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

Good work is no done by ‘humble’ men. -- H. Hardy, A mathematician's apology.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. -- Donald Knuth

Omit needless words. -- William Strunk, Jr. (The Elements of Style)

No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the ‘paralysis through analysis’ thing. That only slows progress and saps morale. -- 37 Signal, Getting real

The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same. ~Colin R. Davis

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. ~George Bernard Shaw

The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same. ~Colin R. Davis

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. –Albert Einstein