“I talk to many programmers in NYC who follow the same staccato pattern: two years of coding for Credit Suisse, a year and a half building a blogging platform, three years at Morgan Stanley, two years creating a new web development framework. Since software developers in the city make so much, they can afford to save up and launch a startup every few years.

“Lousy programmers won’t anticipate the problems they are going to run up against later, so they happily go about building things that work for a while and fall apart later. Good programmers recognize those problems much earlier on, and try to architect around them. Excellent programmers recognize both the constraints of the technology and the constraints of the real world.

The difference between a lousy programmer and a good programmer is education and innate skill. But the difference between a good programmer and an excellent one is experience.

The experience of working with poorly built code can lead potentially excellent programmers to suffer from premature scalaculation.

“Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

“You’re going to have to rewrite code. All the time. You have to be ok with it. You have to be willing. This is the secret of the great programmers, and the great stumbling block of those new to refactoring and TDD.

The bad news: Refactorings like extract object will require you to test drive a new class from scratch. All the time.
The good news: It’s much easier to rewrite when you have tests. You just haven’t noticed yet.

“Marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.

“The bailout, whether it ultimately passes or not, will likely be studied by game theorists for years to come, as there are conflicting and somewhat self-contradictory incentives between no fewer than a half-dozen different parties. Everyone wants the package to pass but nobody wants to vote for it.

Framing the plan properly would probably make it more popular. Anyone who tries to frame the plan risks taking ownership. Even if framed properly, it would probably remain unpopular enough to constitute a political liability. So no parties have an incentive to “spin” the plan as a positive, and it continues to become more unpopular as the default narrative (“Wall Street bailout”) is left unchallenged.

“Transparency is meaningless without accountability.

“Get big or go home. How big can you f—- up? Can you f—- up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it’s just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global f—-up to get any help.

“We’re all complicit in forcing the presidential candidates to make simple, talking-point narratives. The whole mechanism of dissecting their every waking moment has created somewhat of a paralysis. We have drained them of their ability to remain human.

“Every year that I spent working 12 hours a day on interesting problems while I was in high school put me ahead 6 years on what I could accomplish today, when I’m lucky to get 1-2 hours free a day.