What I'm reading 2/8-2/15

2016-02-15

"Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner."
"It's just that I think compulsory heterosexual monogamy is the least romantic idea since standardised testing, and I don't see why our best ideals of love and lust and passion and dedication need to be boxed into it."
"Today, whatever else we are, women are still taught that we have failed if we are not loved by men."
"We take care of people, soothe hurt feelings, organise chaotic lives and care for men who never learned to care for themselves, regardless of whether or not we're constitutionally suited for such work."

"It is better to solve a minuscule subset of the full problem space first and get that deployed to production than it is to have a large project die."
"There are a few people on a project, no more than 6. A project is never longer than 2.5 months of time. Every project has a win condition."
"Every project starts with a list of 'things we don't solve in this project'."
"You will only pick the parts of Agile/XP/SCRUM/Kanban/ThisYearsFad which works for the team. You will kill everything else."
"Unless you have a dataset above 10 Terabytes, you pick postgresql."
"The system must avoid waking people up in the middle of the night at all costs."

"Fogus: Favorite tools? Editor? Version control? Debugger? Drawing tool? IDE? Hickey: Circus Ponies NoteBook, OmniGraffle, hammock."
"I'm more interested in reducing complexity than I am in concision."
"Looking at Python and Ruby left me resolute that I didn't want to create yet another syntax and yet another object system."
"Prior to starting work on Clojure, he made four attempts to combine Lisp with either Java or Microsoft's Common Language Runtime: jfli, Foil, Lisplets, and DotLisp but Clojure was the first to draw significant attention."
"I don't do any programming not directed at making the computer do something useful, so I don't do any exercises. I try to spend more time thinking about the problem than I do typing it in."

"A fifth mechanism also operates from the consistency principle: people infer traits of social actors from the outcomes those actors have obtained. Thus, great results cause attributions of positive traits and behaviours."

"The idea is not to have uncontrolled failures everywhere, it's to instead transform failures, exceptions, and crashes into tools we can use."
"Heisenbugs by contrast, have unreliable behaviour that manifests itself under certain conditions, and which may possibly be hidden by the simple act of trying to observe them."
"A once in a billion issue requires quite a lot of tests and validation to uncover, and chances are that if you've seen it, you won't be able to generate it again just by luck."

"He seldom agreed with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the important questions that reached the court, but the two for years celebrated New Year's Eve together. Not long after Justice Elena Kagan, another liberal, joined the court, Justice Scalia took her skeet shooting."

"Cooperative Scheduling system cannot satisfy a real-time system because a running task in such system might never return control back or returns late after a deadline. So real-time systems commonly use Preemptive Scheduling."

"Markets (and the humans that make them up) are not very good at analyzing low-probability risks."