"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." -- Blaise Pascal
"Logging into Google+ feels like logging into a seminar, or stumbling into the wrong conference room at an airport Marriott. It looks like a cubicle farm and smells like a hospital. Posting anything on Google+ is like talking into a pillow." -- BuzzFeed
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- Tony Hoare
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Leonardo Da Vinci
The worst app on my iPhone is this thing called "Phone" where you have to speak synchronously with other humans.
Don't worry about missing important things. Just focus on what you are doing. The really important things are going to find their way back to you many times.
For any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is: -- Need to know -- Should know -- Nice to know -- Edge case, only if applies to you specifically -- Useless
You only have so many keystrokes in your life! The only way to multiply them is to use them such that others can share: blogs, wikis, documents, source code, etc.
We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.
Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them. —children’s riddle
The True Way transcends the minutia of Skill. There is no "Technology". There is no "Design". There is only a vision of how mankind should be, and the relentless resolve to make it so. The rest is details.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford
"As my friend Jacob Gabrielson once put it, advocating Object-Oriented Programming is like advocating Pants-Oriented Clothing." -- Steve Yegge
"Stars do get lonely down here on earth and so they go back to where they came from." -- on mourning Aaron Swartz
"If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change. So a big part of my job is to get people focused on things that are not just incremental." -- Larry Page
"If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall." -- Stephen Cohen
The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."
"Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they're transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they've grown several inches taller. Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I'd describe the way lions seem in the wild." -- Paul Graham
"Never argue with an idiot; he will bring you down to his level and win from experience." ― Brad Slipiec
"There are two types of people when it comes to the Oculus Rift,” said Bleszinski. “There are those haven’t seen it, and those who have seen it and believe."
All negative emotions are fundamentally triggered by a lack of confidence.
"80 percent of success is just showing up." — Woody Allen
A "newbie", in Haskell, is someone who hasn't yet implemented a compiler. They've only written a monad tutorial.
-Pseudonymn
"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen." -- from Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good
"If you want to go quickly, go by yourself -- if you want to go farther, go in a group." -- Doc Rivers
"You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make." -- Barack Obama
In the end, just as Indiana Jones could never turn down the opportunity to search for the Holy Grail, I could no less turn down the chance to work for myself on something I truly love, no matter how safe the alternative might be. When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.” -- Tom Preston-Werner
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." -- Oscar Wilde
"When 100 people are listening to you for an hour, that’s 100 hours of people’s time devoted to what you have to say. If you can’t spend 5 or 10 hours preparing for them, thinking about them, and refining your points to best suit their needs, what does that say about your respect for your audience’s time? It says your 5 hours are more important than 100 of theirs, which requires an ego larger than the entire solar system." -- Scott Berkun
"When I was in grad school I used to hang around the MIT AI Lab occasionally. It was kind of intimidating at first. Everyone there spoke so fast. But after a while I learned the trick of speaking fast. You don't have to think any faster; just use twice as many words to say everything." -- Paul Graham
"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." -- Jack London
"Life is like the best video game ever, it has amazing graphics, infinite amounts of levels, a huge map and this ridiculous great freedom. I just needed to pick up the controller." -- http://levels.io/reset-your-life/
"Make sure you marry somebody you want your kids to act like." -- Quora
Freedom, autonomy, responsibility, challenge, and recognition.
"There are 10 people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't." -- Some Hacker News commenter
"The critical point is that you want to do the thing that is most likely to get you on a path to do something great." -- Sam Altman, in "Advice for ambitious 19 year olds"
Larry Page's rules of management, from http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2014-4?op=1
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Don't delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
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Don't get in the way if you're not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
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Don't be a bureaucrat.
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Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn't mean they don't deserve respect and cooperation.
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The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.
"Everything always ends badly; otherwise it wouldn't end."