“When you’re working on something that isn’t released, problems are intriguing. In something that’s out there, problems are alarming.

“We conservatives are fonder of old ways than you [liberals] are. That’s in our definition. Some of our people are obtuse; so are some of yours. While we second-guess the status quo less than you do, we second-guess putative reforms more than you do. Our standard of “information” is a bit tougher than the blips and fads you fall for. Sometimes, these inclinations lead us astray. But over the long run, they’ve served us and society pretty well. It’s just that you notice all the times we were wrong and ignore all the times we were right.

“Individual units at Google don’t have to worry about making money, they don’t all have to be profitable. Most of them are just there to make the consumer happy. One of the things that consumers do when they’re happy is view ads, and we get paid for that.

“Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer.

“If you’ve got ideas, let them go. They’re probably holding you back from the hard work of actually executing.

“I don’t see the appeal in using most social networks. They require lots of input: who are you? what do you do? where do you work? what do you like? who are your friends? In return for all this input, you get very little.

“I perceive Emacs as a huge ship where people embark to travel around the planet. However the ship is heavy and consumes a great deal of fuel to effect only slight changes in direction. It is difficult to find captains for this ship. Its voyages do not fully track the mainstream routes, where the active and diverse crowd is. This is because captains are not that concerned with the mainstream, and also because when corrections become unavoidable, its inertia is such that it always lags a bit from the aimed route. So this ship very slowly diverges, progressively isolating its happy passengers from the rest of the world.

“In Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid—our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk—and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus).

Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way. Those who can are baffled by its name. The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and washed out the stars overhead.

“We—you, me, anyone who programs because they love it, who would do it for free if necessary—are a breed apart. It isn’t intelligence, or hard work, or education, although those help; it’s that we actually like this stuff.

I’ve seen far too many people start to treat programming like a job, forgetting the joy of doing it, and burn out. So keep an eye on how you feel about the programming you’re doing, and if it’s getting stale, it’s time to learn something new; there’s plenty of interesting programming of all sorts to be done. Follow your interests—and don’t forget to have fun!

“You had to put the alphabet into an order, because otherwise you couldn’t remember what all the letters were. The order they picked is as good as any other. They just picked it.