mbrock

32 ms·

1. 331.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   Petting cats, cuddling, walking, biking, cooking, baking, carpenting, watching interesting videos and good films, reading magazines like the London Review of Books, reading beautiful books, drinking good beer, coding and refactoring and doc
2. 332.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   One thing is to learn not to fear jargon. It's just a bunch of made up words, and you can quite easily learn them, and then you will sound just as clever and sophisticated as those people you saw in discussions. Like, you might be gett
3. 333.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   Maybe you could actually use Erlang as your process manager?
4. 334.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   Maybe you have to try underengineering for a while, in order to find the middle path.
5. 335.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   I work between 5 and 8 hours, four days a week, from my home office, as a remote contractor with flexible hours. Typically I do Pomodoro and spend the breaks having tea, talking with my partner, etc. My plan is to take several months off ea
6. 336.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   Ironically I started that one but never managed to finish it. I still got something out of it though, so I suppose that's one way to read a book. The basic advice I took from it is to treat a book like it's an artifact that you&#x
7. 337.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   There are also some words that are thoroughly embedded in your culture and yet you still don't really see what they're referencing, which can be quite confusing. For me it's "homesickness." People might ask me if I&
8. 338.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   I wonder if it’s okay for an interviewee to ask something like “What’s the worst thing about this company?”
9. 339.▲
   by mbrock 8y ago

   Also directory structures are content-addressed, so if a commit changes nothing in a given directory, the commit data won't duplicate the listing of that directory.
10. 340.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    I coded a modular software synthesizer as my final year project in high school, without any previous knowledge of digital signal processing. C++ with a simple GTK+ user interface, sound output via JACK, and MIDI input via ALSA. The difficul
11. 341.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Netflix's selection of films is also so atrocious as to be dangerous for the Bildung of our youth.
12. 342.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    At least there you can see how convoluted the systems really are, at a glance...
13. 343.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Christopher Alexander (the architect) wrote a paper called A City Is Not A Tree. I don't know of any paper called A Program Is Not A Tree , but one could be written. Programs are fundamentally messy tangles of references, as far as
14. 344.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Some kinds of API endpoints and webhooks are exactly what I love CGI for—when what I want to do is exactly “bind an HTTP endpoint to a shell command.”
15. 345.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Yes! Every mention of CGI also gets a sneer and a reminder of how poorly it scales, but nothing I do requires scale in that sense. "In production" doesn't always mean "hundreds of requests per second." Every road do
16. 346.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Make sure to also check out Michael Cera’s video “Impossible is the Opposite of Possible”: https://youtu.be/nAV0sxwx9rY
17. 347.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Thorough automatic testing is valued by agile practitioners because it lets them move faster even thought it might initially seem like more testing means more work means slower iterations. I think a similar effect is possible when you u
18. 348.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    There’s a huge misunderstanding that pops up in every discussion about “formal methods.” These methods are not perfect silver bullets to guarantee bug-free software forever. They are supposed to be useful engineering tools that help you thi
19. 349.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Inconsolata doesn’t even have italics!
20. 350.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Yeah... I think it’s hard. Instant access to global data just isn’t cozy, somehow. Coziness usually involves seclusion of some sort. (Gil Fronsdal talked nicely about this in the second part of his currently ongoing course on concentration
21. 351.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Try going on a "trip" away from the internet, while staying at home. I mean turning it off for a while, and making a little kind of ceremony about it. It's almost like meditation. In fact I think temporary internet deprivatio
22. 352.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Hey, that reminds me about Keybase. It's not talked about that much anymore, as far as I can see, but it's nice how it lets you verify your identity across different sites.
23. 353.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    I like a lot of things that are hard to use and only used by a handful of weirdos.
24. 354.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    Alright, consider it useless then. I kind of like it.
25. 355.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    You can send and receive dollar-denominated tokens through a p2p network using open source command-line tools without a bank account.
26. 356.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    On the other hand some weirdos try to claim that Python is “a Lisp”...
27. 357.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    I know my name just like I make a cup of tea. It's not you who makes my cup of tea, right, so who is it? Well, me—the referent of my name, this person right here. That's just part of how our language works. It doesn't seem to
28. 358.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    That is indeed a good way to gain insight into consequences, but still you will have to make ambiguous decisions when formulating the measure of good healthcare—e.g., do you consider equality for rich and poor?—and when judging tradeoffs li
29. 359.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    And now Racket, which used to be a Scheme, doesn't call itself a Scheme anymore. In fact it describes itself on its web site as "The best of Scheme and Lisp."
30. 360.▲
    by mbrock 8y ago

    I sometimes like to say that the Nix language is like JSON with functions and multiline interpolated strings, both of which happen to be extremely useful for system configuration and package definition. In fact packages in Nix are functio