“The really painful thing to recall is not just that I accumulated all this useless stuff, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn’t. Why would I do that? Because the people whose job is to sell you stuff are really, really good at it.

“What if Verizon, and AT&T, and Comcast, and half a dozen other huge broadband ISPs suddenly cut deals with some search company other than Google and your ISP-supplied browser and homepage no longer give such prominence to Google? How different are the search results these days from one engine to another? Not very different.

“Abbreviations might be good.
Removing Accidental Complexity is better.
Providing Useful Abstractions is best of all.

“You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API. Compare it to Apple, who reserves for itself and a few partners, under terms we don’t know, the right to develop rich apps for the iPhone.

“The Novice has been the focus of an alarming amount of attention in the computer field. It is not just that the preferred user is unskilled, it is that the whole field in its application rewards novices and punishes experts.

“Being profitable too soon gives investors, rightly or wrongly, an idea of what the margins are on the business, as opposed to what they could be in some perfect world. As a result, it takes a mighty force for them to not start wading in with discounted present value worksheets, and the like, thus hammering your valuation and generally making funding much more complicated (and equity consuming) than if you were wildly unprofitable.

“The only way to stay alive is work on something you like. If you do not, you are slowly making yourself weaker.

“Centuries are sometimes accorded exaggerated value; this was an innings far more significant, both in quality and importance to his team, than Tendulkar’s last two hundreds.

“You spend so much time checking off what you’ll do that you never do anything.