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US Rail Construction Costs
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…
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JavaScript’s internal character encoding: UCS-2 or UTF-16?
Does JavaScript use UCS-2 or UTF-16 encoding? Since I couldn’t find a definitive answer to this question anywhere, I decided to look into it. The answer depends on what you’re referring to: the JavaScript engine, or JavaScript at the language level.
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Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
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PEP 393 – Flexible String Representation
The Unicode string type is changed to support multiple internal representations, depending on the character with the largest Unicode ordinal (1, 2, or 4 bytes). This will allow a space-efficient representation in common cases, but give access to full UC...
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The 4% Rule: The Easy Answer to “How Much Do I Need for Retirement?”
In the world of early retirees, we have a concept that goes by names like “The 4% rule”, or “The 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate”, or simply “The SWR.” As with all thing…
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Old School Color Cycling with HTML5
Anyone remember Color cycling from the 90s? This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time,...
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Pragmatic Unicode
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
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Community and Diversity
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
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A case against syntax highlighting
Do you rely on syntax highlighting when developing software? If so, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. In this post, I will argue that syntax highlighting, while aesthetically seductive, moves focus from content to form, and discourages those who look at the code from trying to understand it.
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Computed goto for efficient dispatch tables
Recently, while idly browsing through the source code of Python, I came upon an interesting comment in the bytecode VM implementation ( Python/ceval.c ) about using the computed gotos extension of GCC [1] . Driven by curiosity, I decided to code a simple example to evaluate the difference between using a computed goto…
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The Backfire Effect
The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking. The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challeng…
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Component · Decoupling Patterns
Allow a single entity to span multiple domains without coupling the domains to each other.
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New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage
Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about…