“Social networking sites” on the net are creating nothing new, but rather recreating things we do already - and things in some sense that have been destroyed by our modern/suburban urban designs. With modern society we’ve removed many of the connections of our social networks, and our geographical connection to them as well. The net is rebuilding them, and allowing us to find them around us in the physical world as well.

“If you try to impose a global ordering to the transactions across a lot of systems, it is very much like the way Newton thought of the Universe with time marching forward uniformly everywhere.

The move from this [classical] distributed computing to SOA is like moving from Newton’s Universe to Einstein’s Universe.

“It is better to just implement a language, like in Python’s case, than have a standard and many implementations.

“It is better to bet on yourself than on other people.

“Is it possible to build a successful business without great customer service? Yes. Absolutely. There are untold numbers of profitable businesses that resent and mistreat their customers. It’s up to you to decide if your company is going to make customer service a competitive advantage.

“Knowing the tool-du-jour is very different from knowing the structure of a large class of tools. The beauty of Scheme is that it has reified the structure of a truly huge range of tools into a fairly simple programming language.

“The development of Wikipedia’s organization [its increasing hierarchy] provides a benign case study in the political malignancy of crowds: people prefer a path toward ever more elaborate schemes of rule-making, at least when they become members of a large group.

“Don’t worry about the starting salary or the benefits package, because it will have no bearing at all on whether you are happy or rich in ten years time. All that matters is whether the work is sufficiently stimulating, and the network that comes with it sufficiently high-powered, to allow you to glimpse your own potential.

“Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. I think this difference is the single most under-appreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like: throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

We’re descended from women who played it safe. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich.

“Culture (e.g., a country, a religion) is an abstract system that competes against rival systems [including counterfactuals]