“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?

“Hot market you raise money/sell, down market you don’t sell/you build.

“Many of the test cases in the original language shootout involved calculation or large values in loops, which would cause Perl and Python (and even C, Java, and C++) to chug merrily away burning cycles so that I could measure the timings in seconds, rather than microseconds. Then along came GHC, and the lazy nature of the evaluation threw out the unneeded calculations, handing over the final useful result without breaking a sweat.

Consequently, we had to revise many of the tests to force the programs to perform real work. With those changes, Haskell began to fall back in speed to more moderate levels. However, in the last few releases, GHC has approached native C in performance overall.

The performance is also consistent across platforms. [For example] While Java’s HotSpot compiler makes a good showing on Intel, my AMD test machine yields consistently worse results. However, GHC performs equally well on both systems. This is great because applications written in Haskell can be reasonably expected to yield good performance on all of the common x86 platforms without customizations.

“Pyro demonstrates a new breed of applications we call site-specific browsers—apps that are about making a browser-based application better with client-side technology while keeping the user interface intact.

“Roll forward with the scroll wheel while in a Google map and you’ll zoom in on the spot your mouse is over. Yahoo [and local.live] only zoom to the center of the map.