Uncanny valley tech recruiting

As recruiter pitches show up in my inbox, it’s clear there’s a lot of “fake it til you make it” when it comes to tech terminology. ..

Yes, net neutrality is conservative. That’s the problem.

Fred Wilson makes the argument (here and here) that net neutrality is a conservative idea. That’s correct, and that’s the problem. ..

My security and privacy tools

A quick list of the things I use to improve my web experience: ..

A type system in runtime’s clothing

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. — Greenspun ..

Hierarchy and orthogonality in C# and Go

Prompted by this question I got to thinking about methods in C# and Go. It’s another example, I realized, of Go’s (logical) insistence on orthogonality and (stylistic) insistence on flatness/lack of hierarchy. ..

Know your guarantees, Go edition

I was directed to a thread about a poor soul who started a project in Go, eventually had to hand it off to the community, and discovered that his original source no longer compiled, due to third-party dependencies having changed. Key quote: Not even the original programmer, with the original files on his original dev machine, can compile the source anymore. ..

The two edges of “culture fit”

Here’s a smart and funny bit about culture fit. I think it’s brutal and by and large true. [1] ..

How a savvy landlord would handle Airbnb

Megan McArdle describes the understandable discomfort that some tenants and property owners have about Airbnb’ers coming into their buildings. ..

De facto immutability

Another in a series of posts wherein I spitball about things that computer scientists already know, but have only just occurred to me. ..

What Netflix bought from Comcast is a CDN

With the hubbub about net neutrality, fast lanes and Netflix, I though I would illustrate what we are dealing with technologically. ..