“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

“Most people engage in strategies with low volatility but high risk. Demand for certainty is an intellectual vice.

Be fooled in small matters, not in the large. Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Lose small to make big. If you are in the military, in catastrophe insurance, or in banking and lending, or in homeland security, you face only downside. Examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: movies, some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital.

Living in cities is invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters. Diplomats understand this well: big breakthroughs come from casual chance discussions at cocktail parties, not dry correspondence or telephone conversations. Go to parties!

When you hear a ‘prominent’ economist use the word equilibrium or normal distribution, do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.

“When man disappears from the earth the only thing that misses us will be the head lice and the E. coli.

“The Human Genome Project set out on a 15-year quest to map the human genome. Nine years in, the project had only mapped about one percent. To linear thinkers this appeared to be a failure. But completing one percent of the map wasn’t the same as completing one percent of the TASK, which included developing the technology for efficient genome mapping. The project was actually completed ahead of schedule and under budget.

“Laziness allows you to think of data structures like control structures. Lists, along with the usual higher order functions, turn into essentially reified loops which can be transformed all at once.

There is a place for strictness, but it’s actually rather small compared to the cases when laziness wins out. You want strictness when reducing large data structures into small ones in a way which uses all of the large structure (i.e. not a search). In all other cases, laziness is actually preferable or equivalent to strictness in terms of performance.

“One needs to exit doubt to produce science — but few people heed the importance of not exiting from it prematurely.

One usually exits doubt without realizing it. We are dogma-prone from our mother’s wombs.

“In most cases, ugly code becomes uglier as it’s maintained or enhanced.

It does not sound like much to take time to write a little test, perform a simple refactoring, or rename one variable. But it represents a huge change in attitude and a rare and courageous stance toward legacy code. It means that you don’t accept the inevitable slide from ugly code to uglier code.

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

“ActiveRecord’s family of class methods isn’t a DSL, it’s a database pidgin.

“It intrigues me that the media is regularly running stories about how quickly executive pay is rising and ask if they are being paid too much. But it appears the media aids and abets the increases.