A person won't retain proficiency at a task unless he or she has at one time learned to perform that task very rapidly. Learning research demonstrates that the skills of people who become accurate but not fast deteriorate much sooner than the skills of people who become both accurate and fast. -- Philip Greenspun

Good artists copy. Great artists steal. -- Pablo Picasso

The only problems we can really solve in a satisfactory manner are those that finally admit a nicely factored solution. -- E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. -- Aristotle.

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

The choice of the university is mostly important for the piece of paper you get at the end. The education you get depends on you. -- Andreas Zwinkau

It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live. –Mae Jemison

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absense of fear. ~Mark Twain

Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi

Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. –Vince Lombardi