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Note: I do NOT agree with some of these!
"There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors." -- http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
" It is told that even as Varda ended her labours, and they were long, when first Menelmacar strode up the sky and the blue fire of Helluin flickered in the mists above the borders of the world, in that hour the Children of the Earth awoke, the Firstborn of Il\xfavatar. By the starlit mere of Cuivi\xe9nen, Water of Awakening, they rose from the sleep of Il\xfavatar; and while they dwelt yet silent by Cuivi\xe9nen their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight, and have revered Varda Elent\xe1ri above all the Valar. In the changes of the world the shapes of lands and of seas have been broken and remade; rivers have not kept their courses, neither have mountains remained steadfast; and to Cuivi\xe9nen there is no returning. But it is said among the Elves that it lay far off in the east of Middle-earth, and northward, and it was a bay in the Inland Sea of Helcar; and that sea stood where aforetime the roots of the mountain of Illuin had been before Melkor overthrew it. Many waters flowed down thither from heights in the east, and the first sound that was heard by the Elves was the sound of water flowing, and the sound of water falling over stone. Long they dwelt in their first home by the water under stars, and they walked the Earth in wonder; and they began to make speech and to give names to all things that they perceived. Themselves they named the Quendi, signifying those that speak with voices; for as yet they had met no other living things that spoke or sang. And on a time it chanced that Orom\xeb rode eastward in his hunting, and he turned north by the shores of Helcar and passed under the shadows of the Orocarni, the Mountains of the East. Then on a sudden Nahar set up a great neighing, and stood still. And Orom\xeb wondered and sat silent, and it seemed to him that in the quiet of the land under the stars he heard afar off many voices singing. Thus it was that the Valar found at last, as it were by chance, those whom they had so long awaited. And Orom\xeb looking upon the Elves was filled with wonder, as though they were beings sudden and marvellous and unforeseen; for so it shall ever be with the Valar. From without the World, though all things may be forethought in music or foreshown in vision from afar, to those who enter verily into E\xe4 each in its time shall be met at unawares as something new and unforetold. In the beginning the Elder Children of Il\xfavatar were stronger and greater than they have since become; but not more fair, for though the beauty of the Quendi in the days of their youth was beyond all other beauty that Il\xfavatar has caused to be, it has not perished, but lives in the West, and sorrow and wisdom have enriched it. And Orom\xeb loved the Quendi, and named them in their own tongue Eldar, the people of the stars; but that name was after borne only by those who followed him upon the westward road. " -- Tolkein, the Silmarillion, "Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor"
"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
"The cardinal rule of successful groupware is that those who put information into the system must receive a proportional benefit for their efforts, or those who want to get information out of the system will not see anything coming out." -- PJ Eby
""If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Ah, the original humblebrag." -- kghose
" For me, startups are more than just a clever way to make money. They are machines for harnessing the fire of human self-interest, creating a self-sustaining reaction capable of rapidly transforming the world. Self-interest is often treated as if it were dirty or wrong, but NASA didn't get to the moon by vilifying gravity." -- http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-technology.html
"If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." -- Hal Abelson
"We think you can draw a 2\xd72 matrix for venture capital. &And on one axis you could say, consensus versus non-consensus. And on the other axis you can say, successful or failure. And of course, you make all your money on successful and non-consensus. & it s very hard to make money on successful and consensus. Because if something is already consensus then money will have already flooded in and the profit opportunity is gone. And so by definition in venture capital, if you are doing it right, you are continuously investing in things that are non-consensus at the time of investment. And let me translate non-consensus : in sort of practical terms, it translates to crazy. You are investing in things that look like they are just nuts." -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/
" You want to have as much prepared mind as you possibly can. And learn as much as you can about as many things, as much as you can. You want to enter as close as you can to a zen-like blank slate of perfect humility at the beginning of the meeting saying teach me &. We try really hard to be educated by the best entrepreneurs. " -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/
"rather than trying to predict the unpredictable, it is best to purchase a portfolio composed of mis-priced optionality." -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/
"You may consciously purchase a risky investment one that indeed has a significant possibility of causing loss or injury if you believe that your gain, weighted for probabilities, considerably exceeds your loss, comparably weighted, and if you can commit to a number of similar, but unrelated opportunities." -- Warren Buffett, 1993 Chairman s letter
" The great saving grace of venture capital is that our money is locked up. The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a lock up on our money. So we invest in these companies with a ten-year outlook. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it s okay, because we can stay the course.
