What I'm reading 1/18-1/25

2016-01-25

Clojure is for type B personalities - Zach Oakes

  1. "When looking at languages through this lens, it becomes obvious that a lot of internet flamewars are predicated not on objective disagreements, but subjective personality differences."

  2. "This may be pop psychology stuff, but it's convenient for my point so in the spirit of American politics I will treat it as fact."

  3. "It's been said that Shaq played basketball to do all the things he really wanted to do: making terrible movies, rapping about Kobe eating his ass, and holding things."

  4. "Paul Simon didn't come up with The Sound of Silence from a list of requirements. He sat in his bathroom with the lights off and riffed on his guitar until genius poured out."

Jim Harbaugh's Guide to Dating - Spencer Hall

  1. "Milk. Babies grow from it. Men remain strong with it. Even dogs crave it, but do not let them have it! The farts are just too tremendous for words."

  2. "The only bad idea is to date someone who DOESN'T work with you. That person is not on your team. They're on team Meijer or team H&R Block or team County Land Appraiser's Office."

  3. "Trips right, leave a tight end in to block, and line her up way out wide on the left. If she can't find a soft spot in the defense you're better off without her anyways."

The Last Days of Target - Joe Castaldo

  1. "The investigating team went to Fisher and John Morioka, the senior vice-president of merchandising, with a drastic proposal: Shut down the entire merchandising division so everyone could comb through and verify every single piece of data in the system — manually."

  2. "Ironically, even as consumers encountered barely stocked stores, Target's distribution centres were bursting with products. Target Canada had ordered way more stock than it could actually sell."

  3. "But by flipping the auto-replenishment switch off, the system wouldn't report an item as out of stock, so the analyst's numbers would look good on paper. 'They figured out how to game the system,' says a former employee."

The aliens are silent because they are extinct - ANU Canberra

  1. "A plausible solution to Fermi's paradox, say the researchers, is near universal early extinction, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck."

The Fallacy of Premature Optimization - Randall Hyde

  1. "What Hoare and Knuth are really saying is that software engineers should worry about other issues (such as good algorithm design and good implementations of those algorithms) before they worry about micro-optimizations such as how many CPU cycles a particular statement consumes."

  2. "Premature optimization may lead to code that is difficult to modify, maintain, and read. Improper design and implementation, on the other hand, often necessitate a complete rewrite."

Alec Baldwin with Peter Beard: The Elephant Attack - ASX

  1. "Well, you can't escape an elephant."

  2. "The elephants went back up the hill so to speak and we just stood there. The sons of bitch, this matriarch came again. So then she starts coming, we start running again, make it feel happy. But it wasn't stopping."