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

Understanding why C++ is the way it is helps a programmer use it well. A deep understanding of a tool is essential for an expert craftsman. -- Bjarne Stroustrap

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. -- Alfred North Whitehead (Introduction to Mathematics)

Courage is grace under pressure. -- Ernest Hemingway

The Work Begins Anew, The Hope Rises Again, And The Dream Lives On. -- Ted Kennedy

[How friendly will this machine be?] Well, I don’t think it’s a matter of friendliness, because ultimately if the program is going to accomplish anything of value, it will probably be relatively complex. -- Gary Kildall (inventor of CP/M, one of the first OS for the micro).

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success. ~Dale Carnegie

Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. ~Lolly Daskal

You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing, no one to blame. –Erica Jong

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty. –Unknown