“ When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people’s identities. [1] Because the point at which this happens depends on the people rather than the topic, it’s a mistake to conclude that because a question tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer.
Keep Your Identity Small
Quotable
“ The text segment also maps your binary file in memory, but writes to this area earn your program a Segmentation Fault. This helps prevent pointer bugs, though not as effectively as avoiding C in the first place
Anatomy of a Program in Memory : Gustavo Duarte
The Third Bit » Unwritten
Do want.
“ Grandparents are odd things, cursed to die at almost the exact moment they become anything beyond the kind face that gives you cookies or kisses boo-boos. They have the funny tendency to pass away just as the grandchildren are finally old enough to meet them on their own terms and understand that there was a person that existed before they became simply grandma and grandpa, that indeed, beneath those subjectively all-important titles, there was a very different and very important name. Later, the child realizes that these uncomplicated caregivers actually had jobs and things, maybe even made mistakes occasionally (and maybe even made a mistake that you call Dad!). But by the time you’re old enough to appreciate them as something beyond what they are to you, they die. It’s a dirty trick that life plays. I might hope that our increasing lifespans would create more overlap between grandparents and mature, perceptive grandchildren actually old enough to really learn something, but it seems like we’re compensating for our longer lives by having children ever later, so the essential chronological curse of the grandparent seems unlikely to change much.
The Musty Man - Words Between The Lines Of Age
“ That said, I do think that the greatest potential benefit of DSLs comes when business people participate directly in the writing of the DSL code. The sweet spot, however is in making DSLs business-readable rather than business-writeable.
MF Bliki: BusinessReadableDSL
“ WORK is feeling more and more like a Skinner box.
Preoccupations - In Hard Times, Fear Can Impair Decision-Making - NYTimes.com
“ publish a public Web diary of what you do every day, thus discouraging you from wasting time because you’ll be ashamed to admit that all you accomplished yesterday was a 15-minute oil change and a trip to Target
Early Retirement
“ Computer programming is an activity that is also a culture. The unfortunate fact is that it is not a culture that values mental or physical health very much.
How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
“ So, when the simple stuff fails, what do most people do? Think up a bunch of features and train a classifier.
Geeking with Greg: Finding task boundaries in search logs
“ One of its characteristics was that “reasoning by analogy” was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today.
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)
