Jan 30, 2008
In exploratory programming, it’s as important to avoid premature specification as premature optimization.

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Jan 29, 2008
zip is matrix transpose in disguise.

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Jan 29, 2008
If you’re interested in deriving maximum benefit from your work, there’s no substitute for making it public and findable. Obscurity sucks. But obscurity by choice is irrational. When in doubt, make it public.

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Jan 29, 2008
Leaving Unicode support in a language “for later” means you will spend a huge chunk of time sometime in the future to put it into the language — or you won’t, and then programs written in that language will forever be verbose when dealing with strings.

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Jan 28, 2008
When we look back someday at our juggling of electronic lives, the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Cinematic shorthand for the frenzy [glamour?] of modern life.

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Jan 26, 2008
Under no circumstance should you punish your users for using your system.

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Jan 26, 2008
If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting.. if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed.

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Jan 26, 2008
To measure the large amount of energy produced in a supernova per second, specialists occasionally use a unit of energy known as a “foe”, an acronym derived from the phrase [ten to the power] fifty-one ergs. In comparison, if the Sun had its current luminosity throughout its entire 10-billion-year lifetime, it would produce 1.2 foe.

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Jan 26, 2008
The disease metaphor for viral marketing is misleading. Trends are more like forest fires: there are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. In those rare situations, the landscape is ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do.

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Jan 26, 2008
Common Lisp makes the classic lisp error of confusing symbols (a data type) with variables (a language level object).

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