designed by a committee."

"Keep a decade behind."

"I'm all for simplicity. If it's very complicated I can't understand it."

"Use intuition to ask questions, not answer them."

"If it ain't broke, find something else to fix"

The worst maxim around is "Don't fix it if it ain't broke". You'd better be improving it, because your competitor is.

"The Fast drives out the Slow even if the Fast is wrong"

"Any programming problem can be solved by adding a level of indirection."

"Any performance problem can be solved by removing a level of indirection."

"Q: What is the single most important fact in Computer Science?

A: The fact that there are N+1 elements in the set {0..N}"

"The 10th axiom of Systemantics: When a fail-safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe."

"Instructions should not bind together operations which an optimizing compiler might otherwise choose to separate in order to produce a more efficient program."

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

"Turning off the type and range checking after the program is debugged is like throwing away the lifeboats after the maiden voyage."

"The Titanic Effect: The severity with which a system fails is proportional to the intensity of the designers' belief that it cannot."

"One of the problems of being a pioneer is you always make mistakes and I never, never want to be a pioneer. It s always best to come second when you can look at the mistakes the pioneers made."

"SourceForge? is about projects. GitHub? is about people& A world of programmers forking, hacking and experimenting. There is merging, but only if people agree to do so, by other channels& GitHub? gives me my own place to play. It lets me share my code the way I share photos on Flickr, the same way I share bookmarks on del.icio.us. Here's something I found useful, for what it's worth& Moreover, I'm sharing my code, for what it's worth to me to share my code& I am sharing my code. I am not launching an open source project. I am not beginning a search for like minded developers to avoid duplication of efforts. I am not showing up at someone else s door hat in hand, asking for commit access. I am not looking to do battle with Brook'wwreadwws Law at the outset of my brainstorm" -- Gutierrez, 2008

"It is an invariable principal of all play... that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever MUST play CANNOT play."

"The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards." -- Richard Hamming, You and Your Research, 1986

"when you're taking flak you know you're over the target"

"A big construction is always completed late." -- http://kzhu.net/does-life-end-at-35.html

" Vita brevis, ars longa, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile. " -- Hippocrates

"CAPTCHA -- Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart"

"the problems with standards work is that the process is so exhausting that no one who ever finishes the task wants to try another, so everyone involved is always brand new and no knowledge ever propagates from cycle to cycle. This isn t literally true, but there is still some truth to it." -- http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html

"Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business." -- Francis Bacon

" On a planet far away they have universities. In those universities they have many of the same subjects we teach here, such as math, biology, philosophy, history, computer science, psychology, and literature. But although the subjects of the classes are the same, the contents are different. They teach a history class, but their history is different from ours. So are their biology and literature. I m not interested in subjects where their content is different from ours.

In some classes, though, the content is the same. They re teaching the same physics class (assuming they re at the same level of understanding we re at) and the same math classes (with a different base). In computer science most of what they teach is different, but their theory of computation is surely the same. Their biology is different, but their teaching of evolution is the same. Their philosophy is vastly different (think how different Eastern and Western philosophies are on earth), but their philosophy of science is probably very similar. " -- Lawrence Kesteloot (bayle: i would argue that their philosophy would also be similar, it's only the history of philosophy which would not be)

"Power demands transparency. Lack of power should give you some privacy." -- Ygg2, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583969

"If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess" -- Ronald Coase

"It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them." -- Frederick Mosteller

"You don't win prizes for taking bad advice from good people." -- http://aelag.com/58-things-i-learned-at-yc

" Things to Build There are lots of valid, useful, interesting things to do. I offer a small sample as evidence. If the field is moribund, it s not from a lack of possibilities. Only one GUI has ever been seriously tried, and its best ideas date from the 1970s. (In some ways, it s been getting worse; today the screen is covered with confusing little pictures.) Surely there are other possibilities. (Linux s interface isn t even as good as Windows!) There has been much talk about component architectures but only one true success: Unix pipes. It should be possible to build interactive and distributed applications from piece parts. The future is distributed computation, but the language community has done very little to address that possibility. The Web has dominated how systems present and use information: the model is forced interaction; the user must go get it. Let s go back to having the data come to the user instead. System administration remains a deeply difficult problem. Unglamorous, sure, but there s plenty of room to make a huge, even commercial, contribution. " -- http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf (Rob Pike)

" M: Maybe you can help by being more concrete: can you recommend us some books, computer science books or otherwise, which you think have had a big influence on you?

K: The only computer science book I read more than once, that I actually pick up every few years and read parts of again, is The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, a great book. " -- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/kernighan-interview/

" M: Speaking of students, what advice would you give to a computer science student who wants to pursue a research path? Maybe you see some areas to be more rewarding that other, and maybe some areas are not interesting anymore?

K: Well, don't take my advice on careers [laughs]. Unfortunately I don't think that there is any good advice. The interesting, sorry, I shouldn't be saying ``interesting --- the areas that are difficult are only two: one that it's too hard to write programs that work, and the other that it's too hard to use computers. So if you want things to work on, these are two that you could try. Of course, those are fairly general [laughs], there are a lot of special cases that you could play with. If you make any progress at all, on any aspect, then you have an opportunity to go on and pursue the purely academic side of it or alternatively you may go out and try to make your fortune in a start-up. And at this point it looks like a lot of people would rather make their fortune in a start-up than by spending 5 or 6 years getting a Ph.D. Maybe you're just misguided [laughs].... I think unfortunately the best advice you can give somebody is ``do what you think is interesting, do something that you think is fun and worthwhile, because otherwise you won't do it well anyway. But that's not any real help. " -- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/kernighan-interview/