March 2012
1 post
“We need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or...”
– Yukihiro Matsumoto, inventor of the Ruby programming language, enemy of robot collaborators.
February 2012
1 post
October 2011
3 posts
“For all the talk of “bubbles” and crazy valuations, I think most overlook...”
– TechCrunch writer turned venture capitalist MG Siegler, using in 2011 a bubble rationalization that would have sounded just as accurate in 1999, when he was in high school, or in 1845, when 30 little TechCrunches were published on paper.
“By 1845 a full railway mania was raging. By the summer new schemes were being...”
– W. Brian Arthur comparing the first dot com collapse to the railway mania of the 19th century, in a paper I fact checked for the March 2002 edition of Business 2.0. At one point in 1845, some 30 different railway investment publications were in circulation. Sound familiar?
August 2011
4 posts
“[Page view statistics] are, in particular, helpful as a counterweight to the...”
– Paul Krugman weighs in on the benefits of being at least slightly obsessed with pageviews. Now someone needs to ask the economist to turn his Nobel prize winning mind on pageview bonuses. (CoughFelixCough)
July 2011
3 posts
“He was a Nobel Laureate in economics, and generally is portrayed by his...”
– Wikipedia entry on Josiah Barlet. Oh, sorry, whoops, wrong link.
Death To McDonald's Programming Books
Gruber:
Hot off the O’Reilly presses: Matt Neuburg’s 834-page iOS programming tome.
Oh boy: An obese time suck whose reference section will probably be obsolete by the time FedEx drops it off on my doorstep.
Is it still 1991? Do we still need every class and function call documented because gopher is slow on our 1200 baud modems? Are our lives less busy than they were then? Has the number of...
'San Francisco is becoming Silicon Valley' -- but...
There are many reasons the payroll tax break San Francisco extended to Twitter was horrid public policy; here’s just one: San Francisco is a high cost, high service city in the mold of New York.
It’s a premium product, albeit not as premium as Gotham — the transit and nightlife are inferior, for example, and it’s not dense enough. But then SF’s payroll tax rate is...
April 2011
5 posts
The most liberal city in America is now caving to... →
WatchGawker.com, where the author is employed as a staff writer, declined to publish this story.
March 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
'I should have a right to use it for evil!'
From a 2009 lecture by Douglas Crockford describing the genesis of JSON comes this anecdote involving Crockford’s “no evil” licensing scheme (for related software). Someone mentioned the tale this morning in a book interview; I first saw it months ago but still get a kick out of it. I think the “minions” bit is what really seals it.
November 2010
1 post
6 tags
The lost Thanksgiving punch of San Francisco
Anne and I are hosting Thanksgiving for some family and friends this year, and today I went rummaging around for punch ideas. My favorite festive tipple was, of course, the one tantalizingly out of reach: In his great 2007 column on the dearth of Thanksgiving cocktails, in which he mines history for recipe cues, Eric Felten alludes to a candidate he’d commissioned from Greg Lindgren of the...
August 2010
4 posts
Steal this Twitter feature, already
An underappreciated reason for Twitter’s success is that the service made it so easy to subscribe to things. Uniform button. One click and you’re done. Remember how hard it was before Twitter, with RSS readers? Find feeds, pick feed, view feed, send feed to reader, import feed, pick a folder — click click clickity click KILL ME ALREADY I GIVE UP.
But Twitter is kind of lame...
Why writing is more draining than programming
I’ve been on hiatus from my programming sideline and giving all spare time to my long-form writing sideline. Tonight I was wondering why editing lots of writing (say an essay or book chapter) is so much more emotionally draining for me than editing lots of code.
It’s because editing prose involves so much time judging your work, I decided.
In programming, you typically judge your...
June 2010
1 post
A cóctel for the Cup
So for my birthday my wife gave me, among other delightful things, Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking, a fitting addition to the other titles on my cocktail bookshelf, Absinthe’s Art of the Bar and Eric Felten’s How’s Your Drink? (HI ERIC!!).
Anyway, tonight I was plowing through the second chapter, “Actual Drinks,” and, amid many weird cocktails built around...
