"Successful open-source development can be understood by Richard Gabriel's claim that 'the right thing' design approach, tends to lose to 'worse is better.'"

"Escaping High School - A guide for fourteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds at heart."

Because ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ‘knowing something’.

"How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions?"

"Despite stagnant wages, declining employment rates, and an increased propensity to live with their parents, younger men report increased happiness during the 2000s."

"What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."

"I know the politicians are mistaken because it was my job to predict which people will become billionaires."

"Was the MBA worth it? Am I better for it? Am I now the person I want to be?"

One of the most valuable writing skills is the ability to generate novel ideas.

"Cap your existential downside risk, pursue max volatility, repeat."

"Tar Tasks are the dead weight To Do List items dragging down your soul."

"In this post, I want to discuss exactly how the design of TikTok helps its algorithm work as well as it does."

"Suppose you were to reach into the mirror universe, where everything is inverted, and pull out a book that is the exact opposite of Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth."

"This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders."

"It's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, Warren Buffett ran a hugely successful investment partnership."

"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."

"The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin."

"Smart Companies Try To Commoditize Their Products’ Complements"

"Our vision is that we’re going to power the Internet."

"It's a frequent occurrence that the weird stuff lands on my desk after it goes through another skilled engineer or two."

"It was a group of consultants at McKinsey & Company who coined the 'war for talent' in their 1998 report and subsequent book of the same name, propelling the term 'top talent' into the corporate executive hive-mind for the next two decades."

"The idea of 'structurelessness,' however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right."

"If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about."

Nintendo uses a product-development philosophy called “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.”

"A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death."

"Of all the attempts to put Sir Alex Ferguson’s 27-year tenure managing Manchester United in perspective, perhaps none were as articulate as the team he selected yesterday for his final match at Old Trafford."

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel — only worse.

"In fact some nerds are quite fierce."

"Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it."

"Grocery delivery, an ideology?"

Yes, you may be special, chosen people putting big dents in the universe, but believe it or not, the rest of us actually have some interesting lessons to share from our less ambitious lives!

"Oozification is a process that makes the technological future visibly illegible, especially to those closest to it and working hardest to make it happen, and this fear is the temporal analog of high-modernist fear of illegibility."

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field." (Niels Bohr)

"Upward, not Northward" - was the clue to the whole proof.

"The more we understand about the world around us, the less it seems we understand about people and the way they are."

"There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems."

"One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right."

"The average internet user spent about 30 minutes a day online, compared to about 7 hours today."

"Subcultures are dead."

"The scene that made me cry was about paper."

"The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure"

"Blockchains are all the rage."

"Seize the memes of production."

"One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale."

"When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins; when a lousy team meets a great market, market wins."

"Isn't that really, really weird?"

"Warren Buffett is almost certainly the most studied investor in history."

"Well, another day shot to hell!"

America is today in the midst of a great technological revolution.

"What Would Bezos Build If He Were Starting Out Today?"

"Language is the most important piece of the Idea Stack because language is the terrain on which the battle of ideas is fought."

"I often get introduced to people looking to make the jump into startups and Silicon Valley."

"America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism."

"Most successful consumer social products walk through a boneyard of failures before achieving victory."

Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated?

"The world is constructed entirely by people who are mostly winging it… and a lot of them don't realize that about themselves."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Everything is Held Together with Duct Tape: All of it. Every last thing. Seriously."

"The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network."

"Your thesis is like your first love," Eco muses. "It will be difficult to forget.”

"Every tweet is a free lottery ticket."

"Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention, incentivizing a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior."

"Designing a New Old Home: Part 2 - The Elements and Materials"

"One thread I connected pretty late at Cash App was that speeding up time-to-money for a given transaction creates more value than is obvious."

"A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre."