“Most companies don’t outsource things they need to win a customer, but they have no problem outsourcing things the customer needs to use the product.

“The Simpsons did say that Flanders, who opposed the teaching of evolution, is sincere in his beliefs. We tried to take his emotions seriously.

“Religions dislike each other, but no heretic is as damned as someone who starts with your religion and makes a modification to it.

“Anytime a comment thread becomes huge enough to exhibit emergent behavior, up to and including spawning new species of monsters, you know you’ve touched a nerve.

“Garry’s Mod is a game modification for Half Life 2 created by Garry Newman. While GMod does not possess any traditional gameplay value, it enables the player to freely manipulate all of the objects and features of the Source engine. This has allowed an extensive community to build up for mini-games within GMod.

“I do my best to be in a relaxed state of mind because that’s when I play at my best. I try to slow things down a couple of days before a game. I have long lunches, do things in an unhurried way. The morning of the match I always get up a couple of hours before we have to get to the ground, so that I have plenty of time to get ready. I take my time to have a bath, wear my clothes, eat breakfast. I never rush things, and that sort of sets up my mood for the rest of day.

“I want to be glad and happy with my eyes fully open, without fooling myself in the belief that we live in a pink world: to be happy to be alive in the full knowledge of all misery.

“Spare the group from scale. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe’s law is a drag.

Sometimes you can do soft forking. LiveJournal does the best soft forking of any software I’ve ever seen. The median size of a LiveJournal group is around five people.

My favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page.

“The overload principle: set moderately difficult but potentially achievable goals. In weight lifting, for example, strength cannot be increased by tasks that can be performed easily or that cannot be performed without injury to the organism. Strength can be increased by lifting weights that are realistic but difficult enough to stretch the muscles.

“Kernel developers at large haven’t the faintest idea just how big the problems in userspace are. lkml is about as scary a communication forum as they come. Most people are absolutely terrified of mailing the list (e.g. saying ‘my Firefox tabs open slowly since the last CPU scheduler upgrade’) lest they get flamed for their inexperience, an inappropriate bug report, being stupid or whatever. Whereas enterprise users are the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some $bullshit_benchmark degraded by 0.1% with patch $Y gets reported, and how quickly it gets attended to.