More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity. -- W.A. Wulf

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 feel it is everybodies obligation to reach for the best in themselves and use that for the interest of mankind. -- Corneluis (comment on 'Are you going to change the world? (Really?)')

Resume writing is just like dating, or applying for a bank loan, in that nobody wants you if you're desperate. -- Steve Yegge.

In general, we can think of data as defined by some collection of selectors and constructors, together with specified conditions that these procedures must fulfill in order to be a valid representation. -- SICP, What is meant by data?

A hacker on a roll may be able to produce–in a period of a few months–something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more. -- Peter Seebach

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. –Maya Angelou

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –Robert Frost

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do. –Bob Dylan

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. –Amelia Earhart