What I'm reading 6/6-6/13

2016-06-13

"I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, 'Yes, I would like to do first-class work.'"
"And after some more time I came in one day and said, 'If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'"
"You have to learn to write clearly and well so that people will read it, you must learn to give reasonably formal talks, and you also must learn to give informal talks."
"You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this."
"When you find apparent flaws you've got to be sensitive and keep track of those things, and keep an eye out for how they can be explained or how the theory can be changed to fit them."
"By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work."

"I live with a sexy, strong, beautiful woman who turns my crank."
"I think a metaphor for this time in our society would be a tree that's under stress. When that happens the tree puts out a lot of seed."

"Look at how slowly Twitter has improved their platform, and all the new features are for advertisers, not for writers. I suspect Medium will go down a similar path."
"Is it necessary that a Silicon Valley tech company own every media type?"
"I don't see a statement of principles, tech startups usually don't have them. They're here to dominate and make money off the dominance."

"Only a small percentage (6.1%-16.7%) of configuration parameters are set by the majority of users; a significant percentage (up to 54.1%) of parameters are rarely set by any user."

"Unfortunately, attempting to help the user by fixing the error could make things worse by leading to subtle and catastrophic failures down the road."
"If you can't safely fix the problem, always err on the side of protecting the user's data. Protecting the user's data is a sacred trust."

"Aren't you glad everyone is using fucking OAuth now?"
"Do I miss IE6? As a CEO, actually yes."
"Yes, you can build 2007 websites much better now. They will be consistent across platforms and perform great. But my 12 year olds don't want 2007 websites. They want 2016 apps."
"We have more amazing technology than ever before but we also have so much diversity of platforms, browsers, and screen types, that building a consistent experience pretty much means using almost none of it."

"Every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing."
"Aides think Democrats should be grateful that he's increased voter turnout and registration."

"Friendly and descriptive as always, they told me this would be deemed a won't-fix and is actually intentional behavior. I was puzzled: how can Facebook let this happen?"