Prediction: Because the quality of abstract art is (ahem) hard to judge, it will be a lot easier to revise the history of that period to adjust the r… - Paul Graham

At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.

It's not a sufficient defense of activism to claim that it "increases awareness" of a problem. There are forms of activism that increase awareness and yet set back efforts to solve the problem.

One thing I didn't get about technical fields as a kid is that rigor is the standard ideas have to meet, not the source of them. The source is often the cheesiest sort of guessing.