“Being the best in the world means burning your other bridges and obsessing.

“To darcs, patches exist in time at the earliest point at which they apply cleanly. The crazy thing is, it figures this out at the latest time possible.

“The Linux kernel source is remarkably transparent but not at all discoverable — acquiring the minimum knowledge needed to live in the code and understand the idiom of the developers is difficult, but once you do the whole makes sense. On the other hand, the Emacs Lisp libraries are discoverable but not transparent. It’s easy to acquire enough knowledge to tweak just one thing, but quite difficult to comprehend the whole system.

“If it’s white or sweet, it’s probably not good for you.

“Left folds are far more common in strict languages because they’re tail-recursive; right folds use stack space. A right fold is more natural in lazy languages like Haskell because it builds fewer (by 50%) thunks than the corresponding left fold.

“Real estate does obey the Econ 101 laws of supply and demand, but with such a long delay in response that it seems to defy those laws.

“What plans are like depends on how they are used. The plan-as-program view gives plans a central role. Plan use is only a matter of execution. Plans-as-programs directly determine their users’ actions.

The plan-as-communication view gives plans a much smaller role. It requires an account of improvisation. An agent who does use a plan-as-communication does not mechanically execute it. Instead, the agent uses the plan as one resource among others in continually redeciding what to do. The mindset is of participating in the world, not controlling it.

“Being socially exposed is AOK when people cannot hold meaningful power over you. Such is the life of most of the tech geeks living in Silicon Valley. But I spend all of my time with teenagers, one of the most vulnerable populations because of their lack of agency (let alone rights).

Self-exposure is critical to the coming of age process — it’s how we get a sense of who we are, how others perceive us, and how we fit into the world.

Forced exposure puts this population at a much greater risk, if only because their content is always taken out of context. Avoiding exposure for them is not a matter of security through obscurity, it’s about only being visible in context.

“A founder who gives up more equity to attract cofounders, new hires, and investors builds a more valuable company than one who parts with less equity. However, those superior returns often come from replacing the founder with a professional CEO more experienced with the needs of a growing company. This fundamental tension requires founders to make “rich” versus “king” trade-offs to maximize either their wealth or their control over the company.

“Just because it was stimulating doesn’t mean it helped with our goal.