“Darwin was like a salesman who finds lots of little ways to get you to say yes before you’re asked to utter the big yes. He invited people to affirm things they already knew, about a topic much more familiar in their era than in ours: domestic species.

It only took a couple of years for Darwin to formulate the idea of evolution by natural selection. It took thirty years to frame that idea in a way that would convince other scientists and the general public.

“..computing’s central challenge, “How not to make a mess of it”, has not yet been met.

“We don’t recommend trying to escape a four-year commitment to the company (including time served). Four years is the typical commitment for a start up, high school, or college, as well as the span between Olympics and World Cups, and the term we give our Presidents to start as many wars as possible.

“Around 2:00, somebody came into the Show and Tell and said that we shouldn’t be making people register just to try the thing out. ..I stepped out for about 15 minutes and built the “Lemme In!” button. I pushed the build live and Things. Went. NUTS.

“Quick replies are what we want to avoid. That’s how flamewars start. Ignoring the post is going to be unsatisfactory for the flamewar-prone. That leaves the down-arrow as a sort of relief valve. So I think its presence can actually reduce nastiness.

“Frameworks don’t solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems.

..evaluate frameworks based on two rough metrics: how far the framework goes in solving the general case problem out of the box and how little friction the framework creates when you have to solve the specific-case problem yourself.

“We who read (and write) blogs and play with the latest Internet Trinkets (and build them), a teeny geeky minority whose audience is itself.. this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. ..the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools.

“Mass-produced products vary in quality a lot less than handmade works.

“In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

“..while anyone’s reaction to a famous painting will be warped at first by its fame, there are ways to decrease its effects. One is to come back to the painting over and over. After a few days the fame wears off, and you can start to see it as a painting. Another is to stand close. A painting familiar from reproductions looks more familiar from ten feet away; close in you see details that get lost in reproductions, and which you’re therefore seeing for the first time.