Psychological Gang Bang of Hillary is Proof We Need a Woman President →
nownys.org
Really? You’re gonna use “Gang Bang” in this context?
February 2008
21 posts
The 5 stages of learning $stuff
- Denial : “I don’t need to learn $stuff”
- Anger: “This syntax sucks! “
- Bargaining: “If only I knew how to do this using $stuff, I’d be done sooner”
- Depression: “Learning this $stuff really sucks and I don’t think I’ll ever get it”
- Acceptance: “I know $stuff now so I can put that on my CV”
I’m learning SQL.
“ […] the Clintons’ worst nightmare — a very dynamic, talented black man […]”
—BET Founder Johnson Defends His Recent Criticisms of Obama - washingtonpost.com
January 2008
44 posts
Simple [SQL] script to iterate through db objects →
beingmarkcohen.com
I never met a bunch of tables I didn’t want to iterate through
“A talented undergraduate student could write something like this in a few months as a final exercise from SICP. This is what you get when you’re so in love with yourself that you claim you can design a programming language for the next 100 years. Ikarus, Clojure, e7… so many more interesting Lisp-related projects out there. But they don’t get thousands of people talking in one day :(”
—stiffx, on the release of Arc, the vaporware Paul Graham has been talking about for some years
“There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic position than whites at any time in American history, including during Clinton’s presidency. In fact, striking gaps in income, employment, and wealth continue to distinguish black economic reality in the United States.”
—Black Americans’ love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy. - By Melissa Harris-Lacewell - Slate Magazine
“How it is that the editors and reporters of the nation’s leading newspaper - located in the city where salsa was invented from the Afro-Caribbean beats of Puerto Rica and Cuba, where Dominican blacks have replaced American blacks in much of Harlem, where Washington Heights now goes by the name Quisqueya Heights, for the Dominican Republic, where Junot Diaz and his Afro-Dominican novelistic mojo dominated the bestseller list last year – can completely ignore the significant segment of this country’s Latino population that IS BLACK is beyond me.”
—Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on the NY Times’ using “black” and “latino” as if they were mutually exclusive
Georgia names since 1990 →
projects.ajc.com
There are 147 Georgia girls named Chanel, 31 named Cinnamon, 1,435 named Diamond … and just a half dozen boys named Bubba.
“What is driving a lot of programmers towards the ‘art form’ theory is their need to see what they do as ‘creative’. As it involves complex analysis, and building tools to solve specific problems, there is a huge amount of creativity required to find a working solution to a set of problems. But, and this needs to be said, once that design is complete you’ve got to get down to work and actually build the thing. Building is just raw and ugly work, it is never pretty. If you are doing it well, it shouldn’t be creative.”
—Paul W. Homer on the nonsensical notion of software as an art form
“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”
— Farmers’ Almanac, 1978
The tinyurl algorithm
TinyUrl takes long url’s and turns them into short ones. There are at least a dozen of clones sites just like it that essentially provide the same service. I’m surprised there’s not an open-source implementation.
Here’s an algorithm for storing long urls as short ones. We assume that our shortened url will have a maximum of 4 “digits” and pick from an alphabet of 36 characters (26 lower-case letters +10 digits). Steps:
- pick a random number n between 0 and 36**4
- translate this number n into base-36 number m.
- the resulting url will be something like http://url.com/m, where m is at most 4 ‘digits’ long
“[…] for many lower-level problems there’s The Right Answer (IEEE floating point). Occasionally The Wrong Answer gains some market share and you have to live with that (big endian; lost some market share recently). With higher-level things, it’s virtually impossible to define which answer is right.”
—Low-level is easy
“Why is Python so easy to not learn, and what should I copy from it if I want my software to be usable?”
—Teeth marks at the rear end - Proper Fixation
Stop wasting your time on TeX
If you’re using TeX a lot like I did, you might want to read this:
- Everyone has a favorite way to design their favorite symbol. For example, did you know that there is no “official” function for the absolute value of an element? Here’s the worst part: 50 different mathematicians will have 50 different ways to define the absolute value bars. Some will think the bars are too high, some too low, some will find the space between the bars is too small or too big, etc. And guess what? you can do every single one of these things in TeX. This is stupid. Stop it.
- You can modify every little detail of the layout of your page. You can redefine style file attributes. You can. You shouldn’t. You’re wasting your time. This is stupid. Stop it.
- TeX (the programming language) is a hack. A Turing-complete hack, but a hack nonetheless. Keep this at the back of your mind every time you use it. Think about the amount of complexity you add every time you customize table layouts, indentation, etc.
VM's... What's the best? | Lambda the Ultimate →
lambda-the-ultimate.org
What’s the best VM to write a compiler for? Right now, I would bet most of my money on the .NET CLR.
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