quotes3

Note: I do NOT agree with some of these!

Note: I didn't factcheck these, they may be misattributed

https://mobile.twitter.com/omarnajam/status/935626720408768512?lang=en

"like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children." -- Jacques Mallet du Pan

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." -- Thoreau

"the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me" -- Blaise Pascal

"Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. What will the expected waiting time be? What happens if you add another teller? We assume customer arrivals and customer service times are random (details later). With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. But if you add a second teller, the average waiting time is not just cut in half; it goes down to about 3 minutes. The waiting time is reduced by a factor of 93x" [1] via [2]

"Col. T. P. Dowly, a 49er, Pike s Peaker, of 56; a Black Hill s boomer, of 76, and a Leadville hustler, of 78, is among the guests of the Ebbitt. Colonel Dowly is a telegraph genius and labored upon the construction of the Union Pacific telegraph line west from Omaha in 69. The greatest difficulty we encountered, says the colonel, was from the buffalos. They used the poles for scratching posts, and rallied from all parts of the bare plain to these what they regarded Godsends of comfort. A young Yankee with us invented a sharp brad-awl about three inches long to run into the poles with the points outward. It was thought sure that these ugly spikes would fend off the uneasy buffalo. It proved that the sharp points only made the sensation more grateful to the lordly bison, and down went every pole for fifty miles out of Omaha that night. " -- [3]

"it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other" -- Freud . See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences

"Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time." - Kenneth Arrow

"There was an AI made of dust, whose poetry gained it man's trust..." -- http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html (Universal Paperclip game)

"In public relations, there is a special term for the dumbest thing you say in a press interview. They call it the headline ." -- Tim Sweeney [4]

"in 2050, 70 percent of Americans will be living in just 15 states. That 70 percent will then have 30 senators, and the remaining 30 percent of the people, mainly those living in the smallest and poorest states, will have 70 senators." -- -- Norm Ornstein

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." -- Thomas Jefferson

"In primaries, the vocal rump of a minority of obnoxious asses can hold the entire country hostage to extremist views" -- John D. Dingell

"Whenever I see people comparing C to assembly I automatically assume they don't know anything about (a) C or (b) any kind of assembly." -- sanskritabelt

"I deal with a number of smart C (and even C++) programmers who view it as assembly with macros. But I've yet to meet any assembly programmers who view C as just a more succinct way to write assembly. Maybe it can be phrased as "Anyone who conflates C and assembly has probably never compared the output of their compiler with the code they think they wrote"." -- nkurz

"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -Dick Guindon, via Leslie Lamport

"Even the quest for justice can turn into barbarism if it is not infused with a quality of mercy, an awareness of human frailty and a path to redemption. The crust of civilization is thinner than you think." -- David Brooks

"Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. ...Laugh at the stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way. ...Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. ...Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. ...This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life." - Kierkegaard, Either/Or

"Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival" -- George Orwell

"You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic." -- a navigation device company's billboard

"Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure." -- Hannah Arendt

"Mathematics is the only totally clear, utterly unambiguous language in the world; yet it cannot say anything very interesting about anything very important" -- Peter Kreeft, in Socratic Logic

    "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false." -- Alan M. Turing

"Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice". [5]

"If you don't own a home, you are effectively short the housing market. If you own one home you are neutral: you can't sell it to make a profit because you always need one roof over your head. If you own more than one house, you are a landlord/investor and I don't know why we are giving you special treatment relative to other asset classes.

It would be better for everyone if housing was not an investment. " -- dangjc

"In his commands let him be prudent and considerate; and whether the work which he enjoins concerns God or the world, let him be discreet and moderate, bearing in mind the discretion of holy Jacob, who said, If I cause my flocks to be overdriven, they will all die in one day. Taking this, then, and other examples of discretion, the mother of virtues, let him so temper all things that the strong may have something to strive after, and the weak may not fall back in dismay." -- St. Benedict

"Let him not be excitable and worried, nor exacting and headstrong, nor jealous and over-suspicious; for then he is never at rest." -- St. Benedict

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery to think one can be happy without money." -- Camus

"The promise of our civilization, the point of all our labor and technological progress, is to free us from the struggle for survival and to make room for higher pursuits. " -- Tim Wu

"The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure." -- Tim Wu

" "The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success.

