It annoys me when teachers require kids to use laborious, prescribed methods to calculate things (and to "show their work" to prove they did) because… - Paul Graham

A startup's ascent often consists of alternating rises and flat spots. This puzzled me when I first saw it at Viaweb. But it turns out just to be what happens when you add a function representing "random ups and downs" to one that's consistently increasing.

When people criticize an action on the grounds of the "optics," they're almost always full of shit. All they're really saying is "What you did looks bad." But if they phrased it that way, they'd have to answer the question "Was it actually bad, or not?"

I’d like to propose an alternative idea: that in a modern society, increasing variation in income is a sign of health. Technology seems to increase the variation in productivity at faster than linear rates. If we don’t see corresponding variation in income, there are three possible explanations: (a) that technical innovation has stopped, (b) that the people who would create the most wealth aren’t doing it, or (c) that they aren’t getting paid for it.