Another investor who has figured the value of locked up capital from investors is Warren Buffett, who famously closed his partnership and started Berkshire. Unlike a hedge fund, Warren Buffett s capital is locked up protecting him from people trying to redeem after the panic during a market dip. Bruce Berkowitz: That is the secret sauce: permanent capital. That is essential. I think that s the reason Warren Buffett gave up his partnership. You need it, because when push comes to shove, people run. " -- http://a16z.com/2014/07/21/a-dozen-things-ive-learned-from-marc-andreessen/
"One of the best ways to tell if we're doing something right is when both sides are ticked off at us," Cecil Andrus, President Jimmy Carter's Interior secretary, famously told an assistant. -- http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-03/sally-jewell-obamas-pro-fracking-climate-czar
"I enjoy the looking-glass aspect of our industry, where running a mildly profitable small business makes me a crazy maverick not afraid to break all the rules." -- maciej, https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/
"Avoiding burnout is difficult to write about, because the basic premise is obnoxious. Burnout is a rich man's game. Rice farmers don't get burned out and spend long afternoons thinking about whether to switch to sorghum. Most people don't have the luxury of thinking about their lives in those terms. But at the rarefied socioeconomic heights of computerland, it's true that if you run a popular project by yourself for a long time, there's a high risk that it will wear you out....What burns you out is the constant strain of being responsible for a lot of other people's stuff....Perspective does not make you immune to burnout. It just makes burnout less scary. " -- maciej, https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" -- Oscar Wilde
"Every innovative work of mankind has been the product of one sometimes two, rarely three minds." -- http://www.loper-os.org/?p=69
"...electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms)." -- http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/
"...even though multitouch is a good idea (pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte s ARCH-MAC group [a predecessor of MIT's Media Lab] in the late 70s), much of the iPad UI is very poor in a myriad of ways.
There are some elements of the PARC-style GUI that are likely to stick around even if undergoing a few facelifts. For example, we generally want to view and edit more than one kind of scene at the same time this could be as simple as combining pictures and text in the same glimpse, or to deal with more than one kind of task, or to compare different perspectives of the same model. Pointing and dragging are likely to stick, because they are simple extensions of hands and fingers. One would hope that modeless would stick, though there are many more modes now than in the original PARC and Mac interfaces. Undo should stick (for obvious reasons), but it is very weakly present in the iPad, etc.
There is also the QWERTY phenomenon, where a good or bad idea becomes really bad and sticks because it is ingrained in usage. There are many examples of this in today s interfaces.
There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating. We can contrast this with technologies that do have learning curves, but pay off well and allow users to become experts (for example, musical instruments, writing, bicycles, etc. and to a lesser extent automobiles). [Douglas] Engelbart s interface required some learning but it paid off with speed of giving commands and efficiency in navigation and editing. People objected, and laughed when Doug told them that users of the future would spend many hours a day at their screens and they should have extremely efficient UIs they could learn to be skilled in. " -- http://techland.time.com/2013/04/02/an-interview-with-computing-pioneer-alan-kay/
"A lion doesn't lose sleep / over the opinion of a sheep / but still the deer / will drink his beer" -- twist on an old saying by tanosthas found at http://instagram.com/p/oz-RtJK6HA/
"Men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them." -- George Orwell
"...The Bill of Rights is a literal and absolute document. The First Amendment doesn't say you have a right to speak out unless the government has a 'compelling interest' in censoring the Internet. The Second Amendment doesn't say you have the right to keep and bear arms until some madman plants a bomb. The Fourth Amendment doesn't say you have the right to be secure from search and seizure unless some FBI agent thinks you fit the profile of a terrorist. The government has no right to interfere with any of these freedoms under any circumstances." -- Harry Browne, 1996 USA presidential candidate, Libertarian Party
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard H. Aiken
"Be skeptical but not cynical" -- my high school history teacher
"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out." -- Anton Chekhov
"And the [TCL] book was there 'cause the hardware guys use it for scripting their lovecraftian toolchain." -- http://www.yosefk.com/blog/i-cant-believe-im-praising-tcl.html
" One way of beginning to understand privacy is by looking at what happens to people in extreme situations where it is absent. Recalling his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi observed that "solitude in a Camp is more precious and rare than bread." Solitude is one state of privacy, and even amidst the overwhelming death, starvation, and horror of the camps, Levi knew he missed it.... Levi spent much of his life finding words for his camp experience. How, he wonders aloud in Survival in Auschwitz, do you describe "the demolition of a man," an offense for which "our language lacks words."...
