Viewing profile — mbucc

Draft Unix manual written by Dennis Ritchie circa 1971---at a time when Unix had been running for a "few months" on the PDP-11.

Here's a great blog post on insurance and healthcare: https://healthcareinamerica.us/how-to-ask-good-questions-abo... I think insurance is not an accurate word for the health care …

> I hear a lot about OTP and the "let it crash" mantra, but > I just don't quite understand what's so great about it. The top two for me are: (1) you start to just program the sunn…

By default, the erl interpreter starts up the otp app, which loads lots of modules (50+?) and multiple (5?) different processes. It takes a second. To get things running faster, yo…

Wow, they sure don't. In fact, nationwide gas tax and tolls cover about 32% of highway costs. [ http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa... ] (But that just say…

I don't hate it, but I do question if it is the best use of funds. The U.S. doesn't have the density required to support the transit systems we have built. Fare box revenue only co…

The benefit I see is that (at least in Erlang) pattern matching combines pre-condition asserts with programming the sunny path. For example, "/" ++ X = HttpRequest:get(path). will …

Nice. Here's an Erlang version of your code, which I think reads even more like math: gcd(A, B) when B == 0 -> A; gcd(A, B) when A gcd(B, A); gcd(A, B) -> gcd(B, A rem B). I also r…

> I do hold the belief that Spotify is putting a good-faith effort towards paying musicians and "rights holders" day in and day out. The NPR piece said they asked a copyright laywe…

> Nokia 635, $40 I don't understand why these low cost Nokia's get so little love here in the U.S. My 520 was $50 a few years ago and is a rock solid piece of hardware. I guess it'…

They created a ton. Transistors, solar cells, lasers, satellites, cell phones, LEDs, UNIX and C all came out of that monopoly. That's an unparalleled track record of technical inno…

This tutorial is a good intro: http://blog.gopheracademy.com/cron-filesystem/ The Plan 9 web pages are really good (if dense). If you write in Go, check out github.com/rminnich/go9…

FWIW, I found shmig [1] much simpler than sqitch. Last I used sqitch, it returned a zero value on error, which made me leery of using it for scripted deployments. [1] https://githu…

My Venice and Other Essays by Donna Leon

Actually, discovered ledger-cli here last week (thanks HN). It's amazing. Abstracting currency to the concept of commodity + price files makes it trivial to track your shares in 40…

I found it interesting how radically different his teaching premise is from the current U.S. public school approach. From the preface: I thought to address them to the most intelli…

For immutable collections, guava is helpful.

The models certainly contributed. (Note: I have read this far in the book.) The modeling error in question was independence; that is, if you have five mortgages, each with a 5% cha…

So, if the method was commented, would you: (A) assume the comments are correct and skip reading what the code does? (B) use comments as guidance and read code anyway? The first se…

This talk is very informative. The historical bit about NASA using event-sourced design for the Apollo Program (1969) was pretty interesting. He gives IBM big props for hitting 2,3…

There are supposed to be Chinese walls. If you read the article about Ted Parmigiani in last Sunday's New York Times, it seems the walls can be like the one in A Midsummer Night's …

Last month Forbes reported that Netflix said 75% of what it's customers watch are from recommendations. Definitely some bang there. Also, note that 10% improvement was far from lin…

Keeping variable names short is a natural brake on routine length. Like wrapping at 80 columns and using tabs is a natural brake on deeply nested conditionals. If I need a longer v…

according to OpenBSD man page, head(1) first appeared in 3.0 BSD, so that would be 1979.