Only reality can be a neverending story.
— Me@2012.01.27
2012.02.01 Wednesday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK
Category Archives: software
Category Theory 4
1.1.1 From Elements To Arrows
Category theory can be seen as a “generalised theory of functions”, where the focus is shifted from the pointwise, set-theoretic view of functions, to an abstract view of functions as arrows.
— Introduction to Categories and Categorical Logic
— Samson Abramsky and Nikos Tzevelekos
2012.01.27 Friday ACHK
The Hundred-Year Language
盜用未來身份 3
How will we program in a hundred years? Why not start now?
Now we have two ideas that, if you combine them, suggest interesting possibilities: (1) the hundred-year language could, in principle, be designed today, and (2) such a language, if it existed, might be good to program in today. When you see these ideas laid out like that, it’s hard not to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language now?
— The Hundred-Year Language
— Paul Graham
2012.01.27 Friday ACHK
Cloud Foundry
Whatever the fate of the project, it shows where the enterprise software world is going. The world has evolved from Microsoft’s desktop OS to sweeping web services like Google, and now these two are coming together in a new type of operating system for running not mere desktops or individual servers but armies of servers and even multiple data centers.
— Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’
— Cade Metz
2012.01.19 Thursday ACHK
“Derivatives”
Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks, devising explosive devices called “derivatives.” They used Excel to maximize the bankers’ bonuses on nine out of ten years, and to cause western civilization to nearly collapse every tenth year.
— How Trello is different
— Joel Spolsky
2012.01.16 Monday ACHK
And Yet It Moves
And Yet It Moves is set in a world reminiscent of a paper collage. The game focuses on rotating the world around the player character in order to surmount walls too steep to climb or maneuvering around complex objects.
— Wikipedia on And Yet It Moves
2012.01.13 Friday ACHK
Lisp macros 2
People complain macros are difficult to understand. Macros are easy. If you can understand a program that concatenates lists to make a new list, you can understand a macro. Macros are quite literally ‘just lisp code’.
— ohyes 2 weeks ago
— Lisp is Too Powerful
— Hacker News
2012.01.07 Saturday ACHK
時空幻境 2
Braid 2
Blow’s goal was that Braid would “be mind-expanding” and that “people [would] get experiences from it that they [had] not gotten from anything else”.
— Wikipedia on Braid (video game)
2012.01.04 Wednesday ACHK
Literate programming 2
The Haskell programming language has native support for semi-literate programming, inspired by CWEB but with a simpler implementation. When aiming for TeX output, one writes a plain LaTeX file where source code is marked by a given surrounding environment; LaTeX can be set up to handle that environment, while the Haskell compiler looks for the right markers to identify Haskell statements to compile, removing the TeX documentation as if they were comments. However, as described above, this is not literate programming in the sense intended by Knuth. Haskell’s functional, modular nature makes literate programming directly in the language somewhat easier, but it is not nearly as powerful as one of the WEB tools where “tangle” can reorganize in arbitrary ways.
— Wikipedia on Literate programming
2012.01.01 Sunday ACHK
Braid
時空幻境
Braid is a platform and puzzle video game developed by independent software developer Jonathan Blow.
The game features traditional aspects of the platform genre while integrating various powers of time-manipulation.
Blow designed the game as a personal critique of contemporary trends in game development. He funded the three-year project with his own money.
— Wikipedia on Braid (video game)
2011.12.28 Wednesday ACHK
Recursion 7
Life as a recursion
Level 1: Life is a repetition.
Level 2: Life is an iteration.
Level 3: Life is a recursion.
— Me@2008.07.00
— Me@2011.12.24
2011.12.24 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK
MapReduce 3
Recursion is the key to be scalable.
— Me@2011.12.20
2011.12.23 Friday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK
Literate programming
The idea, which originated with Knuth, is to write a program and its documentation at the same time, interleaved with each other.
…
In literate programming, the code is subservient to the documentation. For example, the various sections of the code are written not in the order the compiler (or interpreter) wants them, but in the order most appropriate for the explanation. Two utility programs transform the combination file: one to typeset the documentation and the code via TeX, and the other to extract and rearrange the source code and send it to the compiler.
— More shell, less egg
— Dr. Drang
2011.12.14 Wednesday ACHK
Wikipedia 2.0
Encyclopedia Galactica 2
我的百科全書 2
More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
Deletionists rule Wikipedia. Ironically, they’re constrained by print-era thinking. What harm does it do if an online reference has a long tail of articles that are only interesting to a few people, so long as everyone can still find whatever they’re looking for? There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica.
— Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund
— Paul Graham
— July 2008
2011.11.28 Monday ACHK
Wave–particle duality
Hardware is local. Software is non-local.
— Me@2011.11.24
2011.11.26 Saturday (c) All rights reserved by ACHK
Khan Academy 2
“The school of the future will not resemble the school of today,” Khan says. “In the past, the assembly-line, lecture-homework-exam model existed because that’s what was possible in the no-tech and low-tech classrooms of their day.”
— Salman Khan (educator)
2011.11.19 Saturday ACHK
Google 10
That’s why it made utter sense to me that Google would try to dig itself out of its patent hole with a plan that wound up to encompass much more than the problem itself. After being rebuffed in its efforts to nab an expensive patent portfolio to defend Android against “bogus” (in David Drummond’s phrase) claims, it decided not only to get a better portfolio but an entire company and new business model as well.
— Why the Motorola Mobility Deal is like the Google Book Search Settlement
— Steven Levy
2011.11.16 Wednesday ACHK
iPod creator’s thermostat
The Nest Thermostat also aces a task that traditional thermostats surprisingly don’t do very well at: measuring the temperature.
Many current thermostats can be routinely off by four or five degrees.
— Brave New Thermostat: How the iPod’s Creator Is Making Home Heating Sexy
— Steven Levy
2011.11.14 Monday ACHK
Oxygen of the real world
Publish! 8
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.
— Matt Mullenweg
2011.11.13 Sunday ACHK
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a role-playing game (RPG) in a fantasy setting originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR).
D&D’s publication is widely regarded as the beginning of modern role-playing games and the role-playing game industry.
— Wikipedia on Dungeons & Dragons
2011.11.11 Friday ACHK
Physics Town 
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