“The real reason people drink: it takes effort to have fun if you are sober.

“Ruby extension modules are slightly easier to write and read than Python ones, but slightly less portable. Main reasons: no reference counting, less obtrusive exception propagation using setjmp/longjmp, and a more uniform notion of types and classes. There are also some minor conveniences, such as C methods which take an ordinary argument list instead of a vector.

“Plastic bags that float into storm drains in the west coast make their way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a heap of debris twice the size of Texas floating in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii. This patch has been growing, along with other ocean debris worldwide, tenfold every decade since the 1950s.

At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option. It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues.

“You don’t need to know how to read email headers to detect phishing. You just need to trust your coercion detector, and know that nothing that happens online invalidates it.

“In Russia today it takes courage to run for president. In the US it takes courage not to.

“Broadly speaking, there are two types of internet users: Time Rich and Time Poor. Time Poor people use the internet to get things done. They are very task focused, and their favorite websites help them use their precious time more efficiently. Time Rich people use the internet to kill some time. They are bored. They are willing to be diverted and entertained. The cost of being wrong is low.

If you’re starting a new internet company, its important to know who your audience is. Search is for the Time Poor, discovery is for the Time Rich. Advertising is for the Time Rich.

Time Rich does not mean unsophisticated. Your users spend enough time on the internet, and on your competitors sites, to know what’s what.

“Destructively assignable entities are essential to the ability to change one part of a program in a significant way without changing the rest of the program. A mechanism for threaded state (Haskell monads) cannot substitute.

“Is The Onion our most intelligent newspaper? While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire.

One common complaint about newspapers is that they’re too negative, too focused on bad news, too obsessed with the most unpleasant aspects of life. The Onion shows how wrong this characterization is, how gingerly most newspapers dance around the unrelenting awfulness of life and refuse to acknowledge the limits of our tolerance and compassion.

“Marketing to attract users to web applications does not make any difference in the rate of adoption. You can get more people to register, but you can’t get more of them to adopt. Registrations grow from marketing, and adoption grows from referrals.