Ryan Tomayko

Sayre's Law —

More general version of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (AKA “bike shedding”):

“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue.”

Via this HN comment thread discussing the tendency of both Ruby and Python hackers tend to favor their chosen language with vehemence.

WTF - Haml —

I love this so much:

… one way or another it seems I need something called EMACS.. WTF..!!!!! I dare you to install it and see how many WTFsss you will say…. it’s like some text editor that is so smart that you dont use the mouse dont even use the cursor keys..if you want to go back one character you hit control then B!!! Brilliant!!! two random keys instead of one with an arrow!!!! WWWTTTFFFF!! ok I might not need this crap…. lost a day learning to use the Rubik cube of text editors.

It’s easy to pfft and blow off this kind of … criticism, but if you can look past the make believe grammar and punctuation you really do get a sense for how hard it is for newbies to wrap their heads around even very basic set of tools needed to build things on the web. Maybe what we do is just hard and complex and there’s nothing we can do to make it simpler. I’m just always surprised when I get to peek through someone else’s eyes and see just how fucked up everything must seem.

Dean Allen on Human Identity —

In comments related to the recent shutdown of Favrd:

I’ve spent the past year or so reading and writing and doing my level best to chip away at 40 years of belief in the logical fallacy that one’s identity meaning – self-worth, self-image, whatever you want to call it – can accurately be measured in the thoughts of others. Much as you and I may enjoy being encouraged through recognition and praise and dislike being saddened by rejection or indifference (god knows we’re taught to right from the outset by caregivers: good boy, pretty picture, heckuva job Brownie), deriving personal value from these transactions in the absence of a well-formed internal frame of reference through which you can decide on your own what does and doesn’t work, and subsequently accept the opinions of others as feedback, is just plain faulty thinking, of the sort that makes otherwise capable, centred people all loopy and weird.

Disco.

25 And Over —

“If you have reached the age of 25, I have a bit of bad news for you, to wit: it is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest of us in the world.”

Very well done.

Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? —

“The reflexive reverence for Revolutionary Road is a testament to the degree to which antisuburban sentiment is one of the most unexamined attitudes in American culture.”

Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind —

“When the Texas Education Agency evaluated its Technology Immersion Pilot, a $14-million program to install wireless tools in middle schools, the conclusion was unequivocal: ‘There were no statistically significant effects of immersion in the first year on either reading or mathematics achievement.’”

Shaper_pmp explains the importance of pedantry —

“It also becomes a good-natured game. Think of it like golf. In golf you’re trying to hit the ball into the hole in fewer strokes than your opponent. In Pedantry Golf you’re trying to be more correct than your opponent, by correcting edge-cases, mistakes or assumptions in the previous post or statement (see also: Perl Golf).”

Notes From The Zeitgeist —

Koshi’s been hanging out at the legendary San Francisco dive bar, “The Zeitgeist,” every day for thirty days now; takes photo’s and blogs about the picnic table discussion.

Caganer —

“… the caganer is often tucked away in a corner of the model, typically nowhere near the manger scene. There is a good reason for his obscure position in the display, for ‘caganer’ translates from Catalan to English as ‘pooper’, and that is exactly what this little statue is doing — defecating.”

Not Being a Real Person —

“We’re born as unreal people but somehow get turned into respectable members of society with good cover stories.”

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus —

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.”

"All I need is a Programmer" —

Ethan Vizitei with a great piece on people’s misconceptions about what coders do and the difficulty with which they do it.

April First Reconsidered —

Interesting take on AFD as launch-crazy-but-legit-projects day. I didn’t use the Internet at all this AFD and sent everything in my reader to /dev/null. Now, I feel kind of bad. Sorry about that, internet.

20 Year Archive on Google Groups —

I’m apparently the last person on the internet to see this. The rise of internet culture as recorded on Usenet. It’s beautiful, really.

The recursive implementation of /bin/true —

This is why I love Unix.

Microsoft Boy Announces His School Homework —

“What is catching users' eyes? Legibility, correctness, conciseness…. the list goes on and on. Simply put, this history essay is a significant release for me – one that builds on all of the great things that I was able to deliver last year […]”

“The Bug Count Also Rises” by John Browne —

“Hernando who worked down the hall and who was large with microbrews came to him and told him that the ship day was upon them but the bugs were not yet out. The bugs which were always there even when you were in Cafes late at night sipping a …”

The Speed-up Loop [thedailywtf.com] —

“Nothing – and I mean nothing – in IT takes less than 80 hours, and whatever you think it’ll actually take, multiply it by 20, and tell management that. You see, 80/20.”

War Breaks Out Between Hackers and Scientology -- There Can Be Only One —

“… people of the Internet, the YTMNDers, trolls of the world, the GameFAQs members, the eBaumers; us old time Internet users, and the newest of noobs, the YouTubers and MySpacers, must band together for a fight that transcends our differences …” :)

How Software Companies Die —

Orson Scott Card: “You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can’t exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they’re not looking, you can carry off the honey.”

I need a woman who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix —

“Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family.”

The Right and Lawful Rood —

… the primary activity depicted here is standards development, particularly the historically mandated procedure for determining the linear measurement known as the “rood”, related to the English “rod”, the German “rute” and the Danish “rode”.

Merriam-Webster name "w00t" 2007 Word of the Year —

w00t!

The Nerd Handbook —

“Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface …”

adamssl on anonymity —

Now this is an interesting theory on John Gabriel’s GIFWT.

Why I Hate Mission Statements —

“The easy and fun way to test whether a mission statement/purpose/motto is garbage is to negate it and see whether it still holds up.”

Programming Can Ruin Your Life —

“You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.” Aye!

Hawking on the Simpsons —

Ha!

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal —

An oldy but goody :)

3D Mailbox - FREE 3-Dimensional Email Software. Bring e-mail to life! (And put spam to death!) —

This just ruined my day. I’m going home. Absolutely horrible. Just horrible.

Understanding Engineers: Feasibility [fishbowl.pastiche.org] —

Programmer definitions of impossible, unfeasible, trivial, non-trivial, hard, very hard, and distinctly non-trivial.

Evolution of a Python programmer —

“Web designer” is dead on :)

Does Linux "Fail To Think Across Layers?" [slashdot.org] —

Slashdot has become a horrible discussion forum for most topics. Disk theory and UNIX sysadmin type stuff is an exception, though. This story on ZFS might have the most informational comments I’ve seen in years.

The Day Digg Went Crazy —

“It’s a mutiny of sorts.”

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 [google.com] —

“Results 1 – 10 of about 283,000 for 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0” – This is officially the craziest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet (with the exception of the Hasselhoffian Recursion).

Define - /etc? —

“et see” :)

your clever screen name is not clever —

“There’s a time and place for a penis decal on your forehead and the Monday morning staff meeting is not it.”

Lines From Alanis Morissette's "Ironic," Modified to Actually Make them Ironic —

“A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break… at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco corporate offices in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”

Chuck Norris Facts —

“Guns don’t kill people, Chuck Norris kills people” :)

George Washington's Rules of Civility —

Nice.

"George Bush doesn't care about black people" —

The realness a major emergency creates is soooo refreshing.

Jon Stewart's ('84) Commencement Address —

“Not everybody can wander around in an alcoholic haze and then at 40 just, you know, decide to be president.”

All your base are belong to us —

The original european zero-wing introduction followed by a load of AYBABTU spottings in teh wild..

... All Your Base Rhapsody —

oh hell no.