Humans differ from animals to the degree that they are not merely an end result of their conditioning, but are able to reflect on their experiences and strategies, and apply insight to make changes in the way they live to modify the outcome. -- SlideTrombone (comment on "Programming can ruin your life")

While I’ve always appreciated beautiful code, I share Jonathan’s concern about studying it too much. I think studying beauty in music and painting has led us to modern classical music and painting that the majority of us just don’t get. Beauty can be seen when it emerges, but isn’t something to strive for in isolation of a larger context. In the software world, the larger context would be the utility of the software to the end user. -- [A comment on a blog]

Code is poetry. -- wordpress.org

Adapting old programs to fit new machines usually means adapting new machines to behave like old ones. -- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)

So the mere constraint of staying in regular contact with us will push you to make things happen, because otherwise you'll be embarrassed to tell us that you haven't done anything new since the last time we talked. -- Paul Graham (a talk at Y Combinator, for startup creators).

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

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. –Maya Angelou

What’s the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable. ~Anonymous

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears. –Les Brown

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absense of fear. ~Mark Twain