Aug 15, 2007
As humankind moves along, shedding light in the direction of the movement, Darkness repossesses the area behind us.
Dad

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Aug 15, 2007

A roadmap for getting luck on your side

Develop energy, skills of synthesis and pattern recognition, and a unique, comfortable, eclectic lifestyle.

Marc Andreessen

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Aug 15, 2007
Bizarrely, each time we have won in England there was no coach.

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Aug 14, 2007
We’ve come to learn that it’s hard to motivate technical people, including ourselves, through money, colorful toys, or gigantic monitors. We try, instead, to have a mock-up ready for everything we’re about to approach so the motivation for accomplishment is instilled by our need to see something that looks cool come alive.

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Aug 14, 2007
The hegemony of “free” will in the long run end up narrowing our choices rather than expanding them. I still hope that there will be a way to actually sell stuff on the internet rather than having to give everything away for free, crassly plastered with ads.

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Aug 14, 2007
Awareness of human fallibility is dangerous knowledge, if you remind yourself of the fallibility of those who disagree with you. If I am selective about which arguments I inspect for errors, or even how hard I inspect for errors, then every new rule of rationality I learn, every new logical flaw I know how to detect, makes me that much stupider.

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Aug 13, 2007
The Aesthetic-Usability Effect: users perceive more aesthetically pleasing designs to be easier to use than less aesthetically pleasing designs.

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Aug 12, 2007
Nu is written in Objective-C, and is designed to allow deep interaction with Objective-C programs. As a result, Nu has deep access to its own implementation. That gives its users an unusual ability to explore and understand Nu.

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Aug 12, 2007
I publish various things on the web. I write in this blog, I publish photos to my photo blog and I save snippets of interesting articles using Magnolia. Unfortunately, Facebook only allows the importing of a single RSS feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes. Using Yahoo Pipes, I can combine all three into a single RSS feed.

What I love about this system is that it ties together the three power houses of the current internet: Google (Feedburner), Yahoo and Facebook, all working together.

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Aug 11, 2007
Avoiding error handling results in shorter and clearer code. In C etc. you have to write something if you detect an error, but in Erlang it’s easy - don’t even bother to write code that checks for errors. Just let it crash, the Erlang runtime will provide a perfectly acceptable error diagnostic.

Then write a new linked process that observes the crashes and tries to correct the error. If it can’t correct the error it should crash (same principle). Each monitor should try a simpler error recovery strategy, until finally the error is fixed.

Joe Armstrong has a new take on the error codes vs exceptions debate.

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