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RE: Bye Steem!
Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in
a better direction.
-- Alan Kay
Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in
a better direction.
-- Alan Kay
A non negative binary integer value x is a power of 2 iff (x & (x-1)) is
0 using 2's complement arithmetic.
-- [fact]
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
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and
reflect.
-- Mark Twain
I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot
now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be
graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't
tell is whether they have any kind of taste."
-- Paul Graham
Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute.
-- Alan J. Perlis
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a
violent psychopath who knows where you live.
-- Martin Golding
Photography is painting with light.
-- Eric Hamilton
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in
God.
-- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)
No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
-- Eric S. Raymond, How to become a hacker
I guess, when you're drunk, every woman looks beautiful and every
language looks (like) a Lisp :)
-- Lament, #scheme@freenode.net
We are the sum of our behaviours; excellence therefore is not an act but
a habit.
-- Aristotle.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain
Simple things should be simple. Complex things should be possible.
-- Alan Kay
Do you want to sell sugared water all your life or do you want to change
the world?
-- Steve Jobs, to John Sculley (former Pepsi executive)
PI seconds is a nanocentury.
-- [fact]
I think that a lot of programmers are ignoring an important point when
people talk about reducing code repetition on large projects.
Part of the idea is that large projects are intrinsically wrong. That
you should be looking at making a number of smaller projects that are
composable, even if you never end up reusing one of those smaller
projects elsewhere.
-- Dan Nugent
Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are
rare, much rarer than you think...
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan".
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir
de la faire plus courte. (I have made this letter so long only because I
did not have the leisure to make it shorter.)
-- Blaise Pascal (Lettres Provinciales)
Mistakes were made.
-- Ronald Reagan
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete
themselves upon execution.
-- Robert Sewell
I think there’s a world market for about 5 computers.
-- Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc,
informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common
Lisp.
-- Philip Greenspun (Greenspun's Tenth Rule)
Bonne bosse et reste le boss.
-- Darryl Amedon
Simplicity and pragmatism beat complexity and theory any day.
-- Dennis (blog comment)
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
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops
until you stand up to speak in public.
-- Anonymous
We are the sum of our behaviours; excellence therefore is not an act but
a habit.
-- Aristotle.
Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
-- Randy Pausch
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
-- LaoTzu
The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak.
-- J. B. Bossuet, Politics from Holy Writ, 1709
New eyes have X-ray vision. [someone that hasn't written it is more
likely to spot the bug. "someone" can be you after a break]
-- William S. Annis
It's like a condom; I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and
not have it.
-- some chick in Alien vs. Predator, when asked why she
always carries a gun
Software is like sex: It’s better when it’s free.
-- Linus Torvalds
La haine est une liqueur précieuse, un poison plus cher que celui des
Borgia, - car il est fait avec notre sang, notre santé, notre sommeil,
et les deux tiers de notre amour! Il faut en être avare!
-- Charles Baudelaire, Conseils aux jeunes littérateurs.
You think you know when you learn, are more sure when you can write,
even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.
-- Alan J. Perlis (Epigrams in programming)
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
-- Brian Kernigan
I guess, when you're drunk, every woman looks beautiful and every
language looks (like) a Lisp :)
-- Lament, #scheme@freenode.net
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is
not worth knowing.
-- Alan Perlis
Remember: you are alone. Every time you can get help from someone,
it is an opportunity: you should eagerly size it. But then, promptly
return to normal mode: you are alone and you must be prepared to solve
every problem yourself.
-- Eric KEDJI
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
-- Albert Einstein
C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce.
-- Scott McKay
This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so
unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It
should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation,
it should give us better control over the task of organizing our
thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should no deserve the
computer at all! It has allready taught us a few lessons, and the one I
have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much
better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full
appreciation of its tremenduous difficulty, provided that we stick to
modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the
intrinsec limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very
Humble Programmers.
-- E. W. Dijkstra, The humble programmer
Be the change you want to see in the world.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
I guess, when you're drunk, every woman looks beautiful and every
language looks (like) a Lisp :)
-- Lament, #scheme@freenode.net
Having large case statements in an object-oriented language is a sure
sign your design is flawed.
-- [Fixing architecture flaws in Rails' ORM]
I had to learn how to teach less, so that more could be learned.
-- Tim Gallwey, The inner game of work
It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to
be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.
-- Randy S. Nelson (dean of Pixar University)
A person won't become proficient at something until he or she has done
it many times. In other words., if you want someone to be really good at
building a software system, he or she will have to have built 10 or more
systems of that type.
-- Philip Greenspun
Bonne bosse et reste le boss.
-- Darryl Amedon
Functional programming is to algorithms as the ubiquitous little black
dress is to women's fashion.
-- Mark Tarver (of "The bipolar Lisp programmer" fame)
To do something well you have to love it. So to the extent you can
preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it well. Try
to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. If
you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably
is.
-- Paul Graham.
What is truth?
-- Pontius Pilate
It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to
be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people.
-- Randy S. Nelson (dean of Pixar University)
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be
regarded as a criminal offense.
-- E.W. Dijkstra
Il y a très loin de la velléité à la volnt, de la volonté à la résolution, de la
résolution au choix des moyens, du choix ds moyens à lapplication.
-- Jean-François Paul de Gondi de Retz
If there is a will, there is a way.
-- unknown
All creativity is an extended form of a joke.
-- Alan Kay
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.
To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
-- L. Peter Deutsch
Just like carpentry, measure twice cut once.
-- Super-sizing YouTube with Python (Mike Solomon, [email protected])
There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
-- Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible
to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with
such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
-- John Von Neumann, circa 1949