lifefeed

Tucked away in the middle of any urban planning article is a reference to Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It's a great book that puts into words why certain neighborhoods cities feel alive and fit for humans. From mixed-use buildings to small blocks to sidewalks to parks to landmarks.

I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like.

You worked at the Schwartz PR firm?

Future.com was more PR than news.

It reminds me of Paul Graham's old essay on PR firms, which unintentionally(?) contained the best advertisement for the NYT I've ever read.

> At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I read through some of this author's other articles, and he has a really inaccurate view of technology workers. We're not VC-backed digital nomads spending our days eating artisanal hot dogs. Most of us are just nine-to-five workers with families and hobbies, and most of use work on relatively boring parts of code that keep the wheels turning. (Only a specialized few get excited about automating mass data migrations. I love it, but it doesn't make for interesting TikToks.)

This reminds me a lot of "I Am Sitting in a Room", a piece of process music that slowly goes from understandable, to vaguely inhuman, to alien, to something else. By the end if feels like, even though you heard every step along the way, you're listening to something that you were never meant to understand.

The software industry isn't going to disappear overnight. It didn't disappear in 2001 or in 2008, despite all the concerned emails I read from my relatives.

That said it's always a good idea in general to live below your means, and to be specific, not get the biggest mortgage your lender thinks you can afford.

There was another story like this on Reddit, that is more likely to have actually happened.

"I have become a forgotten employee for a few months at my job. I want to start a new job and wondering legal ramifications."

https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/xzq4...

Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl...

It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious.

Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.

Vol 1 is just an intro to math and his language, you don't really need it, but it's kinda fun.

I read some of Vol 2, Seminumerical Algorithms, to hone my instincts on how random numbers work in practice. I have referred to it on occasion when people say things like, "if we seed the random number generator, take the random number, then feed that into the seed, the result would be more random."

I read most of Vol 3, Sorting and Searching, when applying for jobs. It was more interesting than leetcode grinding. I don't know if it was more useful, but it was better for my sanity.

If you mute "NFT" and various crypto keywords you won't see 99% of the spam. It's a not a scalable solution, but it works well for me.

Small bash functions that're useful for silly-ego-reasons.

    ## coding analysis
    function lines_coded {
        perl -ne'print unless /^\s*$/ || /^\s*(?:#|\/\*|\*)/' $* | wl
    }
    function lines_commented {
        perl -ne'print if /^\s*(?:#|\/\*|\*)/' $* | wl
    }

And wl is just a small alias (because I used it all the time):

    wl='wc -l'

I was still living in Boston in 2015, and I happy to see my city put a stop to that. We still have collective PTSD from the Big Dig, and we can identify a "over-promises and under-delivers" from a mile away.

The implication with these types of articles is always "any tests are better than no tests, but here's how to do better tests."

The rare case of combining my love of APIs and my love of comic books.

Very nice! Are you using the hacker news api?

The "Backed by Google" is an under-appreciated social piece of the puzzle. It's not just that Go has institutional backing, it's that googlers produce a lot of startups, and they bring their favorite things with them, and quite often one of those things is Go.

Are you getting the same number of comments for better landing pages, but the comments are getting more detailed and nit-picky?

There's a list of his papers with little notes by him on every one at https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html . His casual notes are themselves an absolute education.

My favorite is on "Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", where he applies the lessons of special relativity to understand computers, and he says:

> Jim Gray once told me that he had heard two different opinions of this paper: that it's trivial and that it's brilliant. I can't argue with the former, and I am disinclined to argue with the latter.

I want the inverse of this tool to audit it. I'll give it a specific account, and it identifies it as fake or not. Let me run some spot checks and accounts I know (and myself), and I'll find out if I can trust their numbers.

Some of the reactions against her were unreal. People were wishing for her children to be kidnapped to teach her a lesson.

And 14 years later America is now watching "Old Enough!" on Netflix.

This story always reminds me of the Nth Country Experiment, from 1964, where the United States wondered how long it would take a country to design a nuclear weapon, starting from no particular expertise or classified access. One answer, they learned, was three new physics PhDs and two and half years. I don't know if that's when the US started focusing on enriched uranium, but that is really the only limiting factor in the whole deal.

Just one? Metro-west Boston is filled with angry turkeys.

I draw boxes and arrows. Sometimes the boxes are rounded.

There was a study on this, UML in practice by Marian Petre. http://oro.open.ac.uk/35805/8/UML%20in%20practice%208.pdf where she interviewed 50 developers across 50 companies. Here's what she found.

- 50 interviews.

- 35 people don't use it.

- 11 use it selectively, just whatever is useful.

- 3 use it just once in a project, to generate code.

- 1 uses it to comply with customer or management requirements.

- 0 use it fully.

Ada.

Larry Wall said once that he added sigils in Perl so he could freely add features to the language without conflicting with other's peoples variable names. It's a language design choice that makes sense for Perl's maximalism approach to features.

Perl is very well thought out, in a way that I don't think gets enough credit. For example, the three loop controls (next, last, redo) are four letters long, which makes remembering them easier. In a world where I sometimes have to jump between languages I haven't used in a while, and I'm always forgetting what arbitrary word choice this particular language used for a feature, it's nice to come back to Perl and have a language where the grammar is a little bit less arbitrary.

I don't know what your general knowledge of economics entails, so this might be obvious, but the back half of Principles of Economics by N. Gregory Mankiw covers how a lot of those pieces are interrelated.

(Bonus tip: buy an international edition on eBay. It's the same content.)

I decided to learn and use Go for my recent job hunt, and this site was just the best. I used the structure of the code in the "build an application" section in every take home coding challenge I wrote.

Much happier game than the time I destroyed the universe with paperclip manufacturing.

Reminds me of the time some dev[0] accidentally recreated the traveling salesman problem, created unit test with 5 items in it, said "looks good", and pushed it.

[0] - me