Author: LINUS FERNANDES
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Jeremy Grantham: Only price matters
‘There are no ‘new eras’. The behaviorally driven, inefficient market is full of minor distortions that can usually be helped a lot by governmental action, and a few, very much more important major bubbles and busts in which the rules change and the usual governmental moves are of little or much reduced help. Only price…
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Jeremy Grantham: Important events in investing
“Major bubbles and busts are the only very important events in investing. The rest of the time, you show up for work, do a competent job, keep your nose clean, and everything works out okay because nothing much is happening. In a major bubble everything changes; stock picking fades into relative insignificance and asset and…
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Warren Buffett: Imperfect
“Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we’re trying to do. It’s imperfect but that’s what it’s all about.”— Warren Buffett.
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Ray Dalio: Expected value
“Thinking about expected value also applies when the downside is terrible. For example, even if the probability of your having cancer is low, it might pay to get yourself tested when you have a symptom just to make sure.”— Ray Dalio.
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Elon Musk: Odds
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” — Elon Musk.
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Peter Singer: Circle of altruism
“The circle of altruism has broadened from the family and tribe to the nation and race, and we are beginning to recognize that our obligations extend to all human beings. The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are…
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Daniel Dennett: Veil of ignorance
“Everyone gets to vote on a favored design of society, but when you decide which society you would be happy to live in and give your allegiance to, you vote without knowing what your particular role or niche in it will be. You may be a senator or a surgeon or a street-sweeper or a…
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Sun Tzu: Soldier’s best ally
“The natural formation of the country is the soldier’s best ally.” —Sun Tzu.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Technology agnostic design
“Technology agnostic design (TAD) lowers cost, decreases risk, and increases both scalability and availability. If implemented properly, TAD complements a build versus buy decision process. TAD is as much of a cultural initiative as it is a process or principle. The biggest barrier to implementing TAD will likely be the natural biases of the engineers…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Architecture and implementation
“Architecture is a design and should not rely upon any given vendor for implementation. Implementation is a point-in-time description of how the architecture works on that day and at that moment.” —Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Architecture
“The architecture of a platform describes how something works in generic terms with specific requirements, and the implementation describes the specific technologies or vendor components employed. Physical architectures tend to describe the components performing the work, whereas logical architectures tend to define the activities and functions necessary to do the work.” —Michael T Fisher &…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Describing architectures through implementation
“Describing architectures through implementation is akin to constructing a picture of your current or desired soulmate from pictures cut out of US Magazine; the result may paint a good picture of what you have or want, but it in no way describes how it is that the soulmate will meet your current or future needs.”…
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Sun Tzu: Enemy’s purpose
“Success in warfare is gained by carefully accommodating ourselves to the enemy’s purpose.” —Sun Tzu.
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Sun Tzu: Long delays
“Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.”—Sun Tzu.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Cowboy coding
‘Development without any process, without any plans, and without measurements to ensure that the results meet the needs of the business is what we often refer to as cowboy coding. Thecomplete lack of process in cowboy-like environments is a significant barrier to success for any scalability initiatives.Often, we find that teams attempt to claim that…
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Sun Tzu: Art of maneuvering
“He will conquer who has learned the artifice of deviation. Such is the art of maneuvering.” —Sun Tzu.
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Margaret Fuller: Light candles
“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.” —Margaret Fuller.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Human conditioning
“As people perform riskier and riskier activities, their level of risk tolerance goes up. This human conditioning can work for us very well when we need to become adapted to a new environment, but when it comes to controlling risk in a system, this can lead us astray. If a sabre-toothed tiger has moved into…
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Betty Williams: Arms are for hugging
“I like to say that arms are not for killing. They are for hugging.” —Betty Williams.
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Acute versus overall risk
“Acute risk is the amount of risk asso- ciated with a particular action, such as changing a configuration on a server. Overall risk is the amount that is cumulative within the system because of all the actions that have taken place over the previous days, weeks, or possibly even months.” —Michael T Fisher & Martin…
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Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott: Risk
“You could argue that risk demonstrates a Markov property, meaning that the future states are determined by the present state and are independent of past states. We would argue that risk is cumulative to some degree, perhaps with an exponential decay but still additive. A risky event today can result in failures in the future,…
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Sun Tzu: Blended together
“Hence in the wise leader’s plans, considerations of advantage and disadvantage will be blended together.” —Sun Tzu.
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Sun Tzu: Local guides
“We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides.” —Sun Tzu.
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Elizabeth Gilbert: Grief
‘I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with…
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Anne Lamott: Hope begins in the dark
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.” —Anne Lamott.
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Sun Tzu: Seek battle after victory
“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” —Sun Tzu.
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Sun Tzu: Make no mistakes
“He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.” —Sun Tzu.
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Lorraine Hansberry: Exceptionally lonely
“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” —Lorraine Hansberry.
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Jeff Atwood: Optimize for users
“We have to stop optimizing for programmers and start optimizing for users.” —Jeff Atwood.
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Bertrand Russell: Motor cars and human beings
‘No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, “You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.” He attempts to find out what…
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Sun Tzu: Concentrate from the greatest distances
“Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight.”—Sun Tzu.
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Alan Kay: From one context into another
“Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the ‘Aha’. Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re…
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George Goodman: Go with what is
“It has taken me years to unlearn everything I was taught, and I probably haven’t succeeded yet. I cite this only because most of what has been written about the market tells you the way it ought to be, and the successful investors I know do not hold to the way it ought to be,…
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William Henry Seward: Justice and humanity
“As a general truth, communities prosper and flourish, or droop and decline, in just the degree that they practise or neglect to practise the primary duties of justice and humanity.” —William Henry Seward.
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Max Frisch: Hatred
“I feel fairly certain that my hatred harms me more than the people whom I hate.” —-Max Frisch.
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Daniela Lamas: Expectations placed on mothers
“For all the pressure I have felt as a doctor or a writer, there is nothing that compares with the expectations placed on mothers.” —Daniela Lamas.
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Phil Fisher: Background conditions
“To look at the per-share earnings by themselves and give the earnings of four or five years ago any significance is like trying to get useful work from an engine which is unconnected to any device to which that engine’s power is supposed to be applied. Just knowing, by itself, that four or five years…
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Niccolo Machiavelli: Good advice
“A prince who is not wise himself will never take good advice.” —Niccolo Machiavelli.
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Muhammad Ali: Impossible
“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary.…
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Kurt Vonnegut: Rotten lesson
“If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the education of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books— books…
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George Carlin: Special, obscene imprint to Christmas
‘At some point, someone who worked at Rockefeller Center must have said, “Boys, I have a great idea for Christmas. Let’s kill a beautiful tree that’s been alive for seventy-five years and bring it to New York City. We’ll stand it up in Rockefeller Plaza and conceal its natural beauty by hanging shiny, repulsive, man-made…
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Chris Pine: Programming
“Programming isn’t about what you know; it’s about what you can figure out.” —Chris Pine.
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Edsger W Dijkstra: Simply reliable
“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.” —Edsger W. Dijkstra.
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Sophie Scholl: I have to go
“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause… It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death…
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St. Thomas Aquinas: Unjust and unlawful
“To sell a thing for more than its worth, or to buy it for less than its worth, is in itself unjust and unlawful.” — St. Thomas Aquinas.
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Karl Popper: No book can ever be finished
“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.” —Karl Popper.
