“Professional and business social networking sites will find it more difficult to compete if Facebook is able to successfully allow people to distinguish between their various social graphs.

“In Ruby if I decide that all string comparisons must become case-insensitive, I can do that. In python, there is no way I can do that. This dynamism makes Ruby much more suitable for “tinkering”, but Python equally more suitable for use in large production applications.

It’s funny, because both languages are so much more dynamic than most others, that in the end the key difference between them should hinge on this issue.

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

“Shorter code is better if it expresses underlying relationships better.

“Lomography emphasizes casual, snapshot photography. Characteristics such as over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring, “happy accidents,” and alternative film processing are often considered part of lomographic technique.

“The Nobel Peace Prize is the only one that is awarded not for solving a problem but for merely trying to. Sometimes, the hope expressed by the Nobel committee is realized—as it was by Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk, for example, in 1993. Just as often, the prize ends up honoring an illusion—Yasir Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, in 1994—or a cause that’s as hopeless as it is noble: the Dalai Lama, in 1989; Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1991.

“New Yorkers are living longer than ever before, and longer than most people in the country. A New Yorker born in 2004 can now expect to live 78.6 years, nine months longer than the average American will. What’s more, their life expectancy is increasing at a rate faster than that of most of the rest of the country.

“My feed reader shows me what’s been updated. It can’t show me what’s new [to me].

“..men 18-34 are more likely than women to need extra thanks from the boss in order to be productive.

“The worst thing that can happen to a code base is size.

Most people only arrive at this conclusion via painful things happening to them.