Dec 13, 2007
“Until you don’t have the skills to make an idea happen you are not in the place to make a plan.
— Dushan Wegner on building out workflows
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Dec 11, 2007
“Most people don’t care about privacy, not at all. What people care about is being surprised. In fact, the people who most want privacy are almost certainly the worst possible customers: unlikely to click on ads. If I were running a web property, I’d work hard to attract the people who least want privacy and want to share their ideas with everyone else.
So far, big government and big business have gotten away with taking virtually all our privacy away by not surprising most of us. Libertarians are worried (probably with cause) that once the surprises start happening, it’ll be too late.
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Dec 10, 2007
“Given perfect freedom people have a tendency to do just enough to make themselves minimally happy, even if greater happiness is ultimately attainable.
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Dec 9, 2007
“You can say pretty much anything in any human language. Human languages differ not so much in what you can say but in what you must say. In English, you are forced to differentiate singular from plural. In Japanese, you don’t have to distinguish singular from plural, but you do have to pick a specific level of politeness.
Obviously, if your language forces you to say something, you can’t be concise in that particular dimension using your language.
— Larry Wall’s counterpoint to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
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Dec 9, 2007
Paul Graham: Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for. One of the defining qualities of organizations is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts.
Alan G Carter: It isn’t the interchangability of workers that is the issue, but that so much of corporate motivation, structure and custom is based on stress, pressure, anxiety.
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Dec 9, 2007
“Programming is labour intensive, costly intelligence work. Why has there been so little progress in understanding it since Weinberg’s The Psychology of Computer Programming in 1971?
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Dec 7, 2007
“In the long run the ‘minor’ virtues are the only ones that matter. Politeness is more reliable than the moist virtues of compassion, charity, and sincerity; just as fair play is more important than the abstraction of justice. The major virtues tend to disintegrate under the pressures of convenient rationalization. But good form is good form, and stands immutable in the storm of circumstance.
comments
- Kartik Agaram, 2010-01-19: “The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.” —Edmund Burke (via David Brooks)
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Dec 5, 2007
“I hate sneaking around and making plans and feeling big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway? The majority? The majority is always holy, is it not? Just never wrong for one tiny insignificant moment? Let’s not think about it. Let’s just crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger.
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Dec 5, 2007
“The cruel irony of clichés is that we’re doomed to not understand them until the moment we re-coin them for ourselves.
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Dec 5, 2007
“This layout turns CSS into a selector rolodex with insanity on the right. And you know something? That’s exactly what CSS is: insanity, complete unmitigated chaos.
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