As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get… - Paul Graham

The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs). This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

Companies often wonder what to outsource and what not to. One possible answer: outsource any job that’s not directly exposed to competitive pressure, because outsourcing it will thereby expose it to competitive pressure. (I mean “outsource” in the sense of hiring another company to do it, not the more specific sense of hiring an overseas company.)

I was very impressed by the papers published in philosophy journals. They were so beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating — alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. A fellow would be walking along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon him. I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more closely. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. This was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't really saying anything. No philosopher ever refuted another, for example, because no one said anything definite enough to refute. Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either.