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Tag Archives: philosophy

What Spending Money Says About You

Money is more than a transfer of value. It’s a statement of belief. (via Seth) There are a lot of ways to think about how this applies that might help you to better make sense of why things “work” they way that they do.

Conway’s Law

Conway’s Law is not intended to be a joke or nasty witticism: …organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. – Melvin Conway (via Fare via Wikipedia)

The Grass is Always Greener

Here is a little tongue in cheek developer career philosophy/humor: (via xkcd via Greg Wilson)

Hamming’s Insight

THE PURPOSE OF COMPUTING IS INSIGHT, NOT NUMBERS. (via Wikipedia via John)

When it Comes to R7RS; R6RS Users are Quiet

R6RS users don’t seem to have much to say about R7RS. Most R6RS users seem to happy with Scheme and busy using it rather than worrying about how it should be split into two parts (little and big).

Is It Our Duty to Maintain Our Body?

Suppose that you awoke to find your consciousness contained within a robot. You don’t know where you came from before this existence, you don’t know who gave you this robot, and there is no manual for the time you will spend in this robot. Is it your duty to maintain your robot?

The Clarity that Tragedy Brings

Sometimes tragedy brings a certain clarity to one’s life. Suddenly, your priorities are clear and things are so simple. You know what matters, and everything else doesn’t. Why is that the case? When tragedy passes, why does that clarity so easily slip away?

Serious Statistics Programs Pay for the Fun Ones

Here is an article that explains how one of the four co-founders of SAS, a statistician, has an awesome job where the serious product (SAS) pays for him to develop the fun product (JMP). Note: That is an understatement, as it probably would pay for him to stare at the ocean for the rest of [...]

Why PLT Scheme disllows one-armed ifs

In 1991 I asked Bob Hieb (Kent’s Chez Scheme buddy then, and my co-researcher on theoretical stuff) what the most frequent annoying bug was in the code. He ranked an accidentally omitted else branch among the top three. Indeed, he said that because of this, they had agreed to use WHEN and UNLESS exclusively for [...]

Being Scrappy

What does it mean, exactly? It’s basically the diminutive form of belligerent. Someone who’s scrappy manages to be both threatening and undignified at the same time. Which seems to me exactly what one would want to be, in any kind of work. If you’re not threatening, you’re probably not doing anything new, and dignity is [...]