But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence (or, more in general, talent and personal qualities) exhibits a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth - often considered a proxy of success - follows typically a power law (Pareto law), with a large majority of poor people and a very small number of billionaires. Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale (the average talent or intelligence), and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes."

I would highly recommend people here to take a look at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068 " -- DecayingOrganic

"May you live all the days of your life." -- Jonathan Swift

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed." -- Jonathan Swift

"Men nowadays Worship the Rising Sun, and not the Setting." -- Jonathan Swift

"Laws are like Cobwebs which may catch small Flies, but let Wasps and Hornets break through. But in Oratory the greatest Art is to hide Art." -- Jonathan Swift

"Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired" -- Jonathan Swift

"And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid" -- Jonathan Swift

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect" -- Jonathan Swift

"If you don't want to legislate, maybe you shouldn't run for the legislature," -- Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma. [6]

"The true optimists are the conspiracy theorists, because they believe the people in charge actually have a plan." -- [7]

"Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." -- Richard Feynman

"A pessimist says the glass is half-empty. An optimist says it's half full. An engineer says the glass is too big." -- [8]

"If I had it all to do over again, I'd spell creat with an "e"." - Kernighan [9]

"Why did the programmer quit his job? Because he didn't get arrays" [10]

"There are 10 types of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that don't."

"If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime." -- [11]

[Brooks s Law of Prototypes] "Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow." -- Fred Brooks University of North Carolina

"Less than 10 percent of the code has to do with the ostensible purpose of the system; the rest deals with input-output, data validation, data structure mainte- nance, and other housekeeping." -- May Shaw Carnegie-Mellon University

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment." -- Fred Brooks University of North Carolina

"The structure of a system reflects the structure of the organization that built it. " -- Richard E. Fairley Wang Institute

[Little s Formula] "The average number of objects in a queue is the product of the entry rate and the average holding time." -- Peter Denning RL4cs

Of all my programming bugs, 80 percent are syntax errors. Of the remaining 20 percent, 80 percent are triv- ial logical errors. Of the remaining 4 percent, 80 per- cent are pointer errors. And the remaining 0.8 percent are hard." -- Marc Donner IBM T. 1. Watson Research Center

"Before optimizing, use a profiler to locate the hot spots of the program." -- Mike Morton Boston, Massachusetts

(The Principle of Least Astonishment) "Make a user interface as consistent and as predictable as possible" -- [12]

"Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write itself. David Iones Assert, The Netherlands" -- [13]

"On some machines indirection is slower with displace- ment, so the most-used member of a structure or a record should be first. " -- Mike Morton Boston, Massachusetts

" There is a trade off between flat and deep org structure. Deeper org structures build familiarity, process, etc. It works when there is a stable process, but doesn t turn well.

Shallow orgs can move quicker, but that isn t free. Because the designated leaders cannot actually manage up to dozens of direct reports, you end up with what I call a circle org structure. People get voted on/off the inner circle, and the downstream leaders get disempowered.

I ve never worked in a place with no explicit command structure. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I cannot see that ever working. Fundamentally it s a lie, because some individuals have to control the money.

In my experience, shallow orgs also have a half life. They need to be purged every 18-24 months." Spooky23

reply

"Any sufficiently complicated company [without] management contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of management." Yehuda Katz

"Value created the 2nd greatest lie in tech about "not having a boss is cool" because it attracts people who think they're too smart to be working for someone else. But if you're working for no-one in the company, you're practically working for everyone. " esturk

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." -- Knuth

"@Nate @Tejinder: I can tell you that 34 years ago when I was clerking, the Justices actually considered quite seriously whether to include the "respectfully" or not. Omitting it signalled really serious disagreement and, frankly, disrespect."

