February 2012
22 posts
“WorldWideWeb is a hypertext browser/editor which allows one to read information...”
– Tim Berners-Lee in comp.sys.next.announce (via Horace Dediu)
“The whole web is built on one mistake after another. We have this big pile of...”
– Douglas Crockford in “Coders at Work”
“It’s not just temporary. Now that it works you’re not going to touch it because...”
– Chris Parker (Apple frameworks engineer): You Are Not Ruthless Enough
I’ve seen the kind of long term damage this sort of cruft can inflict on a code base many times, which is why, like Parker, I tend to believe strongly in investing the extra time necessary to design good class interfaces,...
“Fordlandia isn’t just the story of a plantation; it’s a story about...”
– Fordlandia: The Failure Of Ford’s Jungle Utopia : NPR (via Patrick Ewing)
The story of Henry Ford’s failed Brazilian rubber plantation is a great cautionary tale about the danger of blindly assuming that what made you successful in one domain will automatically make you successful...
High Scalability: Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion... →
If you’ve ever wondered what’s involved in keeping Tumblr humming along, here’s a great overview courtesy of Blake Matheney.
“It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with...”
– A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From Joel Spolsky
Pretty much my sentiments exactly.
David Cole responds to my previous post about San Francisco:
California is gentle and tolerant, but to me that’s the more honest route. I don’t relate at all to the notion that one should be calling others out on their bullshit. Life is far too vast and one’s personal experiences are far too narrow for me to feel comfortable with the idea that anyone has it all figured out. To...
Jim Ray asks:
Honest question: have you found New York, center of the soul-less finance careerists and “new media” wankfest, to be different?
New York can certainly be a soulless place (just ask me about the time I ate at a sushi place in Midtown East and overheard a finance guy ask his date if she wanted to be with “the guy who has the villa on top of the hill or the guy who has the...
“These are the boys who suck up to the boss’s boss. They’re...”
– Some Advice for Young People | The Awl
I could have written this very article, and if I had, it would have been subtitled “Why I Left San Francisco.” The place is practically founded on an unwillingness to call bullshit.
“There is no stack [on the PDP-1]. For programmers used to working at a C level...”
– Owen Macindoe, GAMBIT: Investigating the Spacewar! Source
I don’t think I can convey to a non-programmer how frightening this is. It would be like trying to go through your day with Memento-style short-term memory loss. That these 1961 MIT hackers wrote a real video game under these constraints...
WatchOpenCV Face Detection: Visualized (by Adam Harvey)
slavin:
Like a lot of folks, I’ve often thought about how what we see determines how we see. And so it is, that a 1973 Playboy model was imprinted in the distributed AI of cameras around the world, at the same time it embedded itself into my six-year-old brain. The effects of all this are impossibly subtle, they’re embedded deep in a...
Bijan Sabet: Why Facebook Connect shouldn't be... →
bijan:
When I see startups that only offer FB Connect as the singular sign in option, I always get squeamish.
I tell founders they should support FB Connect but they also support Twitter sign-in as well as giving users an option to sign in the good old fashioned way : user id & password.
For me it’s as simple as this: when you require a Facebook sign-in, you are essentially...
