“We’re not a replacement for venture capital funds. We occupy a new, adjacent niche. VCs are playing a zero-sum game. They’re all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of “deal flow,” and that explains a lot of their behavior. Our m.o. is to create new deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own startups instead. We compete more with employers than VCs.

“A creator needs to acquire only 1000 true fans to make a living.

“Legacy code is code which has no automated tests.

“Collection of Rules” is a decent metaphor for programming languages, and some languages have more rules than others. But it is orthogonal to the metaphor of languages as tools.

“A Hacker is always trying new things, trying to stretch the limits of what’s possible or what exists. Once something is functional and successful, the hacker moves on to another hard problem.

“Among the founders of the Ghadar Party—founded in San Francisco in 1913 to liberate India from British Rule—was Prof. Har Dayal of Stanford University.

“In an ingenious bit of research in Germany, subjects were asked to play a video game that involved steering airplanes, but the joystick was programmed to react only after a brief delay. After playing a while, the players stopped being aware of the time lag. But when the scientists eliminated the delay, the subjects suddenly felt as though they were staring into the future. It was as though the airplanes were moving on their own before the subjects had directed them to do so.

“Arguments about cheating in sport revolve around conventions more than laws. It is not only a question of “was he breaking the rules?” but also “is that rule sacrosanct?” It is the unwritten constitution that exerts the stronger grip.