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Unicode Dicks
One of the things that has always slightly amused and puzzled me is that unicode lacks a "cock" glyph. I mean, it seems to have characters a...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 369 posts.
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Indirection Is Not Abstraction
The concept of abstraction in software development is frequently misunderstood and confused with indirection. This is partially because of the keywords abstract and interface in statically-typed la...
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My Parents Give Me $28k a Year
Not long ago, my wife, a composer, asked me if I would ever advise a student from a low-income family to pursue a career in the arts. “What do you mean? Of course.” “Really?” “If that’s what they w…
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The Surprising Power of the Long Game
In everything we do, we play the long or the short game. The short game is easy, pleasurable, and offers visible and immediate benefits. But it almost never leads to success. Here's how to play the long game.
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Focus on your own shit (2016)
Check Product Hunt. Ahh, crap. Someone just launched an app similar to my product (and we’re still in beta).
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Foundations of ML and AI: Book recommendations
Here's what I recommend to programmers if they want to understand machine learning. Six fantastic books that you can work with in your spare time to build yo...
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Better Genderless Pronouns in English
Writing or speaking English, we always face a conundrum when we need a pronoun to refer to a person without specifying gender. Previously we needed a way to cover both male and female; nowadays some people state that they don't want to be considered either of those, and I believe in respecting their wishes.
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Myth of the Brown Recluse
Myth of the Brown Recluse: Fact, Fear, and Loathing Rick Vetter Department of Entomology, University of California, Riverside, CA
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So You Want to Open a Small Press Bookstore/Artist-Run Space? A Cautionary Tale
Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.
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The Chamber of Guf
[I briefly had a different piece up tonight discussing a conference, but the organizers asked me to hold off on writing about it until they’ve put up their own synopsis. It will be back up ev…
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Asterix in Translation: The Genius of Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge
As promised in a previous blog entry, what follows is a discussion of the translation of some of my favourite Asterix gags. The translators’ modus operandi was to include as many jokes in the Engli…
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Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
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Do We Worship Complexity?
Complexity is the most important challenge in software development. So it is important to always strive to eliminate complexity. But sometimes we worship complexity - and that can make complexity problems unsolvable.
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Dear Spotify, please let me unlink my Facebook account
Please let me unlink my Facebook account
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The Big List of RPG Plots
What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots , in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds o...
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Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career
This post is not meant to be prescriptive. It’s also not intended to be another “Quitting Google to pursue my passion for X” article because, well, I haven’t been able to pass the interview there yet. This is a telling of my story that I hope will inspire those who are thinking about quitting to take the leap.
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Today Is My Wife’s First Birthday Since She Died
Some advice about love & death followed by a meandering eulogy.
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A Year in Clojure
A lot has changed since my last post nearly a year ago. I want to write about my experience coming from a ML-family language to a Lisp. It’s not very informa...
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On the Law of Diminishing Specialization
On Productive Technology and its Discontents Recently, I’ve been dipping in and out of Edward Tenner’s provocative 1996 book, When Things Bites Back. In following ... Read more
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Flocking
Have you ever watched a school of fish, a flock of birds, or even a crowd of people and watched how they move?
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The Best Article Ever Written About Bragging
After feeling belittled, I journey into the heart of bragging and discover 17 modes of showing off.