When you know something cannot be done, also remember the essential reason why, so later, when the circumstances have changed, you will not say 'It c… - Richard Hamming

my boss was saying intellectual investment is like compound interest: the more you do, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. I do not know what compound interest rate to assign, but it must be well over 6% — one extra hour per day over a lifetime will much more than double the total output. The steady application of a bit more effort has a great total accumulation.

Indeed, one of my major complaints about the computer field is that whereas Newton could say, "If I have seen a little farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants," I am forced to say, "Today we stand on each other's feet." Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way. Science is supposed to be cumulative, not almost endless duplication of the same kind of things.

It is obvious: The past was once the future and the future will become the past.