One function of privacy is to provide a safe space away from terror or other assaultive experiences. When you remove a person's ability to sequester herself, or intimate information about herself, you make her extremely vulnerable....
The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition....
And even when one shakes real pursuers, it is often hard to rid oneself of the feeling of being watched -- which is why surveillance is an extremely powerful way to control people. The mind's tendency to still feel observed when alone... can be inhibiting. ... Feeling watched, but not knowing for sure, nor knowing if, when, or how the hostile surveyor may strike, people often become fearful, constricted, and distracted.
...
Safe privacy is an important component of autonomy, freedom, and thus psychological well-being, in any society that values individuals. ... Summed up briefly, a statement of "how not to dehumanize people" might read: Don't terrorize or humiliate. Don't starve, freeze, exhaust. Don't demean or impose degrading submission. Don't force separation from loved ones. Don't make demands in an incomprehensible language. Don't refuse to listen closely. Don't destroy privacy. Terrorists of all sorts destroy privacy both by corrupting it into secrecy and by using hostile surveillance to undo its useful sanctuary.
But if we describe a standard for treating people humanely, why does stripping privacy violate it? And what is privacy? In his landmark book, Privacy and Freedom, Alan Westin names four states of privacy: solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy. The reasons for valuing privacy become more apparent as we explore these states....
The essence of solitude, and all privacy, is a sense of choice and control. You control who watches or learns about you. You choose to leave and return. ...
Intimacy is a private state because in it people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both. They tell personal stories, exchange looks, or touch privately. They may ignore each other without offending. They may have sex. They may speak frankly using words they would not use in front of others, expressing ideas and feelings -- positive or negative -- that are unacceptable in public. (I don't think I ever got over his death. She seems unable to stop lying to her mother. He looks flabby in those running shorts. I feel horny. In spite of everything, I still long to see them. I am so angry at you I could scream. That joke is disgusting, but it's really funny.) Shielded from forced exposure, a person often feels more able to expose himself."
" This type of post often uses the Goldilocks fallacy to appear like it offers advice when it's actually restating the actual problem: the way to achieve Y is with just the right amount of X.
"A successful startup is easy: simply build the right product in the right market with the right team, and don't forget to build it at the right speed!"
" -- timruffles , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6210331
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck
"Rich dudes can keep small identities and still make shit happen; poor everyone-else has to form teams, and with a diversity of levels of education, talent, intelligence and common sense, that will invariably mean pandering and WOOOOing a bit. Why? Because not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rhetoric. Ex hypothesis everyone else has already been 'taken', i.e. has considered opinions, so by elimination it's the aggressive, passionate idiots who play kingmaker. Thus explaining US politics." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173523 (note: i think they meant "not everyone is smart enough to be affected by rational argument")
"...what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
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diydsp 2 days ago
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The Taoism analogy is an interesting one. Underpinning much of it is the idea that there is a time to move and a time to stand still. iow it's useful to learn when to resist and when to yield.
Many times when people express opinions, they are given with the urgency of "this needs to be done, now!" e.g. we need to stop them from stoning women to death Right Now(!), we need to let gays marry, now.
But the belief that we can do these things right now is an illusion. That would be like me walking out of my office to the airport, buying a ticket in cash to Iran, finding someone who stoned a woman to death, and killing him with my bare hands. It's not strategic.
