Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
Free markets select for winning solutions.
In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.
It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature
Grovelling is not a substitute for doing your homework.
Microsoft is not the problem. Microsoft is the symptom.
Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.
If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
Why the hell hasn't wxPython become the standard GUI for Python yet?
Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time
That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.
The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.
When I hear the words "social responsibility," I want to reach for my gun.
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.
A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)
Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.
The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge... The iPhone is in deep trouble.
Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.
Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.
On first blush this looks to be about money, but it is about power. Is power going to go to the information monopolies, or will it go to developers and users?.
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.
And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.
When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.
As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?
Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?