Every week I drive across the Big Island, a distance of 86 miles each way. Audiobooks, which I'd never bothered with much before, turn out to be a very enjoyable way of dealing with the ride. There are two major disadvantages: "listening while driving" is not suited for deep attention …

Good article: How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic.

Perhaps the most impressive thing is not that Google allocates human effort to the mapping project but that they combine very advanced algorithmics with that human effort and, perhaps …

Please take & RT my 10-question survey about opinions of developer productivity http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/39ZSHLD

Ravi Mohan (\@ravi_mohan)
8/26/12 10:46 PM
Advanced languages (among other things ) are force multipliers. But if you are writing the n-th CRUD app you are multiplying by zero

This very much fits into some of my opinions that have been firming up over the past couple …

New York

Going in to New York is slow. Even at 5PM all the traffic is in-bound. Seems thermodynamically impossible…Flipping the bird at Yankees advertisements…Dark And Stormies at a hipster bar where a dude in a bowler and arm gaiters played ragtime on an upright…Horseradish-infused vodka:

This …

With type inference you avoid “finger-typing” on both sides of an assignment:

Foo myFoo = new Foo()
var myFoo = new Foo() //Type-inference (no "win" here, but with parameterized types...)

Type inference also works with functions, allowing you to write:

def bar() : Foo = { ...etc... }
def bat(foo : Foo) = { ...etc... }

var myFoo …

A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Definitely a step up from "A Feast for Crows" (my review: "What a slog...") in that it is primarily told from the viewpoint of major characters, but the plot is still disturbingly bogged down: after …

Kraken by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps the most successful "modern gods and magic" book I've read (although actually I experienced it as an audiobook). This is the quality that I thought "American Gods" was going to achieve (when in fact I thought that book was …

On July 3, 1988, I moved to San Francisco from San Diego (more specifically, I moved to Sausalito from Pacific Beach) to take a job as Product Review Editor on Computer Language and AI Expert magazines. I remember riding the Marin Airporter (for the first, but certainly not last, time …

Still struggling with the benefits of the Reader monad… In the well-liked answer on StackOverflow, mergeconflict says

I can explain how Reader works easily: it’s a function, and it takes an argument.

OK, so I think the structure of the technique seems clear: instead of being dependent on …