Posts

Jacob Kaplan-Moss on who you let commit code to your projects: What’d you do the day you started your job? Got a little tour. Found your desk. Some HR paperwork. Figured out the network. Set up your new company machine. Got your VPN credentials. And got your commit access to the company’s source control. Normal first day procedure, I know. And yet, that day-one-commit-bit is one of the starkest differences between the corporate and the open source development model. ...

Here it is in terms any Republican or Democrat can understand, courtesy of Congressional Budget Office director Doug Elmendorf (via Ezra Klein): The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services.

Everybody’s posting about this, but if you haven’t gotten a chance to play, definitely do so. Slate did some digging into what we can learn from Google’s search suggestions, and the results are fascinating. Via Marginal Revolution (among others).

Ezra Klein on the future of health care reform: Failure does not bring with it a better chance for future success. It brings a trimming of future ambitions.

Fairly often I find myself writing complex boolean expressions. For example, let’s say I’m writing a function in a controller that renders a page, and I want to check whether the current user is authorized to view that page. Here’s some code: if ((!($a || $b)) && $c != $d) || !$e) { // Do something. } Aside from the variable names, that’s real code. There are two things about that code that to me greatly hinder readability. I rewrote it as essentially the following: ...

tawawa.org has done some research into early blogs, making the argument that attributing the sources for links was the spark that ignited the blogging phenomenon: The blogosphere arose on 24 April 1998. On that day Steve Bogart made the announcement that he was adopting Jorn Barger’s recent practice of attributing the source of the links he was posting to his weblog. Barger’s innovation of crediting the origin of his outbound pointers, adopted by Bogart first and by many others afterwards, infused an earlier, mostly dormant network with a dynamic it had previously lacked, turning the aspiration of a self-aware social medium into the reality of such a medium. ...

I’ve seen a somewhat common piece of bad analysis I’ve seen over the past week, and have been surprised to see people correct it. As you may know, the House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill last night, 220 to 215. 39 Democrats voted against it. The fact that the Democrats couldn’t get everyone on board is being treated as a flaw in their strategy when in fact I’m sure their leadership sees it as the key. The bill passed in the House will be merged with whatever bill is passed in the Senate, and that’s the bill both the House and Senate will vote on again to be sent to the President for signature. ...

I ran across a guest post at Smart Football this morning when I was trawling around looking for more takes on UH’s ridiculous last second 46-45 win over Tulsa last night that I think applies to just about any field as well as it applies to football coaching. The piece is a provocative argument about how to implement offensive schemes in football, but it could just as easily apply to adopting agile development practices on a software development team. Here’s the part that really resonated with me: ...

Greg Knauss describes the beauty of life in the Internet era. It’s a great piece of writing, go read it.

This is courtesy of Felix Salmon, in a brief history of former heads of Goldman Sachs: Paulson seems to have spent a large amount of the crisis throwing up in his office bathroom, and even into Nancy Pelosi’s wastebin. Of course, he couldn’t simply go see a doctor, like the rest of us, because he’s a Christian Scientist. Similarly, he hobbled his ability to communicate by refusing to ever touch email: instead, any time he wanted to say anything to anybody he’d have to do so over the phone or in person. No wonder he was semi-permanently hoarse, and his phone records are insane. ...