It’s odd to say this, but recently I’ve started reading programming language papers as a hobby. It’s actually rather depressing as it’s only reinforced the massive disconnect between engineering in practice and current computer science research. Isn’t it frustrating to see loads of good ideas just ignored for a variety of reasons, from opaqueness to poor marketing?

Wikipedia 15 wouldn’t allow me to post a long story, so here it is

Being a power user is almost always synonymous with saying you’re hard to please. Which isn’t necessarily wrong. I use mutt not because I like it, but because it sucks less than everything else I’ve used.

Sounding smart is really easy. Being smart, as far as I can tell, is the result of a hell of a lot of mental discipline.

No human has ever gotten a full mouthful of crab in one single bite. No one has ever had the pleasure of cracking a crab to only find delicious meat inside. Crab is designed so that no matter how you bite it, there is always at least one inedible bit in your mouth at any given time.

([-!#-'*+/-9=?A-Z^-~]+(\.[-!#-'*+/-9=?A-Z^-~]+)*|"([]!#-[^-~ \t]|([\t -~]))+")@[0-9A-Za-z]([0-9A-Za-z-]{0,61}[0-9A-Za-z])?(\.[0-9A-Za-z]([0-9A-Za-z-]{0,61}[0-9A-Za-z])?)+

I can’t even have Markdown. Screw this, I’m moving to Jekyll or something similar. I only have static content anyway.

It’s like watching a live show.

More to follow.

In the spirit of Christmas, we’re going to talk about gifts (Look at me, using “we” outside of a math paper, where it’s the norm for whatever reason).

Running the following command in Haskell gives the natural log of the integers 1-1000. It runs in about a millisecond.

Recently, I was forced to go to the post office in person to pick up a package. Reading that last sentence out loud is a bit of a tongue twister. Anyway, the lady in front of me in the line needed to send out a package but had forgotten to tape it, so the post office employee asked her if she would like to buy some tape for 3 dollars.

It’s funny how your perspective on Halloween changes as you age.

If you’re writing online, for God’s sake use a newline to break a paragraph rather than indent.

Learning Haskell made me a hell of a lot better at type checking, which also made me better at my math classes. Now I just wish Python’s type annotations were more commonly used.

The best test of whether someone is fundamentally capable of changing is how they handle suggestions that they admit are good.