“Is The Onion our most intelligent newspaper? While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire.

One common complaint about newspapers is that they’re too negative, too focused on bad news, too obsessed with the most unpleasant aspects of life. The Onion shows how wrong this characterization is, how gingerly most newspapers dance around the unrelenting awfulness of life and refuse to acknowledge the limits of our tolerance and compassion.

“Marketing to attract users to web applications does not make any difference in the rate of adoption. You can get more people to register, but you can’t get more of them to adopt. Registrations grow from marketing, and adoption grows from referrals.

“For each new source of information you track, there is an equally old and useless source you must throw away.

“As startup costs drop you’re going to get more founders who aren’t primarily entrepreneurs, they’re primarily do-ers.

“Whatever it professes, practical politics has always been about the systematic organization of hatreds.

“Almost every is-a relationship would be better off re-articulated as a has-a relationship.

“No one seems to be pointing out that Google practically owns the development of Firefox. The browser’s lead engineer and most of the other full-time devs are Google staff.

“The golden years of offshoring (1995-2005) suppressed inflation around the world; goods were getting cheaper because they got made in cheaper places. That is over. Inflation is back.

“Trademark rights are destructive to the cooperation and trust necessary for successful open source projects. An open source project has a large number of authors, but the trademark on it must belong to just one of those authors. US trademark law sucks because it doesn’t recognize legitimate community claim to partial ownership.

“Code is more clear if it is more testable.