joshuago’s Bookmarks

It would be good if more women got in the habit of raising their hands and saying “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” no matter how many people that behavior upsets.

The appeal of bundling is partly that it reduces transaction costs: instead of having to figure out how much each part of a package is worth to you, you can make a blanket judgment. Bundling eliminates the problem of fretting about small expenditures, which may be one reason that flat-rate pricing is very common in the vacation industry. It also offers what economists call option value: you may never watch those sixty other channels, but the fact that you could if you wanted to is worth something. Many consumers also perceive bundles as bargains; getting a bunch of things for one price feels like a deal, even when it’s not.

The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?

An example of how a Presenter helps keep controllers thin, especially when an action needs to pull up objects of many different kinds of models using different criteria.

When McCain surrendered to Palin, it was his last - and unintended - blow to a sane or responsible conservatism. Non-believing people have a hard time swallowing all this. It seems so wacko. Religious people who have had any experience of fundamentalism in their lives know it all too well.

Journalism is not a particularly esteemed profession, but its capacity to bear witness remains one of its more redeeming attributes. In the field during a natural disaster of this scale, you do feel at times ghoulish and intrusive upon both the grief of survivors and in relation to the more directly useful efforts of rescuers and humanitarian relief workers. And yet all of those classes of participants in the crisis will recognize, most of the time, that journalism helpfully amplifies their own condition or potential.

A proposal for a better way to learn, as explained through the analogy of learning to draw. Don't learn by tracing: find (or invent) those pencil structures. Seeing the pencil lines makes the idea become your own: you can modify it, combine it with others, or just appreciate it at a deeper level. And that's the joy of learning.

America may one day be lucky enough to experience its very own national fiscal crisis. Let us hope it is not wasted.

Duntemann starts at the beginning -- the real beginning -- and explains what computers are and what they do. Assembly language must take the hardware into account (at least as far as memory addressing is concerned) so he talks at length about the Intel/AMD x86 hardware architecture. When he finally gets down to teaching assembly language itself, the emphasis is on memory addressing. If you know where your operands are, you're three quarters of the way to anywhere else you might want to go.

How to get inheritable class attributes working properly with parent classes and subclasses. A pretty involved process necessary for getting around the obvious approach, which does not work.