Practicing Programming Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Back in October I wrote an essay in which I compared programming to other professions. In it, I made the unsubstantiated claim that programming is unusual, in that most programmers don't practice their craft -- at least, not in any disciplined
Abstract. The traditional abstraction barriers between compiler, build system and package manager are increasingly ill-suited for IDEs, parallel build systems, and modern source code organization. Recent compilers like go and rustc are equipped with a fully-fledged build systems; semantic build systems like Bazel and…
I recently found myself reading a few of Gregor Hohpe's blog posts and came across Design Patterns: More Than Meets The Eye . In it, Hohpe repeats a message that needs to be repeated every so often even now, twenty years after the publication of the GoF book: software patterns are fundamentally about human…
Metal bands aren't afraid to tackle serious topics in their lyrics. Here, we look at metal songs that deal with concepts in theoretical physics and cosmology.
NOTE: This article is old, this hack is no longer necessary, as Debian includes dehydrated that makes all the work. Free SSL certificates for everyone! the https://letsencrypt.org/ initiative backed by Akamai, Cisco, Mozilla and EFF, is going to offer free certificates. On this post I am going to explain how I have…
This post is now a part of the official rust book In my previous post I talked a bit about why the RWlock pattern is important for accessing data, …
While attempting to learn Javascript and D3.js a couple months ago, I wrote a little library for displaying area proportional venn diagrams .
Although we were very happy with the win at Revision, we were not entirely happy with 8088 MPH as a whole. Because of the time pressure, there were some things we could not finish as well as we wan…
Thanks to Ken Hironaka for kindly taking a lot of time to read and fix countless errors in this blog post!
On one of my visits to the Computer History Museum – and by the way this is an absolute must-visit place if you are ever in the San Francisco bay area – I saw an early Google server rack circa 1999 in the exhibits. Not too fancy, right? Maybe even… a
This is part two of a a two-part post—the first part is here. THE NEED FOR REGULATION Although there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of machine intelligence recently, there...
If you want to order a book (or something else), don't buy it from Amazon. Amazon harms its customers, as well as workers, the national treasury, and many others that it affects.
The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone , ever, because there is a chance that a “women in tech” advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp.
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
Update : On Sep. 28, 2015, Zed Shaw wrote a rebuttal to this post. You can find the details here .
Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .
If you've listened to the anti-Microsoft crowd, you've probably heard this phrase. A web search returns a wide range of attributions, everything from an alleged battle cry to just short of an official company motto. The rumor being that Microsoft would intentionally break competitors' applications with each release of…
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
This post is to announce the start of a new mathematics journal, to be called Discrete Analysis. While in most respects it will be just like any other journal, it will be unusual in one important w…
With the advent and success of the web, the de facto way of delivering user interfaces has shifted from thick-client applications to interfaces delivered via the web, a trend that has also enabled the growth of SAAS-based solutions in general. The benefits of delivering a user interface over the web were huge …
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
