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

Write it properly first. It's easier to make a correct program fast, than to make a fast program correct. -- http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/

It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. -- Edsger Dijkstra

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. -- Bill Gates

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and "great thinking". It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice. -- Steven Den Beste

In terms of energy, it's better to make a wrong choice than none at all. -- George Leonard, Mastery.

The number one reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors. ~Napoleon Hill

I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing. ~Martha Stewart

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him. ~David Brinkley

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it. ~Henry Ford