(This is some observations about my current workplace; it's probably not correct about management of software engineers in general ( Read more... )

Let's take it as given that interpreters are important. (Briefly, linguistic abstraction is a very important tool in managing complexity, arguably the most important, and though both interpreters and compilers support linguistic abstraction, interpreters are generally simpler and can be definitive of compiler correctness, which allows interpreters ( Read more... )

There's parallelism in the world - things that are spatially separated, a tiny bit as in a vector of bits that is processed in parallel in your graphics processor, or a bit larger as in the several "cores" (essentially, CPUs) which are likely in your CPU, or much larger as in the server serving this web page and your client. Taking advantage of ( Read more... )

Bigotry is the tribal-boundary, us-rather-than-them emotion, and it can be very ugly. Examples include nationalists who despise people from other nations, religious people who greatly prefer people from their own religion, academics who take sides in large (e.g. humanities vs. sciences) or small (e.g. bayesian vs. frequentist) academic tensions.
( Read more... )

Suppose that a device (software or hardware) can be remotely loaded with updates. Many classes of devices such as phones, browsers, video cards, operating systems, antivirus systems, even cars and embedded medical devices can be updated like this. If I recall correctly, the single game 'world of warcraft' supports an ecosystem of plugins in its ( Read more... )

There are two examples of incremental computation that almost any programmer should be familiar with ( Read more... )

My slides and my demo video.

( long and boring )

# what if there was a scale ( Read more... )

Okay, so Cosma Shalizi is very smart, and reminded me about linear programming not actually solving the socialist central planning problem. And that reminded me of the New Yorker's View of the World. We each have our ecocentric perspective of the world. And perhaps that is a strategy of how to fight against "the move to 'the cloud'" (a.k.a. the war ( Read more... )

Hi, my name's Johnicholas, I am going to tell you about implementing delimited continuations in Soar ( Read more... )