- If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change. - Not the sharpest knife in the drawer. - A prime candidate for natural deselection. -- [Ideas for flamewars]

You can have premature generalization as well as premature optimization. -- Bjarne Stroustrup

The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple. -- Grady Booch

What do Americans look for in a car? I've heard many answers when I've asked this question. The answers include excellent safety ratings, great gas mileage, handling, and cornering ability, among others. I don't believe any of these. That's because the first principle of the Culture Code is that the only effective way to understand what people truly mean is to ignore what they say. This is not to suggest that people intentionally lie or misrepresent themselves. What it means is that, when asked direct questions about their interests and preferences, people tend to give answers they believe the questioner wants to hear. Again, this is not because they intend to mislead. It is because people respond to these questions with their cortexes, the parts of their brains that control intelligence rather than emotion or instinct. They ponder a question, they process a question, and when they deliver an answer, it is the product of deliberation. They believe they are telling the truth. A lie detector would confirm this. In most cases, however, they aren't saying what they mean. -- The culture code.

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

We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0. -- Andy Pierson

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. – Albert Einstein

Life isn't about getting and having, it's about giving and being. –Kevin Kruse

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it. ~Jane Smiley

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