joshuago’s Bookmarks

Commander’s Intent is a simple goal made at the beginning of an engagement that holds throughout, no matter if the situation changes. Instead of describing in detail a step-by-step, day-by-day strategy of how your battalion is going to take over the mountaintop from the enemy as the initial conditions might suggest, you simply say “We will take control of the mountaintop within ten days.”

It is a rare company that realizes it is time to fire the CEO when the financials are good but the business is fundamentally heading for a cliff.

Excellent backgrounder on the U.S. financial reform bill of 2009-2010.

Significant AI breakthroughs come from identifying or creating new sources of data, not inventing new algorithms.

In programming as in the rest of life, attitude trumps intelligence. It is in the crucible of practical problems that great new ideas can form.

For men the holy grail is within reach – you just need to get fit, and then you'll be fine; then you can think about something else. But the messages aimed at women are much more complex and confusing.

The strange phenomenon that's destroying Latin America.

If you want to dramatically increase your programming skills you need to be reading other people’s code.

In the public sector, the "consumer" often has little choice... so-called "market discipline" is a lot more diffuse when you have a former-schoolteacher-or-real-estate-broker-turned city councilman whose job it is to disburse a multi-million-dollar street-paving contract. And neither the schoolteacher nor the real-estate broker has any clue how to write or evaluate a road-paving contract.

A good survey of good, non-mainstream but powerful programming languages. Gives overview of Haskell, Scala, Standard ML, OCaml, and Scheme.