If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like.

I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!

See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.

If you give a cracker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is carve his initials in it. Fortunately, most crackers get over that once they're through puberty.

Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla.

C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.