What I'm reading 10/5-10/12

2015-10-11

"It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone."
"It turns out that treating software as property makes bad software."
"Aristocracy looks hard to beat, but that's how it looked in 1788 and 1913 too. It is, as Chou En-Lai said about the meaning of the French Revolution, too soon to tell."
"In most programming languages, far more space is spent in telling people what the program does than in telling the computer how to do it."
"'Expressivity' became a property of programming languages, not because it facilitated computation, but because it facilitated the collaborative creation and maintenance of increasingly complex software systems."
"But the most significant difference between political thought inside the digirati and outside it is that in the network society, anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable political philosophy."

"You look at your stack traces, at your queue, at your DB slow queries, at the APIs you call. You spend weeks at a time optimizing every component, making sure it's always going to be good and solid. Things keeps crashing, but you hit the point where every time, it takes 2-3 days more."

"Bugs found by users are more expensive than bugs found before a user sees them. Bugs found by users may result in lost users, lost time and theft. These all hurt the bottom line."

"'The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?'"
"Another troubling discovery was a document from NSA director Keith Alexander that showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals. The memo suggested that the agency could use these 'personal vulnerabilities' to destroy the reputations of government critics who were not in fact accused of plotting terrorism."