Category:
rants
I consider myself a pretty smart person, but there are some things that I don’t understand. One of these things is USPS. You may or may not know that USPS is granted a government monopoly on delivering mail and also has exclusive access to mailboxes. This means that FedEx and UPS effectively cannot compte on the […]
Readers know that I’ve been a longtime supporter and have given high praise to my (now former) web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. I’ve supported them because they do fair usage-based-billing in a market of “unlimited” that’s really limited, because I’m a big fan of their stand against SOPA, on content neutrality, and other matters of libertarian ethics, […]
We do not question assumptions. This is, of course, a tautological statement. But its logical infallibility belies its profoundness. For example, Rondam argues: Underlying the debate about the so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is the unstated assumption that intellectual property rights have the same legal standing as other property rights. They don’t, and the tacit concession […]
People want things to be cheaper and easier and faster than they are. That doesn’t seem very extraordinary, does it? I mean, it’s not really news. In fact, the opposite would be news–if people wanted things harder, slower, or more expensive. You may not even believe it is true. People in fact pay more for […]
Think for a minute about what you work on. In your work life, in your side projects. What are you going to do this upcoming week that is really, really hard? This is not a rhetorical question–it’s the kind that shouldn’t raise a null reference exception. There should be something. Because you are a good […]
I have discovered that there are two mental models for computer programs. Software takes one kind of data and turns it into another kind of data. Data is king. I will call this the “black box” mental model. This is the model used by most computer scientists, programmers, and advanced users. Software is pixels on […]
If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process. The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas. Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD). But […]
Writing a moderately-trafficked blog, I sometimes get some interesting search queries. Thanks to the awesome folks at Clicky Analytics, I get pretty incredible data on what people are searching for who somehow end up here. Most of these searches are pretty on-topic. If you’re searching for Instruments crashing, for instance, some blog post here is […]
This is a story about checks and credit cards. Once upon a time, you would pay people by paper check. You had little pieces of paper with a bank’s name on it. When somebody wanted to pay someone else, they would write on the piece of paper, and the recipient would use the reputation of […]
What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. – Paul Graham There’s been a lot of talk lately about what it means to be a programmer. Patio11 has a fantastic article about not […]
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