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  Difference Engine: Luddite legacy

AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required...

   Artificial intelligence,Engine,Difference,Human,Computer     2011-11-07 08:33:16

  How I Learned to Program

Programming is, without a doubt, the most mentally rewarding thing I've ever done. Programming taught me that life should be fun, filled with creativity, and lived to the fullest. Programming taught me that anything is possible; I can do anything I want using only my mind. Programming also taught me that learning is fun. It showed me that the more you know, the more power you have. Programming showed me that a life filled with learning is a life worth living. Programming revealed to me wh...

   Programming,Tips,Write,Practice,Interest     2012-02-04 21:37:12

  The Disruptor In The Valley

Justin Kan and Emmett Shear watched their first startup, an online calendar called Kiko, implode when Google decided to do the same thing in 2006. They sold Kiko's scraps on eBay for $258,000 and wondered what to do with their lives. So the pair did the only thing they could think of: They went to see Paul Graham at his house in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard Square. Graham sat them down and helped bang out a plan to create Justin.tv, now the Web's biggest portal for live video, with 31 million ...

   Paul Graham,Creative,Programmer,Investme     2011-08-28 04:13:43

  Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition

We’ve finally reached the point in this series that I’ve been waiting for. In this post I am going to share the most crucial piece of floating-point math knowledge that I have. Here it is:[Floating-point] math is hard.You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly hard it is. I mean, you may think it’s difficult to calculate when trains from Chicago and Los Angeles will collide, but that’s just peanuts to floating-point math.Seriously. Each ti...

   Floating point number,Comparison,True value     2012-02-23 07:11:03

  Erlang Style Concurrency

Introduction On an evolutionary scale of innovation from one to ten (one being Bloomberg and Citi Group, eight being Google and Cirque Du Soleil, and ten being the company you couldn't imagine in your wildest dreams), the company I work for is about a three1. Being employed by this bastion of ingenuity affords me certain opportunities I can't get elsewhere. For example, every developer gets to interview potential...

   Erlang,Concurrency,Lock,Message,Innovation     2012-01-03 10:44:44

  The 10 Greatest Hacks of My Life

My co-founder and I briefly considered applying to YCombinator for the Winter 2012 session. We eventually decided to bootstrap Curvio initially, and raise a seed round on our own after we launch (so far so good!). But looking over the YC application, one question intrigued me:Please tell us about the time you, tansey, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.Now, there are a lot of ways to interpret this. A mechanical interpretation would be about...

   Hack,Most important,Example,Curvio     2011-10-22 12:47:42

  10 Questions with Facebook Research Engineer – Andrei Alexandrescu

Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable. We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started. Hello Andrei, welcome on Server-Side Magazine. 1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where and what do you work? Who am I? Ah, the coffee breath of one talki...

   C++,Facebook,PHP,Future,Machine learning     2012-02-06 08:08:12

  Why Emacs?

PreludeIf you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.Neal StephensonIn the Beginning … Was the Command LineI’m an Emacs user and I’m proud of the fact. I know my reasons for using it (and loving i...

   Emacs,Linux,IDE,Editor,Usage     2011-11-21 10:22:05

  Signs that you're a bad programmer

1. Inability to reason about codeReasoning about code means being able to follow the execution path ("running the program in your head") while knowing what the goal of the code is.SymptomsThe presence of "voodoo code", or code that has no effect on the goal of the program but is diligently maintained anyway (such as initializing variables that are never used, calling functions that are irrelevant to the goal, producing output that is not used, etc.)Executing idempotent functions multiple times (...

   Sign,Programmer,Characteristics,Knowledge,Skill     2011-10-20 08:56:16

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