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 greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution. -- Bertrand Russell

Any fool can make the simple complex, only a smart person can make the complex simple. -- unknown

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky. -- Joel Spolsky (The Law of Leaky Abstractions)

I had to learn how to teach less, so that more could be learned. -- Tim Gallwey, The inner game of work

It is said that the real winner is the one who lives in today but able to see tomorrow. -- Juan Meng, Reviewing "The future of ideas" by Lawrence Lessig

Trust because you are willing to accept the risk, not because it’s safe or certain. ~Anonymous

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all. ~Dale Carnegie

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing. ~Dale Carnegie

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. –Pablo Picasso