The Tao is a collection of wisdom of strategy that says, "Don't do everything that you feel right now, right now." Instead, "Find the right time to act." And you don't always act all of the way. You have to figure out how much when to act and how much.
So it seems to crass to sit still while listening to stories of gut-wrenching atrocities, but at least one school of ancient wisdom teaches us we have to be strategic and flow when the time is right, when others are moving at the same time and our force is multiplied, when the "bad guys" have their guard down, etc. And we need to learn to perceive these conditions.
And we need to tame this urge to railroad our opinions into other's actions and forced agreement. In the slavery and suffragist examples, their opinions were much more powerful as they gained domain knowledge and when they coordinated their efforts, becoming the smoothly flowing, powerful water, instead of a disparate cloud of angry electrons. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6173587
" I hope as well, but I doubt it. That kind of secret power begs to be abused. The system of checks and balances that we learned about in civics class is simply gone. A willful executive with these powers at hand can sway the outcome of any congressional vote, any Supreme Court decision, or any media story. Our immune system against tyranny has been compromised and irrevocably so. We haven't yet descended into despotism but it is inevitable once a strong enough individual rises. To carry the analogy further, it's 1984 and we've just contracted HIV." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6151030
"
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Michael Crichton "
"the trick with habit forming is to not give up after you miss a day" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145818
"If you beat yourself up over procrastination, you're just subconsciously teaching yourself to not even think about whether you're procrastinating or not." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145261
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145261
" Those Nigerian prince scams are not very convincing, he adds, but they re meant not to be. If you re a skeptical person, the scammers want to spend as little time with you as possible. " -- http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/07/how_one_weird_trick_conquered_the_internet_what_happens_when_you_click_on.single.html
"Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds" - Orison Swett
" I think the trick with knowledge is to "acquire it, and forget all except the perfume" -- because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own "brain voices". The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick." -- Alan Kay via http://worrydream.com/dbx/
" The National Science Foundation continued to exist as a basic-science funding agency. But unlike ARPA, the NSF funds projects, not people, and project proposals must be accepted by a peer review board. Any sufficiently-revolutionary project, especially at the early stages, will sound too crazy for a board to accept. Worse, requiring a detailed project proposal means that the NSF simply can't fund truly exploratory research, where the goal is not to solve a problem, but to discover and understand the problem in the first place." -- http://worrydream.com/dbx/
" In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it. Of course, you seldom, if ever, see either pure state." -- Richard Hamming
" In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we [Hillis and Feynman] worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress." -- Danny Hillis
"Disclaimer
David Merkel is an investment professional, and like every investment professional, he makes mistakes. David encourages you to do your own independent "due diligence" on any idea that he talks about, because he could be wrong. Nothing written here, at RealMoney?, Wall Street All-Stars, or anywhere else David may write is an invitation to buy or sell any particular security; at most, David is handing out educated guesses as to what the markets may do. David is fond of saying, "The markets always find a new way to make a fool out of you," and so he encourages caution in investing. Risk control wins the game in the long run, not bold moves. Even the best strategies of the past fail, sometimes spectacularly, when you least expect it. David is not immune to that, so please understand that any past success of his will be probably be followed by failures.
Also, though David runs Aleph Investments, LLC, this blog is not a part of that business. This blog exists to educate investors, and give something back. It is not intended as advertisement for Aleph Investments; David is not soliciting business through it. When David, or a client of David's has an interest in a security mentioned, full disclosure will be given, as has been past practice for all that David does on the web. Disclosure is the breakfast of champions.
Additionally, David may occasionally write about accounting, actuarial, insurance, and tax topics, but nothing written here, at RealMoney?, or anywhere else is meant to be formal "advice" in those areas. Consult a reputable professional in those areas to get personal, tailored advice that meets the specialized needs that David can have no knowledge of." -- http://alephblog.com/2012/10/13/book-review-how-to-really-ruin-your-financial-life-and-portfolio/
"Willpower is a depleting resource. We should focus on setting up systems, automating behaviors we want to happen." -- Ramit Sethi, http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2013/06/05/ramit-sethi-how-to-force-yourself-to-go-to-the-gym/
"Don't they play tapes of McCarthy? explaining recursion to foetuses in utero?" -- http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754#comment-75563
"I believe in the concept of America, [But] not its current execution." -- Clayton Seymour
"If there were a policy that saved over 20,000 lives, reduced carbon emissions by 20 percent, reduced gasoline usage by 20 percent, decreased average insurance costs by 75 percent, and which would increase revenues to the federal government and not cost any additional money to implement -- who in this room would support this policy?" -- http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/if-prism-is-good-policy-why-stop-with-terrorism/277531/?
