- If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change. - Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. - A prime candidate for natural deselection. -- [Ideas for flamewars]

Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think... -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan".

J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence. -- Anatole France

Something Confusing about "Hard": It's tempting to think that if it's hard, then it's valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are completely useless -- (picture of someone smashing their head through concrete blocks kung-fu style). Hard DOES NOT EQUATE TO BEING valuable. Remember Friendster back in the day? You'd sign in, invite friends, have 25 friends, go to their profile, and then it'd show how you were connected to each one. That's an impressive [some geeky CS jargon] Cone traversal of a tree - 100 million string comparisons per page -- it won't scale. Used to take a minute per page to load, and Friendster died a painful death. MySpace -- not interested in solving problems They use the shortcut of "Miss Fitzpatrick is in your extended network" (i.e. even when you're not even signed up for MySpace) They didn't solve the hard problem. But they make the more relevant assumption that you want to be connected to hot women. [LOL] Shows Alexa graph showing that in early 2005 Myspace took off, and quickly bypassed Friendster and never looked back. -- Max Levchin, PayPal founder, Talk at StartupSchool2007

It was Edison who said ‘1% inspiration, 99% perspiration’. That may have been true a hundred years ago. These days it's ‘0.01% inspiration, 99.99% perspiration’, and the inspiration is the easy part. -- Linux Torvalds

That is the inevitable human response. We’re reluctant to believe that great discoveries are in the air. We want to believe that great discoveries are in our heads—and to each party in the multiple the presence of the other party is invariably cause for suspicion. -- Malcolm Gladwell, Who says big ideas are rare?

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. ~Pablo Picasso

It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years. –Abraham Lincoln

Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain. ~Anonymous

It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison