TheLarch

That is an interesting thought! I wonder if he did undertake some risk. I just emailed him, as I never properly thanked him. Maybe if he emails back I'll ask.

Also he negotiated a year off of our traditional 5-year vesting (at the time anyway) in the salt mine that is Microsoft, though he was never to take a position there himself.

I see no end to liquidity event horror stories. I'm so lucky.

I was so naive when I joined my first startup. When we were purchased, it came to light that the main guy never got around to signing my stock option agreement. He is a fucking mensch and signed it after the fact.

Character buys a unique, abiding respect.

"The problem with Perl is that it tends to be a different language for every programmer."

Exactly. Larry Wall cited an analogy somewhere: if you want to know where to put walkways on a new campus, wait until pedestrians have worn trails into the grass and pave there. Perl docs repeatedly makes jokes along the lines of, "it does what you want, unless you want consistency. Bottom line, Perl was designed without predictability and consistency in mind. This makes it blazingly fast for development by one person, but the administrative overhead between multiple programmers balloons.

Because of a natural inclination to reduce the number of characters one uses, as you get comfortable with Perl you start taking more and more shortcuts. A singular moment in my long career occurred when I opened some old Perl code after leaving the language for a time. I stared for a long moment, dumbfounded. It was as if an alien had visited my computer and overwritten my code with what Wall has affectionately described as "line noise."

Also, I was awed by the feature set in Perl 6. I don't think any language outside of Lisp, C, and Smalltalk has had such profoundly new ideas. Pronouns in Perl 5 are still unique to my knowledge after 20+ years. Wall is wildly imaginative.

Perl is what made me realize, in the mid-90's, that OO is largely just a marketing term. A sufficiently powerful language provides whatever portions of OO you need a la carte.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." --Bruce Lee

I am not sure if this submission is tongue in cheek or not.

From Wikipedia: "Her four most well-known contributions to the field of psychology are the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, the continuum model of impression formation, and the power-as-control theory."

"Recently, Fiske has been involved in the field of social cognitive neuroscience. This emerging field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception. Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping, intergroup hostility, and impression formation."

Neural systems.

2015 R&D: $806,648,000 2015 Sales, General and Admin $1,132,164,000

I can't imagine a justification for these numbers. Twitter seems like a small company idea.

I presume you speak Russian then? If so did you learn anything about the quotation? I Googled it just now and found... this page.

The best jokes defy explanation to some degree. A good example: the de facto definition of 'chutzpah' is, "To kill your parents and then ask the judge for clemency because you're an orphan." Not only is it funny, it's also the best available definition.

The humor of oppressed Soviets, particularly Soviet Jews, is perhaps the best I have read.

This may be more modern, but one that I love is, "Once you've been in the military, the circus isn't funny anymore."

I feel gratified that you mentioned this. Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita" obsesses about apartments. I suppose this is because financial opportunities were otherwise constrained. In this story at least cheating seems to have been the norm.

"The domesticated foxes had floppier, drooping ears, which are found in other domestic animals such as dogs, cats, pigs, horses and goats."

I happened to recall the Origin of Species mentioning this: "Not a single domestic animal can be named which has not in some country drooping ears."

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, fashion is so ugly it has to be replaced every six months. Though the Metropolitan Museum may be my favorite place on earth, I find a good portion of NYC to be repugnant. Nowhere have I seen such spineless obedience to trends and fashions. Many residents seemingly can't put on a tee shirt without worrying over it endlessly, and express a self-congratulatory air when they've gotten that tee shirt just right. They are delighted to wait for 1.5 hours to get a burrito because it's the right burrito, and the right line to be in to buy one.

Hearing this guy say "my body is not my own" made me twitch and I had to stop.

The difference between them and rabid football fans is a matter of degree, not quality.

"No one can really come up with any stories about his life that don't make him sound like a total dick so they cut the testimonial part short" killed me.