Students should be evaluated on how well they can achieve the goals they strived to achieve within a realistic context. Students need to learn to do things, not know things. -- Roger Schank, Engines for Education

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

Simplicity takes effort-- genius, even. -- Paul Graham

Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming. -- Donald Knuth

One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs. -- Robert Firth

No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the ‘paralysis through analysis’ thing. That only slows progress and saps morale. -- 37 Signal, Getting real

Everything has beauty, but not everyone can see. –Confucius

Wake up to the day's most important news.

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. –Anne Frank

Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life. ~Dr. APJ Kalam