“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men [...]”
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
The theoretical speedup is limited to at most 20 times the single thread performance (i.e., parallelization has diminishing returns).
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
Humans can comfortably maintain only ~150 stable relationships.
Any code of your own that you haven’t looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else.
The time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.
Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from malice.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases. (counterpoint to Occam’s Razor)
If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy person; they will find an easier way to do it.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
The average number of customers in a business (𝐿), is the effective arrival rate (λ), times the average time that a customer spends in the store (𝑊), or 𝐿＝λ𝑊. In other words, you can calculate the average number of customers at any given time if you know how often they arrive, and how long they spend in a system.
Referring to the phenomenon of false memories being shared by large groups of people. Named after the popular false belief Nelson Mandela died in a prison in the 1980s when he lived until 2013.
The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users or devices in the network.
To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
If you write anything criticizing, editing, or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.
What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
People in a hierarchy tend to rise to their “level of incompetence.” In other words, an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.” Often reworded as “be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.”
Interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation.
Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
(corollary) Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.
A psychological phenomenon in which high expectations lead to improved performance in a given area.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Any attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.
Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Produce no document unless its need is immediate and significant.
If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what I received, I haven’t thought enough about what it might mean.
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
Bone adapts to pressure, or a lack of it.