"@Tejinder, I took con law from a former SCOTUS clerk who wrote a major dissenting opinion a few years ago. At least in his experience, quite a lot of thought went into whether the last sentence was "I dissent" versus "I respectfully dissent."

"The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary." -- Ben Graham

"Wealth, in fact, is what you don t see. It s the cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The renovations postponed, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. It s assets in the bank that haven t yet been converted into the stuff you see." [14]

"Harry Markowitz won the Nobel Prize in economics for creating formulas that tell you exactly how much of your portfolio should be in stocks vs. bonds depending on your ideal level of risk. A few years ago the Wall Street Journal asked him how, given his work, he invests his own money. He replied: I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn t in it or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities." [15]

"...civilization is the process of taking intelligence out of human minds and putting it into institutions" Venkatesh Rao

"for this discovery of yours ((writing)) will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." -- http://www.units.miamioh.edu/technologyandhumanities/plato.htm

another wording:

"[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own&You d think they[written words] were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support." -- Phaedrus 275d-e

"The war between the 1% and 99% seems to play out with the 1% and the 90% collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle..." Venkatesh Rao

"if Man were to go further with computers and construct those that were capable of independent thought, it would be better to construct them so they would identify with Man's own survival; their structure itself must be made similar to the structure of Man himself... If Man were to become the servant of more intelligent beings that he was here to create, it would be far better to create those which would foster his own development rather than his demise." -- John C. Lilly, The Scientist

"In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits. However, in the province of the body there are definite limits not to be transcended." -- John C. Lilly, The Human Biocomputer (1974), via [16]

"I think language design converges over time, alternating between expressive-but-unmaintainable and structured-but-too-strict but getting closer to the ideal as we advance. In many ways Lisp isn't a complete language design at all - rather macros are there for the user to finish the language themselves. " -- lmm

"The most notable feature of feudalism is that . . . ownership means sovereignty; he who owns the land shall have primary dominion over the fruitage of the land; he shall therefore hold in absolute subjection the dwellers on the land." -- Woodrow Wilson, in The State

"An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state" -- Richard Stallman

"Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves" -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]

" A novice asked the master: ``In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call `Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying `Go, Hence!' or `Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity be?"

The master replied: ``You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness? " -- [17]

" Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings.

Why are programmers rebellious? Because the management interferes too much.

Why are the programmers resigning one by one? Because they are burnt out.

Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs. " -- [18]

" A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the program on which he was working. ``It will be finished tomorrow, the programmer promptly replied.

``I think you are being unrealistic, said the manager, ``Truthfully, how long will it take?

The programmer thought for a moment. ``I have some features that I wish to add. This will take at least two weeks, he finally said.

``Even that is too much to expect, insisted the manager, ``I will be satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete.

The programmer agreed to this.

Several years later, the manager retired. On the way to his retirement luncheon, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal. He had been programming all night. " -- [19]

" A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial package.

The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a set of generalized graphics routines, an artificial intelligence interface, but not the slightest mention of anything financial.

When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant. ``Don't be so impatient, he said, ``I'll put in the financial stuff eventually. " -- [20]

" A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges. A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant. Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum. Software rots if not used.

These are great mysteries. " -- [21]

" Thus spake the master programmer:

``Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained. " -- [22]

" A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: ``How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?

``It will take one year, said the master promptly.

``But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?

The master programmer frowned. ``In that case, it will take two years.

``And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?

The master programmer shrugged. ``Then the design will never be completed, he said. " -- [23]

"rules...were never designed to be reasonable; they were designed to solve problems that the rule makers encountered in the past and afford them a "legitimate" means of recourse. no one ever intended to apply them consistently." -- leetcrew

"the whole point of a general purpose language is to appeal to devs who failed the marshmallow test & want to minimize the initial steepness of the learning curve." [24]

"Any software project that includes writing a database is, de facto, a database project." -- tlb

"there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing" -- [25]

"Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive." -- Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

"Delusions are often viewed as reflecting some deficiency in reasoning ability. The risk of thinking about delusions in this way is that it encourages the belief that logical, intelligent people are incapable of delusion...Delusions are best understood not as deficiencies in logic, but rather as explanations that have been logically reached on the basis of distorted inputs...Maher emphasized that despite the skewed input, the delusions themselves are derived by completely normal reasoning processes. Similarly, Garety & Freeman found that delusions appear to reflect not a defect in reasoning itself, but a defect “which is best described as a data-gathering bias, a tendency for people with delusions to gather less evidence” so they tend to jump to conclusions." -- John P. Hussman, [26]

" The rookie mistake is: you see that some system is partly Moloch [ie. captured by misaligned special interests], so you say “Okay, we’ll fix that by putting it under the control of this other system. And we’ll control this other system by writing ‘DO NOT BECOME MOLOCH’ on it in bright red marker.” (“I see capitalism sometimes gets misaligned. Let’s fix it by putting it under control of the government. We’ll control the government by having only virtuous people in high offices.”) I’m not going to claim there’s a great alternative, but the occasionally-adequate alternative is the neoliberal one – find a couple of elegant systems that all optimize along different criteria approximately aligned with human happiness, pit them off against each other in a structure of checks and balances, hope they screw up in different places like in that swiss cheese model, keep enough individual free choice around that people can exit any system that gets too terrible, and let cultural evolution do the rest. " [27]

"The best technologies can be understood and used in a simple case by a beginner but still "unfurl" to handle the general case. The worst force you to embrace the entire complexity before you can even hello world." noonespecial , [28]

"The iron law of bureaucracy states that for all organizations, most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective." Stross, paraphrasing Pournelle

celebrity: "a person who is known for his well-knownness." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-events_in_America

"Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature". George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"

"For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." -- Oscar R. Benavides

"Science advances one funeral at a time" -- Max Planck

"I write when I m inspired, and I see to it that I m inspired at nine o clock every morning." -- William Faulkner

"These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psy- chologist Edward Thorndike fi rst noted this lack of transfer- ence over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life. " -- [29]

"I show affection for my pets by holding them against me and whispering I love you repeatedly as they struggle to escape from my arms" -- Ellen DeGenres

"Every mathematician believes that he is ahead of the others. The reason none state this belief in public is because they are intelligent people." -- Kolmogorov

"I m CC d on mails when things get slow...Subject: Docker operations slowing down...I reach for my trusty haiku for this type of thing: " -- [30]

"I didn t fall into the trap of believing I needed a lot of external approval before getting started. Too many aspiring writers do nothing but aspire. They think they need an MFA or a writing workshop before they can consider themselves a writer. It s simple. You re a cook if you prepare food. You re a programmer if you write code. You re a writer if you write. Just do it and see what happens." -- Eliot Peper

"Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you ll never be the same again." -- steve jobs

"I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

"JWT might be the one case in all of practical computing where you might be better off rolling your own crypto token standard than adopting the existing standard." -- tptacek

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." -- [31] (attributed to Lincoln but likely a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle and Horatio Alger Jr. [32]

"If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity only a great man can stand prosperity." -- Horatio Alger Jr

"the iron rule of life is that only 20% of the people can be in the top fifth. " -- Charles Munger

"You never get totally over making silly mistakes." -- Charles Munger

"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense to the author. Truth doesn't have anybody to answer to." -- S. John Ross

https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup/blob/master/taoup

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -- Goodhart's law

"To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions: both dispense with the need for thought." -- Henri Poincare

" Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Goring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. " -- interview of Hermann Goring by Gustave Gilbert

" GuiA?