Month: October 2015

“When you choose technology, you have to ignore what other people are doing, and consider only what will work the best.”

“…server-based applications magnify the effect of rapid development, because you can release software the minute it’s done.”

“In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don’t understand. In business, as in war, surprise is worth as much as force.”

“Ordinarily technology changes fast. But programming languages are different: programming languages are not just technology, but what programmers think in. They’re half technology and half religion.[6] And so the median language, meaning whatever language the median programmer uses, moves as slow as an iceberg.”


“If you ever do find yourself working for a startup, here’s a handy tip for evaluating competitors. Read their job listings. Everything else on their site may be stock photos or the prose equivalent, but the job listings have to be specific about what they want, or they’ll get the wrong candidates.”

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

“I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.”

“Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable.”

“Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn’t just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.”

“The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. ”


“When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite.”


“Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it’s doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. ”


“How can you see the wave, when you’re the water? Always be questioning. That’s the only defence. What can’t you say? And why?”

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

“Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.” — Alan Perlis

“Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance.” – Ivor Brown, The Heart of England


“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” – J. K. Galbraith, Letter to Kennedy, 1962

http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html

“His name is Jeremy England, and at 33, he’s already being called the next Charles Darwin.”


The 101 version of his big idea is this: Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may already be “alive.”


Now take England’s simulation of an opera singer who holds a crystal glass and sings at a certain pitch. Instead of shattering, England predicts that over time, the atoms will rearrange themselves to better absorb the energy the singer’s voice projects, essentially protecting the glass’s livelihood. So how’s a glass distinct from, say, a plankton-type organism that rearranges it self over several generations? Does that make glass a living organism?


“…While Christianity and Darwinism are generally opposed, Judaism doesn’t take issue with the science of life. The Rabbinical Council of America even takes the stance that “evolutionary theory, properly understood, is not incompatible with belief in a Divine Creator.”


For his part, England believes science can give us explanations and predictions, but it can never tell us what we should do with that information. That’s where, he says, the religious teachings come in. “

http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/the-man-who-may-one-up-darwin/39217

“…Italy has this really amazing thing called Jure Sanguinis that allows you to get dual citizenship if you can trace your ancestry back in a certain way. There’s some fairly complex rules to it, but in brief it says that if your immigrant ancestor had kids before he or she became an American citizen, then the kids were technically born as Italian citizens (according to Italy), and you are eligible to claim Italian citizenship as their descendant.”

https://blog.tomasino.org/moving-to-iceland.html#.VhEhWn0oeKI

“Several studies, most notably by the Harvard Business School and Sysomos, have tried to analyze the user behaviour on microblogging services.[9][10] Several of these studies show that for services such as Twitter, there is a small group of active users contributing to most of the activity.[11] Sysomos’ Inside Twitter [10] survey, based on more than 11 million users, shows that 10% of Twitter users account for 86% of all activity.”


( Reading the above paragraph on Wikipedia, I just realized, the “1” in the 1-9-90 Rule when applied to Twitter, is really the People NOT on Twitter. The “9” are the People who are Linking TO or Tweeting ABOUT the Stuff found off-twitter written/blogged by that “1” Percent of Twitter “Users”. )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microblogging

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