acommonplacepage

[acommonplacepage]

I was looking at the Z book and I think it would be best if I skipped the mathematical stuff at the beginning.

An adjunct discussing a formal-methods textbook, overheard on 2003 November 13

[acommonplacepage]

According to Gauss, these latter works were dull and craftsman-like, mathematically simplistic and lacking conceptual elegance. In other words, they were textbooks.

The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, 2002

[acommonplacepage]

Some signs of a good programmer: good programmers have a habit of writing their { and then skipping down to the bottom of the page and writing their }s right away, then filling in the blank later.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing by Joel Spolsky

[acommonplacepage]

marky 01.21.04 at 8:29 pm

Well, the intellectual level of philosophers is so far beneath that of physicists and mathematicians that it’s really a moot point if McGinn is the smartest.

Doug 01.21.04 at 9:06 pm

And the proof that God loves physicists and mathematicians is that He gave them the easy problems.

Comments to When Philosophers Attack at Crooked Timber

[acommonplacepage]

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

Freeman Dyson quoting Enrico Fermi in A meeting with Enrico Fermi from Nature, 2004 January 22.

[acommonplacepage]

Unfortunately, after a bit of investigation, I’ve discovered that the random number-generating machine isn’t working quite yet — they promise me that tomorrow, when I ask the machine to pick a number between 1 and 10, it won’t give me 175.

Placebo by Annalee Newitz in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2004 February 25.

[acommonplacepage]

You know all those phrases that employers use in order to make the rejection seem less harsh? I used to scoff at them, and wonder why they couldn’t just say it straight. But now that I’m the one doing the rejecting, I found those stilted verbal constructions to be exactly what I needed.

Rejection Letters by Kimberley Burchett at About Kim, 2004 May 24

[acommonplacepage]

The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it.

This was not an unusual case.

How Microsoft Lost the API War by Joel Spolsky on Joel on Software

[acommonplacepage]

FP: Could you kindly expand a bit on the Narcissistic Personality Disorder and how you find it in Moore?

Hardy: Jason and I have the advantage here in that we are completely unbiased, since we have neither a background in psychiatry nor an opportunity to interview the patient.

Jamie Glazof interviewing David Hardy and Jason Clarke in FrontPage Magazine

[acommonplacepage]

Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science.

Under Which Lyre by W. H. Auden, 1946

[acommonplacepage]

Q: What about the fundamentals?

Madden: The company has divested assets to get out of debt.

Q: What assets?

Madden: They halved the number of employees.

Q: Oh, those assets.

Threats to Value by Sandra Ward in Barron’s, 2004 September 6

[acommonplacepage]

Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been the losing side in debates about software design. People only tend to use them to justify choices (inaction in particular) made for other reasons.

Better Bayesian Filtering by Paul Graham, 2003 January

[acommonplacepage]

Me: Monmouth please. Cabbie: Park? Me: No, University. Cabbie: Ah, another place of learning.

Bridge Street, Redbank, N.J., 2004 December 16

[acommonplacepage]

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling—the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

A Plea for Lean Software by Niklaus Wirth in IEEE Computer, 1995 February

[acommonplacepage]

C++, of course, excels at returning complex data types, but then the usual issues associated with returning objects must be dealt with. Who originates the object, who owns it, and where does it get destroyed? Do you copy it from place to place, or pass around a pointer or a reference to a single object?

Rich Error Information by John Calcote in C/C++ Users Journal, 2005 March

[acommonplacepage]

2 things were true: (1) the teacher was not too good and (2) the book was not too good. So I would always buy a half-dozen books on the topic and try to get the full picture by reading the same sections in each book. The combination helped me understand much more than the sum of the content. Also, I was never opposed to reading something as much as 10 times until I squeezed everything out of it.

Paul Graham quoting DF in More Advice for Undergrads

[acommonplacepage]

The editors succeed in making a diverse set of papers cohere by framing them in the two trends that have characterized banana scholarship: the first, comparative and macroeconomic; and the second based upon regional history and social dynamics.

Lisa Markowitz reviewing Banana Wars in Gastronomica, 2005 Spring