Quote of the Day
If you enjoy programming, philosophy, math, or any number of geeky topics, you're in the right place. Every day, I'll post a random quote from my extensive collection of Kindle highlights. Quotes do not necessarily reflect my views or opinions. In fact, part of my epistemic process is to consume a wide variety of contradictory material.
03/04/2021
Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting.
— Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine
03/03/2021
…what “industry best practice” actually gets you is not the best, but merely the average.
— Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters
03/02/2021
Why is it that we reward programmers who work all night to remove the errors they put into their programs, or managers who make drastic organizational changes to resolve the crises their poor management has created? Why not reward the programmers who design so well that they don’t have dramatic errors, and managers whose organizations stay out of crisis mode?
— Becoming a Technical Leader, Gerald Weinberg
03/01/2021
Time and again in the history of mathematics, paradoxes have arisen because fundamental notions were not divorced from their origins in the physical world.
— Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory
02/28/2021
…what is real freedom to Hegel? “It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” … The consequence of this, morally, is that the individual is of less significance than the state. The individual’s empirical, day-to-day interests are of a lower moral order than the state’s universal, world-historical interests. … “this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.” … “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”
— Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism
1782 post articles, 357 pages.