"Most of the innovation of Bitcoin must happen outside the US because the US does not tolerate innovation" -- Erik Voorhees, Coinapult
"...it is genuinely normal for senior scientists to stay one step ahead of the system by essentially applying for money to do work that is already largely complete, and thus bears no risk of failing to be delivered on time." -- Aubrey De Grey, http://edge.org/responses/what-should-we-be-worried-about
" The real quest in computer architecture is a model for computation that does not inherently have the vonNeumann bottleneck. This is a pie-in-the-sky arena for computer architecture." -- Mitch Alsup
"Getting rid of a delusion makes one wiser than getting hold of a truth." -- Ludwig B\xf6rne
"Life isn't fair, but government must be," -- Ann Richards
"Journalist: What do you think of western civilization? Ghandi: I think it would be a good idea." -- Ghandi, maybe: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/
"The common law consists of about half a dozen obvious propositions, but unfortunately nobody knows what they are." -- Lord Sterndale
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -- T. S. Eliot (interesting discussion at http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ )
" A man said to the universe "Sir I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "That fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." " -- Stephen Crane
"All I can say is that this is Bitcoin. I don't believe it until I see six confirmations." -- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=ll6ndo095u33p2ebut6kckro40&action=profile;u=34137
"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." -- Linus Pauling
" For the same reason the idea of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is not accepted in the world of copyright today anymore - corporate greed. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687804
" This is best encapsulated in an anecdote from my visit to Athens. A friend and I met up at a new bookstore and caf\xe9 in the centre of town, which has only been open for a month. The establishment is in the center of an area filled with bars, and the owner decided the neighborhood could use a place for people to convene and talk without having to drink alcohol and listen to loud music. After we sat down, we asked the waitress for a coffee. She thanked us for our order and immediately turned and walked out the front door. My friend explained that the owner of the bookstore/caf\xe9 couldn t get a license to provide coffee. She had tried to just buy a coffee machine and give the coffee away for free, thinking that lingering patrons would boost book sales. However, giving away coffee was illegal as well. Instead, the owner had to strike a deal with a bar across the street, whereby they make the coffee and the waitress spends all day shuttling between the bar and the bookstore/caf\xe9. My friend also explained to me that books could not be purchased at the bookstore, as it was after 18h and it is illegal to sell books in Greece beyond that hour. I was in a bookstore/caf\xe9 that could neither sell books nor make coffee. " -- http://economistmeg.com/2012/02/27/note-from-athens-feeling-on-the-ground-has-palpably-changed/
"CAUTION: CUTTING EDGE IS SHARP, AVOID CONTACT." -- notice on kitchen aluminum foil from Ralph's
"(To me, fighting null is the epitome of why i struggled to be a programmer. I am not a natural at it, but I wanted very much to be - and I found no use for NULL. I never needed it, but it was always there. I kept pushing it down, painting over it, shutting it up, constantly checking for it - "Are you NULL? are you NULL? what about you?" - and sometimes I would deceive myself, that my problems were other things, but then NULL would pop up, I would find that it was the cause - however, NULL is never really the cause. It is someone you always run into in bad situations, someone you never want to see. NULL penetrates all the layers to find you, and can only say, helplessly, "Looks like you're having a problem." Endemic to the problem, complicit, and might be the problem.)" -- _why, http://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/-why-s-complete-printer-spool-as-one-book
"As a programmer, my core strengths have always been knowing how to apologize to users, and composing funny tweets." -- http://blog.pinboard.in/2013/04/the_matasano_crypto_challenges/
"...being perpetually rude and having terrible people skills isn't a deal-breaker in corporate America." -- Paul Lutus, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579102
"You have a problem and decide to hire an executive...." -- http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/#comment-3314
" Those phases of human make-up which build habit in the individual and institutions in the group &[are] laziness as to the reworking of a problem once solved; the time and energy saved by routine, especially under any pressure of business; the values of routine as a curb on arbitrariness and as a prop of weakness, inexperience and instability; the social values of predictability; the power of whatever exists to produce expectations and the power of expectations to become normative. The force of precedent in the law is heightened by an additional factor: that curious, almost universal sense of justice which urges that all men are properly to be treated alike in like circumstances. As the social system varies we meet in.finite variations as to what men or treatments or circumstances are to be classed as "like"; but the pressure to accept the views of the time and place remains. " -- Llewellyn
"When you see a four-year-old bossing a two-year-old, you are seeing the fundamental problem of the human race and the reason so many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create "social justice" is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity. " -- Thomas Sowell
"History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." -- Ambrose Bierce
"Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." -- Louis D Brandeis
" By contrast, it is not a huge exaggeration to point out that electronic media over the last 100+ years have actually removed some of day to day needs for reading and writing, and have allowed much of the civilized world to lapse back into oral societal forms (and this is not a good thing at all for systems that require most of the citizenry to think in modern forms). " -- Alan Kay
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- Alan Kay "Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born" -- Alan Kay "If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." -- Alan Kay
"Hodor said only, 'Hodor'" -- A Clash Of Kings
"Branding is not anymore about what we want people to believe. It is more about adjusting to what people think about us. It is also about the tension between what we really want to be and what people want us to become. " -- Tiberius Brastaviceanu (by the way i know Tiberius and out of all of the deep issues that he's said insightful things about, branding is one of the least deep -- i just liked this quote, that's all)
"[Section] One hundred and fourteen. All wrecks, mines, minerals, quarries of gems, and precious stones, with pearl-fishing, whale-fishing, and one-half of all ambergris, by whomsoever found, shall wholly belong to the lords proprietors." -- http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp
"it is the reflective part of the public which tends to determine public policy" -- http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/edmund-burke-and-constitution/#.UUPnuVHaozM
"Si vis pacem, para bellum" -- Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus
"Your cyber systems continue to function and serve you not due to the expertise of your security staff but solely due to the sufferance of your opponents." -- NSA Information Assurance Director Brian Snow
"It's a fiscal bromance." -- Maya MacGuineas?
"A manager knows that he will be vulnerable to the charge of mismanagement if he misses his schedule without having applied all his resources. This knowledge creates a strong pressure on the initial designer who might prefer to wrestle with the design rather than fragment it by delegation, but he is made to feel that the cost of risk is too high to take the chance. Therefore, he is forced to delegate in order to bring more resources to bear.
The following case illustrates another but related way in which the environment of the manager can be in conflict with the integrity of the system being designed.
A manager must subcontract a crucial and difficult design task. He has a choice of two contractors, a small new organization which proposes an intuitively appealing approach for much less money than is budgeted, and an established but conventional outfit which is asking a more "realistic" fee. He knows that if the bright young organization fails to produce adequate results, he will be accused of mismanagement, whereas if the established outfit fails, it will be evidence that the problem is indeed a difficult one.
What is the difficulty here? A large part of it relates to the kind of reasoning about measurement of resources which arises from conventional accounting theory. According to this theory, the unit of resource is the dollar, and all resources must be measured using units of measurement which are convertible to the dollar. If the resource is human effort, the unit of measurement is the number of hours worked by each man times his hourly cost, summed up for the whole working force.
One fallacy behind this calculation is the property of linearity which says that two men working for a year or one hundred men working for a week (at the same hourly cost per man) are resources of equal value. Assuming that two men and one hundred men cannot work in the same organizational structure (this it intuitively evident and will he discussed below) our homomorphism says that they will not design similar systems; therefore the value of their efforts may not even be comparable. From experience we know that the two men, if they are well chosen and survive the experience, will give us a better system. Assumptions which may be adequate for peeling potatoes and erecting brick walls fail for designing systems.