May 2010
1 post
My Steve Jobs argument, for those coming from... →
April 2010
2 posts
Oh, so we're too good to be 'gossips' now?
fek:
I wouldn’t categorize them as “gossip bloggers.” I don’t think they’d categorize themselves like that.
Rovzar:
By putting the “gossip” label on them… the paper is revealing how it actually feels about these blogs: that they’re actually just fluff.
Fischer
He uses the phrase “gossip blog” over and over, as if to...
March 2010
1 post
February 2010
0 posts
“HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our...”
– Some of Mark Pilgrim’s insights into the future of book publishing, as woven into this article about his workstation setup. (Related.)
December 2009
2 posts
“Tate, a San Diego resident, also brings an acting background to the job, which...”
– From the Los Angeles Times’ rave 1990 review of my mom’s stand-up comedy act (page 1, page 2). Yay mom!
C as a death monster (and Ruby as a companion...
Fran Allen: I kind of stopped when C came out. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one problem after another...
Peter Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?
Fran Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. In fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are they key problems to solve...
Fran Allen: By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities...
Peter Seibel: Surely there are still courses on building a compiler?
Fran Allen: Not in lots of schools. It's shocking, there are still conferences going on, and people doing good algorithms, good work, but the payoff for that is, in my opinion, quite minimal. Because languages like C totally overspecify the solution of problems. Those kinds of languages are what is destroying computer science as a study.
Peter Seibel: But most newer languages these days are higher-level than C. Things like Java and C# and Python and Ruby.
Fran Allen: But they still overspecify. The core thing is that is specifies the location of data. If you look at these other languages, they stayed away from specifying the location of data and how to move it, where to put it in the machine. It was ultimately about its value at any point.
Peter Seibel: But very few languages other than C and C++ have raw pointers anymore. Java has garbage collection and the data moves around. Would you say that's overspecified?
Fran Allen: Yes. I believe there's an opportunity to do what we have done with computation in the optimization world with data. We don't manage data very well. We don't have good ways of managing data automatically -- establishing locality of data that's going to be used together.
Fran Allen: There are lots of threads of research now which are very exciting. But I think what's missing is the bigger, bolder concepts.... We need to start trying to break the boundaries of, "This'll be done here and that''ll be done there."
From the excellent Coders at Work: http://www.codersatwork.com/
More on Fran Allen: http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html
October 2009
1 post
Angel, c. 1995-2009
We lost our fussy, demanding, jealous, absurdly cute and frighteningly affectionate cat Angel on Thursday. A dog killed her before my eyes. She was about 14 years old, and irreplacable.
Of our three indoor cats, Angel was the first to be adopted, and by all indications considered our other two felines to be usurpers. She’d hiss at them merely for walking by.
Her hostility was no surprise:...
August 2009
1 post
June 2009
3 posts
Japan trip pictures (Dec. 2003)
We’ve been dying to return to Japan; looking through old pictures I realized these weren’t on Flickr yet, so here, EAGER READER: pictures of my trip to Japan with Anne nearly six years ago.
Noteworthy things about Japan I remembered from these pictures:
In Kyoto, consider indulging the local passion for “WHITE LOVER.”
Better cheese in the subway convenience stores than...
Would Carla Bruni’s music be even more...
May 2009
2 posts
“Fearing competition from radio, newspaper editors in April 1933 had coerced the...”
– Neal Gabler in Winchell: gossip, power and the culture of celebrity, illustrating how AP has been waging a war against the future for more than 75 years now.
My last night shift is over.
I’ll miss the drunken email tips, clipping the late shows, election nights, White House news conferences, writing three-hour posts, being a generalist, having no immediate editor, gossip roundups, IM chats with Blakeley and once and present Valleywags and waking up to a day’s worth of feedback in my inbox. Among other things. But maybe what I’ll miss the most is the taste of my...
April 2009
1 post
March 2009
2 posts
bulicks:
Mia Doi Todd, My Room Is White (Flying...
February 2009
9 posts
In September I came to New York for a week, for...
“So from now on, [Michael Phelps] spends all his free time hanging around in...”
– David Letterman. (File as “Easy one-liners I didn’t think of, part 1781.”)
Tumblr: It's like Blogger, but with better... →
