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
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill
No problem should ever have to be solved twice. -- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker
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?
If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as *lines produced* but as *lines spent*. -- Edsger Dijkstra
Programming is the art of figuring out what you want so precisely that even a machine can do it. -- Some guy who isn't famous
It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. ~Herman Melville
If you can dream it, you can achieve it. –Zig Ziglar
You can do anything, but not everything. ~Anonymous
Change your thoughts and you change your world. –Norman Vincent Peale