Parkinson's law[4] plays an important role in the overassignment of design effort. As long as the manager's prestige and power are tied to the size of his budget, he will be motivated to expand his organization. This is an inappropriate motive in the management of a system design activity. Once the organization exists, of course, it will be used. Probably the greatest single common factor behind many poorly designed systems now in existence has been the availability of a design organization in need of work.
The second step in the disintegration of a system design -- the fragmentation of the design organization communication structure -- begins as soon as delegation has started. Elementary probability theory tells us that the number of possible communication paths in an organization is approximately half the square of the number of people in the organization. Even in a moderately small organization it becomes necessary to restrict communication in order that people can get some "work" done. Research which leads to techniques permitting more efficient communication among designers will play an extremely important role in the technology of system management. ... Therefore, flexibility of organization is important to effective design.
Ways must be found to reward design managers for keeping their organizations lean and flexible. There is need for a philosophy of system design management which is not based on the assumption that adding manpower simply adds to productivity. " -- http://melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
"there's never enough time to do something right, but there's always enough time to do it over." -- http://melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html
"Something that's fascinating about Twitter is that everyone's experience is different. Some people subscribe to 100 people, others 5000, I've even seen people who follow 0 people. No one subscribes to exactly the same people you do. And just because you listen to someone doesn't mean they listen to you, and vice versa. There's a tremendous variety of different experiences. Yet each of us feels as if we're in a chatroom. That's the paradox of Twitter. It kind of feels like IRC while it is nothing like IRC.
What Twitter is most like, imho, is an RSS aggregator. The people who work on Twitter call it a micro-blogging system, because to them, that's what it's like, even if the users don't see it that way. I understand what they're saying, as I think through the possible ways to decentralize it, invariably I'm led down paths I've already walked in implementing blogging software and RSS software.
But IRC is very symmetric -- if I listen to you, then you listen to me. And vice versa. There are ways to block someone in IRC, but it's an opt-out, where in Twitter listening to someone is by default off, and you have to opt-in. Very different experience. In IRC it would be considered a drastic measure to block someone. In Twitter, there's nothing offensive about not subscribing to someone.
Further, you rarely see trolls or flaming in Twitter, because it doesn't work, just as it doesn't work in blogging. Unless you flame someone in an interesting or funny way, you're not going to get many followers. So guys like Loren Feldman, who is funny, gets a lot of followers on Twitter. And the normal grouchy and anonymous trolls who dominate mail lists rarely gain followers on Twitter (or blogs). " -- http://scripting.com/stories/2008/01/18/faqIsDecentralizedTwitterJ.html
"C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute"
"Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The down side is that it's difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled." -- http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
"A common cry, outside the field. People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride." -- http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." --Robert Jarvik
"In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else." - George Orwell
"...the larval stage in which the company focuses on the consumer experience while adopting a pose of apathy toward the brands and marketers it will court when it someday gets around to making money." -- http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/snapchat-and-the-erasable-future-of-social-media#p2
" Over the years, I have seen hundreds of examples of money machine people being severely done in by the patent system. Even murdered by it in several heart-attack-during-litigation cases. And not once did I see anyone approaching the patent system on a small scale basis and profiting from it. Ever. Once again: Unless you are well within a Fortune 500 context, any and all involvement in the patent system in any, shape, or form is absolutely certain to cause you the net loss of time, energy, money, and sanity. Besides ending up a totally useless and utterly unnecessary psychic energy sink. " -- Don Lancaster, Incredible Secret Money Making Machine
"At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could." -- http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html
"The Empire is evil. The Federation is generally good, often neutral and occasionally evil. The Kingdom, on the other hand, is almost always good." -- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheKingdom
" Jackson: I'm energy now. O'Neill: (sarcastically) How's that working out for you? Jackson: Good, actually. " -- Stargate SG-1
"Always forbidden, on occasion mandatory." -- Songs of Earth and Power, Greg Bear
"Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part." -- William Somerset, Se7en
"Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawinski%27s_law_of_software_envelopment#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment
" > So are you saying that you can determine in advance whether the program will > terminate? If so, how?
