joshuago’s history Bookmarks

Mercurial decided to solve the performance problem by developing a specialized storage format: Revlog. Every file is made up of an index and a data file. Git takes the opposite approach: file blobs. To store revisions quickly, each new file revision is a complete copy of the file.

Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich. It is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power.

Being awash in money blinded Yahoo to the fact that their revenue model was precarious and unsustainable. Being ambivalent about being a technology company and considering programmers a commodity led to the hiring of mediocre programmers, which then resulted in products that weren't very good.

Trigonometry made fun, with stories drawn from history.

Comparative discussion of how native tribes in Canada and Polynesia are dealing with the influx of industrially processed food. Includes anecdote about navigating the seas not with a compass or using the stars, but with one's nutsack.

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power.

Former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, his struggle to build a thriving nation on a resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.

Up and down society, people are moving away from commercial, productive activities and toward pleasant, enlightened but less productive ones.

The tension between good and plenty, God and mammon, became the central tension in American life, propelling ferocious energies and explaining why the U.S. is at once so religious and so materialist. Americans are moral materialists, spiritualists working on matter.

Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.