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Some Awesome Quotes

Happiness

"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city." -George Burns

"The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else." -Martina Navratilova

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." -Albert Schweitzer

Uncertainity

"Call no man happy before he dies; he is at best but fortunate." -Solon

"A casino is the only human venture I know where the probabilities are known." -Nassim Nicholas Taleb mocking all kinds of people who make predictions from Astrologers to Meteorologists. [Edge Article]

"Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold." -Yiddish Proverb

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd." -Voltaire

Random

"Trust me on this. If audiences had an unlimited attention span, I'd be in my second term as President." -Al Gore on time and complexity issues. [Time Magazine Article]

"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something." - Robert Heinlein

Selected Books

If you watch a steam engine, you may not know how it works but you can soon get a fairly good idea of its behaviour, and you can predict its future behaviour accurately. Even though you don't understand its workings, you can see it's a pretty simple machine, so you can trust it to behave in a simple way: you have confidence in your predictions based on a short sample of its behaviour.

Most things in life are not like steam engines, but people treat them as if they were. Life in general, and markets in particular, involve large random factors, have complicated stochastic structures, and regularly spring nasty surprises. More at Math Plus

Skiena and Revilla's new book 'Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual' is just the ticket for those interested in a jumpstart to the world of contest programming. With special emphasis on the international ACM collegiate contests, the book's best feature is each chapter's pithy introduction that demystifies a particular scheme or algorithmic approach. The ensemble of these explications coupled with the contest strategy guidelines in the appendix can enable a novice to enhance contest results dramatically in a short time simply by solving the suggested exercises in each chapter. Even contest veterans are likely to be able to find a nugget or two in the explanations and strategies. More at Amazon.com

We live in the computer age, a world increasingly shaped by programmers. Who are they, what motivates them, and what impact will they have on the rest of us? That impact is ever more visible. Everything around us is becoming computerized. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer.

Hackers & Painters examines the world of hackers and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on a fast-moving tour of what he calls "an intellectual Wild West." Why do kids who can't master high school end up as some of the most powerful people in the world? What makes a startup succeed? More at paulgraham.com

Harshit Surana's personal website