Update: (November 2015) In the almost seven years since writing this, there has been an explosion of great tools for automatic differentiation and a corresponding upsurge in its use. Thus, happily,…
This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s / early 90s inspired an IBM researcher to name the company's new mobile computer the ThinkPad. To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have. At least that was the case until I went full-time Apple and the Chinese
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Yesterday, I was updating my local checkout of WebKit and I noticed a few tests for "WebGL" scroll by (view commit). Apparently, a big WebGL…
The key ingredient I see in successful apps, Mac or web — and, really, in creative commercial endeavors of any kind — is that the creators are building something they themselves love.
Heroku has focused since day one on making the end-to-end application experience as easy as possible. From our git focused workflow to the automated...
In November 2001 I gave an invited talk at the inaugural Lightweight Languages conference that has since become somewhat notorious (in netspace, it is said to be “ kickassing genial ”).
In your career as a geek, there's a list of essential career intangibles. These are the things you need to do in order to be successful, which are also maddenin
After holding off for nearly two years, I’m posting this because too many people have asked for it. The lasses should read it, too, as the same principles can be applied to bodyfat loss. I weighed 152 lbs. for four years of high school, and after training in tango in Buenos Aires in 2005, that […]
January 10, 2009 @ 1:19 am · Filed by David Beaver under Peeving , Prescriptivist poppycock
[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…
This article outlines the responsibilities of users, including employees, students, and faculty, who create and maintain personal webpages to ensure that the content is appropriate, accurate, and accessible to all users.
“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.”
Towards the tail end of PubCon, I noticed a spate of articles talking about subdomains and subdirectories in Google, and I wanted to talk more about this subject in case I was unclear. Historically…
A frequently emphasized advantage of XML is the availability of plenty tools to analyse, transform and selectively extract data out of XML documents. XPath is one of these powerful tools.
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks—including death itself—at the university’s 114th Commencement on Sunday in…
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product . Its power is matched only by the amount of confusi...
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
At Fog Creek Software, the way we make sure that people are paid fairly and rewarded for excellent work is based on a professional ladder. Historically, our ladder is based on Microsoft’s pro…
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…
"Dear Jane, I do not have any money so I am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead."
I recently posted an entry in my Python History blog on the origins of Python's functional features . A side remark about not supporting ta...
