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The differences between tinkering and research (2016)
Some of us have academic degrees and fancy university jobs, and publish peer-reviewed papers in prestigious journals. Let's call these peopl...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,940 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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I've just learned Rust and I think I'm in love
I’ve decided to learn some Rust recently while working on the Stanford’s experimental course on operating systems. R...
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Au Revoir
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
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Announcing the Second Edition of “Refactoring”
I'm finishing a new edition of my Refactoring book. Here's details and periodic memos about my work.
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Book Review: Twelve Rules for Life
I. I got Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or…
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Making Slides
I was asked to give a short talk in my Departmental Proseminar yesterday on the topic of giving presentations, and specifically about making slides effective. There is more than one way to give a good talk, and there is more than one way to make “good slides” or—better—make good use of slides and other material you…
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The Bitter Truth of Learning: It’s Tough, Unpleasant, and Often Pointless
Sometimes an insignificant interaction, or an excerpt from a book, is capable of provoking a life-changing insight. It might be an obvious lesson, but it feels epiphanic because it fits differently into my understanding of things. For instance…
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Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now
It’s not every day that I check my office mailbox and, amid the junk brochures, find 500 pages on the biggest questions facing civilization—all of them, basically—by possibly the …
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The Declining Value of a CS Master's Degree (2013)
I don’t know if it helps, but Illinois CS distinguishes the two kinds of programs with two different degrees: MS in CS for the research program, and MCS for the coursework program. Most of the MS students receive funding andtuition waivers, while I’m not sure if the MCS students are even eligible for support.
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The Collector’s Fallacy
There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so…
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The Role of Luck in Life Is Still Misunderstood
The paper Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, and A. Rapisarda, has been receiving a lot of positive reception lately.
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Kottke.org is 20 years old today
kottke.org is 20 years old today. Holy shit! On March 14, 1998, I launched a new episode of 0sil8 called “Notes”. 0sil8 was a previous website of mine, started
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Touched (2015)
opera , paintweb , gsoc2009 , linux , mozilla , moodle , firefox , canvas , ubuntu , tutorials .
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Pixar's Rules of Storytelling (2013)
Pixar's Rules of Storytelling were originally tweeted by Emma Coats, a Pixar Story Artist. Rule 1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
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Frequent versus infrequent developers, in languages and so on
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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A Career Cold Start Algorithm
Starting a new job can be stressful so I've developed an algorithm that has helped me get up to speed quickly.
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Some terrible personal news
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with …
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Get specific (2008)
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.
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A Year Away from Mac OS
This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS and switch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail some further adventures into Mac OS alternatives.