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If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.

Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

We over estimate technology in the short term and under estimate technology in the long term.

I give the fight up; let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.

Source: Paracelsus - Robert Browning

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Wikipedia Entry; Quoted by Edward Tenner in 'The Efficiency Paradox'.

The paradox of efficiency is that progress toward greater efficiency is wasteful.

p. 42 The Efficiency Paradox - Edward Tenner

From A Collection of O'rly book Covers

For each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change.

Source

DHH: 'Software Writing - not Development'

• 'Clarity' should be your number one mission.
• 'Delete key' is the main tool for improving code.
• Every first code is 'draft' - everything should be rewritten: 'omit needless stuff'

Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies.

p. 125, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking - Hofstadter, Sander

Source: The Bitter Guide to Open Source

Avoid saying condescending shit like “just” and “simply”.