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The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
Arial versus Helvetica
Here’s a nifty little graphic showing the difference between Arial and Helvetica. It seems to have been created by Raynor. (via ignant)
If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
A man accused of a crime is brought into a police interrogation room and sits down at an empty table. There’s no polygraph equipment in sight, and the typical two-cop questioning team isn’t in the…
Tim Ferris: Beginner's Guide to Lucid Dreaming
From 1994-1995 I had the great pleasure of training with wrestling legend John Smith, 2-time gold medalist and 4-time world champion (domestic freestyle record of 80-0; international freestyle record of 100-5).
The Simple Truth
“I remember this paper I wrote on existentialism. My teacher gave it back with an F. She’d underlined true and truth wherever it appeared in the essay, probably about twenty times, with a question mark beside each. She wanted to know what I meant by truth.”
The New Science of Causation
It seems like each new day brings another one of those headlines: regular sleep “linked to” life expectancy, playing video games “associated with” surgical prowess, bullies “at risk” of becoming criminals, and “does breastfeeding reduce a baby’s blood pressure?” (the old rhetorical question gambit). Sometimes the…
I had my head examined...
An interactive MRI brain scan of Bill Moorier's head.
Everyone must have a CD, even if free
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
The Founder Visa Ignores Immigration Reality
My fearless readers are, no doubt, already familiar with the fact that I'm an American born and bred, but transplanted here to blighty to fa...
Writing a compiler in Python using Lex, Yacc and LLVM
I found a good post on how to build your own toy compiler using Flex, Bison and LLVM. I saw one disadvantage right in the beginning: you had to use C++. If I w…
Erlang, Yaws, and the deadly Tornado
Good things sometimes happen to the open source community. Since Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, a bunch of technologies were released to the wild, including, most notably, a Tornado web server written in Python. The Tornado is touted as a a scalable, non-blocking web server and web…
Climbing the wrong hill
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Writing Your Own Toy Compiler Using Flex, Bison and LLVM
Update (March 19 2010): this article was updated for LLVM 2.6 thanks to a great patch by John Harrison. He rocks! I’ve always been interested in compilers and languages, but interest only gets you so far. A lot of the concepts of compiler design can easily go way over most programmers’ heads, even the intelligent…