I do not pretend to start with precise questions. I do not think you can start with anything precise. You have to achieve such precision as you can, as you go along.
Bertrand Russell
Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
Guindon
Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.
Edward Tufte
If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.
James Barksdale
The data may not contain the answer. The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
John Tukey
I have no tools because I’ve destroyed my tools with my tools.
James Mickens, “The Night Watch”
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the [people] to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
Incorrectly attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
James Stockdale
Much of my trip focused on my personal faults, which were displayed in detail, and my anger at myself for being unable to correct them. The answer I got was “GET STRAIGHT! DO WHAT IT TAKES TO STRAIGHTEN OUT THE SHIT!” When I argued that it really didn’t matter, the answer was “EVERYTHING MATTERS”
Daniel Pinchbeck
There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
Leon Bambrick
There are only two hard problems in distributed systems:
(2) Exactly-once delivery
(1) Guaranteed order of messages
(2) Exactly-once deliveryMathias Verraes
Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall there was this one: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.” Master lttei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.” Among one’s affairs there should not be more than two or three matters of what one could call great concern. If these are deliberated upon during ordinary times, they can be understood. Thinking about things previously and then handling them lightly when the time comes is what this is all about.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.
Maria Popova
The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don’t push it.
Jamie Zawinski
The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, in “The Gene: An Intimate History”
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin with fine calipers, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and developers.
Move as a team
Never move alonePublic Enemy, “Welcome To The Terrordome”
Work. Don’t stress about the fruit of your labor. Work.
Premalatha Rao
If I knew less, I’d have been better off.
Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
Harold Abelson
Adjectives are like lard. They make all writing flabby.
New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity. Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.
Rumi
If we could see the whole truth of any situation, our only response would be one of compassion.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry
[HSMs] are not a sustainable operational load.
The only good thing about [certificate] pinning is that it makes revocation seem like a good idea.
When someone says “assume that a public key cryptosystem exists,” this is roughly equivalent to saying “assume that you could clone dinosaurs, and that you could fill a park with these dinosaurs, and that you could get a ticket to this ‘Jurassic Park,’ and that you could stroll throughout this park without getting eaten, clawed, or otherwise quantum entangled with a macroscopic dinosaur particle.”
James Mickens, “This World of Ours”
It’s a program, not a project. [Referring to a project that was repeatedly scheduled to finish in a year over its three-year lifespan].
HTTPS & SSL doesn’t mean “trust this.” It means “this is private.” You may be having a private conversation with Satan.
Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) April 4, 2012
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Robert A. Heinlein, in “Time Enough for Love,” 1973
The realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.
Maurice Wilkes
PKI is the all but unknown foundation on which the modern Internet rests. It’s like you go in your basement and you discover that the foundation of your house is actually held up by a bunch of really, really tired Smurfs. The load is really heavy, they’ve been carrying it a long time, but they’re going to smurf their best!
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
Immanuel Kant
Reality has a surprising amount of detail.
Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
The word “quantum” sucks people’s brains out, and otherwise sensible people suffer from impaired reasoning.
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
Nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served.
G. K. Chesterton, in “The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic” (1929). This is also known as “Chesterton’s Fence”