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

Side projects are less masturbatory than reading RSS, often more useful than MobileMe, more educational than the comments on Reddit, and usually more fun than listening to keynotes. -- Chris Wanstrath

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

A CS professor once explained recursion as follows: A child couldn't sleep, so her mother told her a story about a little frog, who couldn't sleep, so the frog's mother told her a story about a little bear, who couldn't sleep, so the bear's mother told her a story about a little weasel... who fell asleep. ...and the little bear fell asleep; ...and the little frog fell asleep; ...and the child fell asleep. -- everything2.com

The best is the enemy of the good. -- Voltaire

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. -- Alan Perlis

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso

Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life. ~Dr. APJ Kalam

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. –Florence Nightingale

Knowledge is being aware of what you can do. Wisdom is knowing when not to do it. ~Anonymous