Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.
Tim O’Reilly (via Daring Fireball)
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There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
Phil Karlton
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This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing. But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are struggling for something; and then distance and difficulties to be overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us—an illusion which vanishes when we reach it; or else when we are occupied with some purely intellectual interest—when in reality we have stepped forth from life to look upon it from the outside, much after the manner of spectators at a play.
Schopenhauer (via Nonicoclolasos)
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Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
John F. Woods
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The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart. If you want the truth to stand clearly before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind’s worst disease.
Zen master Sent-ts’an
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Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G. K. Chesterton
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Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so.
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 43
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Clinical psychologists sometimes say that two kinds of people seek therapy: those who need tightening, and those who need loosening.
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 28
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If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins.
Benjamin Franklin
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Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
Alan Kay in The Computer Revolution hasn’t happened yet
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With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term “extreme programming” sounds like exactly the wrong way to go…with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code.
Donald Knuth in an interview
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Our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product.
Friedrich August von Hayek
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The reason a person is critical of a thing is because he is passionate about that thing. In order to have a critical opinion, you have to love something enough to understand it, and then love it so much more that you want it to be better. Passion breeds critical thinking.
Alex Payne in Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity
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I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying ”A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants,” has been a very real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing well-spring of tolerance.
Albert Einstein (via Nonicoclolasos)
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Oh boy! They make such great stuff. This time it felt like a Faustian bargain. They make such great stuff, but they’re such assholes. Do I really want to support this company?
