“Think about the competition when talking to your customers, not when talking to yourselves. Don’t anthropomorphize the problem. Focus on the problem space, not the people that populate it.

“Recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

Hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition.

Because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.

The mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses.

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health.

Modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers.

Bands of farmers outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.

“Why isn’t everyone beautiful, smart and healthy? Genes that are good for males are bad for females and, perhaps, vice versa.

“In contrast to Gigya, ClearSpring is open to any developer and focuses on widgetizing content, not easily posting them to social sites.

“Estimates that stretch into weeks or months are fantasies.

“When a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious.. their opinions about it will tend to converge if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff.

“Never throw more time or money at a problem, just scale back the scope.

“Developing a new application, you’re faced with hundreds of micro-decisions. How do we make these decisions? If it’s something we recognize as being important, we might ask. The rest, we guess. All that guessing builds up a kind of debt in our applications — an interconnected web of assumptions. As a developer, I hate this. The knowledge of all these small-scale timebombs in the applications I write adds to my stress.

Open Source developers, scratching their own itches, don’t suffer this. Because they are their own users, they know the correct answers to 90% of the decisions they have to make. I think this is one of the reasons folks come home after a hard day of coding and then work on open source: It’s relaxing.

“Don’t limit your product to one ‘use case’. Let your users decide what they want to do with it, and see which market they take you into. Encourage ‘bottom-up’ optimization of your business based on users, rather than top-down control.

“I have more than 60,000 contacts in linkedIn but what are the right contacts?