“Like mating season, VCs in the midst of fundraising season tend to behave a little strange, with a heightened sensitivity to M&A overtures.

“Gimmicky answers in college applications have their place, because they demonstrate a person’s willingness to do something trivial, stupid and creative, all at the same time. That’s a useful skill.

Publishing previous applications eliminates most gimmicks from reuse. This is why blogs and YouTube videos keep getting better.

“The params hash in Rails is a special kind of hash called a HashWithIndifferentAccess. This differs from the CGI::Session hash (a plain old Hash) in which the keys :foo and ‘foo’ do not point to the same values.

“The most productive people rarely have more than 6 hours or so of really concentrated work per day. If you can ensure you get that every day, you don’t need to economize on sleep.

“Everyone was busily employed, but nobody could be heard or obeyed.

“The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but a physical- and emotional-health one. Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity. You might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking.

“The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.

“The worst code is not necessarily buggy code, but code that is unnecessarily complex. Detecting that would be an interesting new direction for program analysis.

“Once your site does attract fourteen year olds, you can never, ever get rid of them.