“The iron law of oligarchy: all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. Causes: the technical indispensability of leadership; the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests; the gratitude of the led towards the leaders; and the general immobility and passivity of the masses.

“Only nascent civilizations will transmit messages without compression, since compressionless transmission is such a bad use of bandwidth. Compressed transmissions, though, have the problem that they approach randomness. That means that the only thing SETI can recognize will be either intentional communications or else the communication of very early civilizations, pre-compression. The situation featured in Contact, where a civilization notices the ‘momentary’ event of our world broadcasting uncompressed must be extremely rare.

“Most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. They fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered.

“The important parts of core git are things like writing your own object allocator to make the footprint as small as possible to be able to efficiently track object flags for a million objects. It’s writing a parser for the tree objects that is fairly optimal, because there is no abstraction. One of the great strengths of C is that it doesn’t make you think of your program as anything high-level.

“A lot of the dissatisfaction with computer science comes from the misplaced expectation that a computer science graduate will be a good programmer. Computer science and software engineering are very different disciplines. Software engineering teaches the process of developing software, in terms of both tools and processes. A computer science course only briefly touches on these topics, in the same way that a materials physicist may learn something of mechanical engineering.

“It’s time to quit pandering to Mort with our condescending paternalistic attitude, and instead demand better from him.

“Test-driven development is akin to double-entry accounting.

“Hacker News is now perhaps my favorite social network, even though it doesn’t look anything like one, and it doesn’t include most of my best friends in the real world. I think there’s a lesson here.

“The 2008 US Presidential race will be a $1-billion election. To be taken seriously, a candidate will need to raise at least $100 million by the end of 2007.

“While big dollar-holding countries such as China, Singapore, Russia and the Persian Gulf states are very worried about the erosion in value of their dollar-denominated holdings, they also know that an abrupt move to cut their pegs to the dollar would force a run on the currency, leaving them even poorer. Instead these countries are pursuing careful reallocations of their investment holdings that will allow them to hedge against the dollar’s decline.