pjmorris

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by pjmorris 4y ago
Danny Hillis makes a similar analogy in 'The Pattern on the Stone', where he reasons that if someone 200-300 years ago where told what he did for work he'd be burned as a witch.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
There is a great chapter on the F1's engineering and development in 'Apollo: Race To The Moon', Murray and Cox. The whole book focuses on the engineering and management challenges involved in putting a man on the moon and ret
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by pjmorris 4y ago
'Becoming A Technical Leader', Gerald Weinberg. Jerry, working for IBM, designed the telemetry system NASA used to track early manned space flights and then spent a career helping organizations, teams, and people achieve their goa
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by pjmorris 4y ago
I don't disagree that there is a distribution problem. And I firmly adhere to Gerald Weinberg's advice on giving advice on technical problems: "No matter what it looks like, it's a people problem." [0] That said, my
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by pjmorris 4y ago
> Poverty, war, and starvation are all political and/or cultural problems, not technical problems. I beg to differ. Currency, weaponry, and agriculture are all technologies.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Big fan and that might be one of the best introductions to Weinberg for the curious and/or skeptical.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
My three favorites from Gerald Weinberg: 1. 'The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully' I was put off for a decade by the click-bait title but this is a profound little book that helped me get pe
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Joke: "I would tell you a UDP joke but you might not get it." Of course, I might be spoiling the point someone else is making by not posting the joke.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Thank you!
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by pjmorris 4y ago
> "Conflict is essential to human life..." This is great. Can you give a citation?
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by pjmorris 4y ago
It's an understatement to call HN a daily read for me. Does anyone else check the comments before following the link? The perspectives shared here are a valuable part of my information diet. Thank you and Happy Thanksgiving!
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Arlo Guthrie's song is an important part of my Thanksgiving day tradition.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
To your point, we also have 'The C Programming Language', K&R, and 'The Unix Programming Environment', K&Pike.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
What you describe is how I tend to comment. At the opposite end of the spectrum we have Knuth's 'literate programming', exemplified in Tex, which has as its goal 'making programs more robust, more portable, more easily m
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Thank you for the corrections, I learned something.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
> The why should be clear from the domain that you're working within Sometimes the 'why' is purely domain knowledge. Sometimes the 'why' is about narrowing down options available in the domain. Sometimes the &#x2
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by pjmorris 4y ago
MMM deserves all the attention it gets, but there's more! 1. I've got to track down the source of the quote (it may be the linked video), but Brooks has said that the most important architectural decision he made was to have an ei
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by pjmorris 4y ago
I read that section of MMM during a down time in my early career where I was doubting my choice of programming as a career because of my limitations. It buoyed my spirits enough that I decided to stick with it and I am glad I did. I owe a g
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by pjmorris 4y ago
> The first thing I'd do is find a forum, group, discord, whatever of people who dabble and deal in this kind of thing. Starting with YouTube channels and follow the strings. Said groups almost always have a "deals/trade&#
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Outside of family and public school, I began my education in libraries, second-hand bookstores, and thrift shops. Thank you for calling our collective attention to these resources.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
My Pixel 3a also scans QR codes.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Big fan of Ole Time. And it's the exception to my rule that any place called 'Ole Time' probably isn't. The pulled-pork sandwich at Clyde Cooper's in downtown Raleigh is worth checking out. It's worth taking a
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by pjmorris 4y ago
As a kid in South Florida (Lake Worth), there was an old barbecue place down the road from us that had Brunswick Stew. I only tried it once or twice, but liked it. And I didn't see it on another menu for decades, and that only when we
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Thank you for the link. Another Simon quote from the panel discussion: > In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs to produce and trans
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by pjmorris 4y ago
> base grades on... and for CS, in-class coding Given that a typical programmer on a typical day has online access, and given the creative lengths students will go to to maintain access to said resources during exams, it seems worth cons
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by pjmorris 4y ago
> Warehouses receiving orbital payloads should probably be nice and far away from the base you care about. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, shades of 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' by Heinlein. All your base are belong to
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Thank you for writing 'Dignity.' I've read it, shared it, given it away. You gave a tip during a panel in Chapel Hill about learning from others by switching where to get your morning coffee, e.g. from Starbucks to McDonalds,
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by pjmorris 4y ago
After a number of frustrating episodes for my wife and I, we came up with a plan. At my home office desk, I've got a 5x7 index card with a big red dot on one side and a big green dot on the other , which I use to communicate whether I&
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by pjmorris 4y ago
Paper ballots counted in public is the strongest system we've found so far.
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by pjmorris 4y ago
I've got H&P on the bookshelf. It's the 'get down and dirty with a breadboard an x86 chip and maybe a soldering iron' aspect I am surfing for. 'Like Ben Eater but for x86', preferably as a course, is what I

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