joshuago’s Bookmarks

An accessible overview to help you keep Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke straight in your head. Includes a nice introduction to the philosophy of John Rawls, too; the Scandinavian political system and expectations are modeled after ideas put forth by Rawls.

Learning depends on reading as a practice of immersion in thought and feeling.

Software is eating much of the value chain of industries that are widely viewed as primarily existing in the physical world.

Problem is, every last part of the web-application stack will fight you on your quest towards UTF-8 purity. What follows is a playbook to win your pervasive-UTF-8 battle.

Practice deliberately. Get back to basics. Put down your ego and specifically concentrate on the areas where you make the most mistakes.

We’re used to thinking of competitive advantage coming from a Eureka-innovation like Google’s PageRank, but the most lasting advantage comes from a million incremental improvements in an operationally intensive business. And there are thousands of opportunities to get operationally intensive.

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.

Long-term, jobs can only come through education, training and investment in regions of the country that are not IT centers. No quick fix.

Being bored is awesome. Savor it. "My creativity flourished because of the soul-crushing boredom of my childhood."

A tutorial on those aspects of floating-point that have a direct impact on designers of computer systems.