Can you? If not, why are you writing this program?" - Matthias Blume, http://groups.google.com.br/group/comp.lang.functional/browse_thread/thread/1f0b2d3bff830c6e/a885a14003d27143?lnk=st#a885a14003d27143
Yet here s the thing to remember on MLK weekend (even though my saying this violates a rule I believe in firmly, a kind of inverse to Godwin s law, because though I believe these two great souls were motivated by exactly the same kind of justice, King s cause was greater): How many felonies was Martin Luther King, Jr., convicted of? King, whose motives were political too, but who, unlike Aaron, triggered actions which caused real harm (as in physical damage). What s that number?
Zero.
And how many was he even charged with in the whole of his career?
Two. Two bogus charges (perjury and tax evasion) from Alabama, which an all-white jury acquitted him of.
This is a measure of who we have become. And we don t even notice it. We can t even see the extremism that we have allowed to creep into our law. And we treat as decent a government official who invokes her family while defending behavior which in part at least drove this boy to his death. " -- http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40845525507/a-time-for-silence
"People who find kidney sales repugnant don't just think it's a bad idea, but think it's the kind of bad idea that only bad people have" -- Al Roth, http://www.stanfordmag-digital.com/stanfordmag/20130102?pg=68#article_id=249248 (bayle: i think this would be a informal definition of 'taboo')
"There seems to be a long period of initial obscurity for any new language. Then after that comes a long period of semi-obscurity, followed by total obscurity." -- Paul Bissex
" When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don't think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn't more talented. And I definitely can't claim I was a harder worker -- I've never worked particularly hard, I've always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious -- but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you'll get in trouble. Very few people's curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity." " -- Aaron Swartz
"I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing." -- Alan Kay
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." -- George Bernard Shaw
"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others- the living- are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later." -- Hunter S. Thompson
" Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use X." Now they have two problems." -- old quote about programming.
"What separates the talkers from the doer's?
Here's what I think it is. It's not about "talking is evil." Rather, it's about DECISION.
If poeple have not DECIDED to do a thing, then the people will just talk endlessly.
The enemy is not talking! The enemy is INDECISION. " -- Lion Kimbro
"People never trust an accommodating man with important things. That may sound harsh and cynical, but check it up in your own experience. If you have a severe illness, for example, you turn to the busiest, most exacting doctor in town. The fact that he is busy and can t be bothered by little things gives you confidence in his ability and judgment." -- http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/1922-why-i-quit-being-so-accommodating/
"I suspect that genius is made up almost, but not quite, entirely of crazy." -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4924641
"In science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts." -- Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan
"Nobody wants to be dubbed the future king while the current king is still on the throne. It's the quickest way to the dungeon." -- http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-next-ceo-of-microsoft-steven-sinofsky-is-the-heir-apparent-2012-2#ixzz2C4fOqBTv
"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this -- who will count the votes, and how." -- Stalin (often shortened to the aphorism 'It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes')
"As the founder and CEO of a startup, VCs would always ask me, 'What keeps you up at night?' It as a tedious question with only one honest answer: raising more money from you guys." -- Lewis D'Vorkin
"Practical politics consists of ignoring facts." -- Henry Adams
"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." -- Henry Adams
"Bob Barton [said] "The basic principle of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer, and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers... Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?" -- Alan Kay
"The basic principle of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." -- Bob Barton
"Vigor is more useful than rigor, unless you're dead." -- Larry Wall's sig ( http://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/95-04-013 )
"Wondering why I signed up for a twitter account." -- my friend P.R. (first of 197 tweets and counting)
"of course not. We would never discuss your paranoia in your absence. " --- my friend P.R.
" Pair-brogramming combines the gym and the office. The bro-navigator does reps while the bro-driver writes code. Arms tired? Switch. " -- Startup L. Jackson
"
If you can't make fun of yourself who can you make fun of? Trick question: Microsoft. Always Microsoft. " -- Startup L. Jackson
"You're missing the point. We want the guarantee enforced at compile time that parallel code doesn't share mutable memory. What you're talking about is enforcing the discipline of not sharing memory in your parallel code. This goes against nature: Humans are supposed to be creative, computers are supposed to be reliable; not the other way around." -- DrBartosz?