Looking back at the Zork I code, and what accounted for handling inventory back and the day. Interesting and frustrating all at the same time…
tags: history
Category Archives: Linkblog
As Coding Boot Camps Close, the Field Faces a Reality Check
Some more signals that ArsDigita University was ahead of its time.
tags: education
A hacker stole $31M of Ether — how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum
“I’ve read some comments on Reddit and HackerNews along the lines of: “What an obvious mistake! How was it even possible they missed this?” (Ignoring that the “obvious” vulnerability was introduced in January and only now discovered.)
When I see responses like this, I know the people commenting are not professional developers. For a serious developer, the reaction is instead: damn, that was a dumb mistake. I’m glad I wasn’t the one who made it.
Mistakes of this sort are routinely made in programming. All programs carry the risk of developer error. We have to throw off the mindset of “if they were just more careful, this wouldn’t have happened.” At a certain scale, carefulness is not enough.”
tags: ethereum
A hacker stole $31M of Ether — how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum
It’s Never Too Early to Fire – Andreessen Horowitz
“To be provocative: No one ever fired someone too soon.”
tags: management
Founder Stories: Kate Heddleston of Opsolutely
Someone was like, “Should the women in engineering, like, form a guild?,” and I was like, “Yeah. As long as we can have, like, a monopoly on baking and space-time travel, I’m in.” People were like, “What are you talking about?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I just make Dune references.”
tags: ycombinator
I’m Loyal to Nothing Except the Dream
“I truly believe we are at an unprecedented time in American history, in uncharted territory. I have benefited from democracy passively, without trying at all, for 46 years. I now understand that the next four years is perhaps the most important time to be an activist in the United States since the civil rights movement. I am ready to do the work.”
tags: usa
America, America – BLARB
“That Trump was ever even taken seriously as a candidate for President of the United States (he was understandably viewed as a carnival freak-show by his adversaries and the media, each of whom hoped to fleece the suckers that gathered while the circus was in town — this too abetted his improbable rise), suggests that we have exposed the limits of our ability to competently govern ourselves.”
tags: usa
The candy diet
“The economics seem to be that the only way to make a living is to reach a lot of people and the only way to reach a lot of people is to race to the bottom, seek out quick clicks, make it easy to swallow, reinforce existing beliefs, keep it short, make it sort of fun, or prurient, or urgent, and most of all, dumb it down.”
tags: culture
A Time for Refusal – The New York Times
“Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.”
tags: politics
The Human Cost of Tech Debt
“For a manager, a code base high in technical debt means that feature delivery slows to a crawl, which creates a lot of frustration and awkward moments in conversation about business capability. For a developer, this frustration is even more acute. Nobody likes working with a significant handicap and being unproductive day after day, and that is exactly what this sort of codebase means for developers.”
tags: programming