This is the first part of my 3-chapter blog post: Ten years of building open source standards Prologue 15 years ago (2007-2011) I was at Yahoo! working with Map/Reduce and Apache Pig, which was the be
Multics Close ⊗ Loading This page is for stories about Multics, pictures, etc. There is room for the contributions of many authors. Send yours to the editor. The 6180 at CISL, skin doors open, circa 1
May 09, 2024 I'm working on an application that needs the ability to schedule tasks. Many applications have a similar need, but requirements can vary greatly. Advanced cases might require persistence
Tom Van Vleck The history of Unix is covered in several books. I have read A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter Salus; he is reasonably accurate about the history that I know personally (I sent him a fe
How GitHub taught me to Micromanage Feedback is critical to performing good work as a team. Good feedback cultivates quality work and professional growth. Bad feedback degrades quality and erodes rela
Search Find anything you save across the site in your account Currency November 6, 2013 Ever since inequality began rising in the U.S., in the nineteen-seventies, people have debated its causes. Some
MemoryDB: Speed, Durability, and Composition. Blocks are fun. Earlier this week, my colleagues Yacine Taleb, Kevin McGehee, Nan Yan, Shawn Wang, Stefan Mueller, and Allen Samuels published Amazon Memo
Here's some good news: The vote was 3-2 in favor of banning noncompete agreements for new workers and voiding them for all existing workers (except C-suite executives). This will eliminate the ridicul
What kind of place is the Internet? A few years ago, an essay called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” by Yancey Strickler, one of the founders of Kickstarter, started getting passed around on
In his sci-fi trilogy The Three Body Problem, author Liu Cixin presents the dark forest theory of the universe. When we look out into space, the theory goes, we’re struck by its silence. It seems like
Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps a
Introduction from Jon Haidt: Freya India is one of the most sensitive and perceptive Gen Z writers. She went through the social media maelstrom herself and now chronicles its effects on her generation
There's an interesting psychological phenomenon where programmers tend to ascribe more trust to computers run by anyone but themselves. Perhaps it's a corollary to imposter syndrome, which leads progr
Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died. Professor Dennett wrote ext
How is it that tiny black marks on a white page or screen can produce such enormous ripples in the heart, mind, and spirit? Why do we lose ourselves in books, only to find ourselves enlarged, enraptur
I've published a number of Open Source Python libraries, but none have seen as much buzz as Rich. Released in 2020, the Rich repo has 35,000 stars on Github. Since then I've released Textual (a work i
It took more than ten years of full-time work for Rama to go from an idea to a production system. I shudder to think of how long it would have taken without Clojure. Rama is a programming platform tha
The Unix shell is a powerful tool, and the Unix ecosystem provides an incredible array of tools for working with strings. But the shell really only knows how to work with one data structure: the files
Zig is a programming language designed by Andrew Kelley. The official website lists three principles of the language: No hidden control flow. No hidden memory allocations. No preprocessor, no macros.
It’s now nearly a year that I started writing non-trivial amounts of C code again (the first sokol_gfx.h commit was on the 14-Jul-2017), so I guess it’s time for a little retrospective. In the beginni
In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything
AHP Note: Every so often I get a great pitch for a guest interview and hand the Culture Study reins over to someone else (usually a reader who *gets it*) to handle the interview (and get paid for it,
Photo by @arnosenoner on Unsplash. Lesson one for me as hospital chaplain was that sometimes a situation is impossibly hard.* For a caring person, this can be a difficult truth to accept—that you can’
PC software pioneer Gary Kildall created CP/M in 1974 Published inCore+ · 11 min read· Apr 18, 2024 By David Laws Gary Kildall at the first West Coast Computer Faire in the San Francisco Civic Auditor
In the spring of 1988, I made a lifelong friend thanks to a video-game cheat code. As preparation for a family move to Pensacola, Florida, I visited my new school. While there, I casually told a futur
At least 21% of the 80 healthcare companies that filed for bankruptcy last year were PE-owned, according to a report from the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP). “PE’s excessive use o
Explore They say, never meet your heroes. Daniel Dennett, who was exceptional in so many ways, and who died last month, was for me an exception to this rule, too. Like so many, I was first inspired by
Explore Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the produc
For most of us, Nginx is just an abstraction of the underlying network. That’s the primary reason why we still use Nginx and think it’s a fine choice as a capable web server, reverse proxy, load balan
Listen to this Idea. 0:01 0:01 Brought to you by Curio, a Psyche partner This is about more than a self-help switch – it will take structural changes to reject capitalism’s productivity obsession We a
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Generative AI is transforming the software development industry. AI-powered coding tools are assisting programmers in their workflows, while jobs in AI continue to increase. But the shift is also evid
A little over two years have passed since the online vigilante who would call himself P4x fired the first shot in his own one-man cyberwar. Working alone in his coastal Florida home in late January of
La Gaceta issues from 1926-1932 and 1934-1943 are now online in Chronicling America! Issues through 1951 will be added to Chronicling America over the next two years. You can find more issues of La Ga
Index FO147 Title Include Performance tooling in Ubuntu Status Pending Review Author Matthieu Clemenceau, Christian Ehrhardt, Jon Seager, Robie Basak Type Standard Created 2023-12-13 Abstract As we ra
These days, our web browsers—whether on mobile or desktop—are highly functional and can do all sorts of things that we could only dream of a decade prior.But despite that, one could argue that the web
Why SQLite Uses Bytecode 1. Introduction Every SQL database engine works in roughly the same way: It first translates the input SQL text into a "prepared statement". Then it "executes" the prepared st
How did we get there? In the early days of computing, programmers could only dream of portability. All programs were written directly in machine code for each computer architecture they were intended
Walter Isaacson's new book about Elon Musk is a fine biography, but a better business book. And like all the best business books, it's not merely an instruction manual, but an inspirational guide too.
AWS has announced the general availability of Amazon Q, the most capable generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant for accelerating software development and leveraging companies’ inter
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