“Imperative programming is more susceptible to premature optimization [than functional programming].

“If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow that may rankle across the decades and endure until death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism—no matter how certain we are that it is justified.

“The real reason people drink: it takes effort to have fun if you are sober.

“Ruby extension modules are slightly easier to write and read than Python ones, but slightly less portable. Main reasons: no reference counting, less obtrusive exception propagation using setjmp/longjmp, and a more uniform notion of types and classes. There are also some minor conveniences, such as C methods which take an ordinary argument list instead of a vector.

“Plastic bags that float into storm drains in the west coast make their way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a heap of debris twice the size of Texas floating in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii. This patch has been growing, along with other ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s.

At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option. It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues.

“You don’t need to know how to read email headers to detect phishing. You just need to trust your coercion detector, and know that nothing that happens online invalidates it.

“In Russia today it takes courage to run for president. In the US it takes courage not to.

“Broadly speaking, there are two types of internet users: Time Rich and Time Poor. Time Poor people use the internet to get things done. They are very task focused, and their favorite websites help them use their precious time more efficiently. Time Rich people use the internet to kill some time. They are bored. They are willing to be diverted and entertained. The cost of being wrong is low.

If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is. Search is for the Time Poor, discovery is for the Time Rich. Advertising is for the Time Rich.

Time Rich does not mean unsophisticated. Your users spend enough time on the internet, and on your competitors sites, to know what’s what.

“Destructively assignable entities are essential to the ability to change one part of a program in a significant way without changing the rest of the program. A mechanism for threaded state (Haskell monads) cannot substitute.