nico λ

Saying yes frequently is an additive strategy. Saying no is a subtractive strategy. Keep saying no to a lot of things - the negative and unimportant ones - and once in awhile, you will be left with an idea which is so compelling that it would be a screaming no-brainer 'yes'.

Foreman feared “an Internet-dependent population is being drained of its ‘inner repertory of dense cultural heritage’ by outsourcing all information and connection to a vast web that spreads us wide and thin and is accessed by the touch of a button.”

A powerful programming language is more than just a means for instructing a computer to perform tasks. The language also serves as a framework within which we organize our ideas about processes. Thus, when we describe a language, we should pay particular attention to the means that the language provides for combining simple ideas to form more... See more

Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace, make sure it’s appropriate for your context

There’s always a trade-off between implementation speed and how confident you are about correctness. So you should ask yourself: how okay is it to ship bugs in my current context? If the answer to this doesn’t affect the way you work, you’re... See more

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it... See more

When we dress our beliefs up in rational argument, we ironically end up constructing an iron-clad fantasy world. We convince ourselves that we’re immune to emotional appeal, that we alone have the pragmatic sobriety needed to see the situation clearly. But often all we’ve done is add a protective layer of reason around something that feels true.

"Since there is a callback function of this type, it is not efficient to do it by saying, "I have this object and set this value." If you define it as a whole, you need so much memory, because it is such a layout, can you not feel like it? So we decided to use the Snapshot features that V8 provided to make it more efficient. By the way, in pure V8,... See more

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that ” or rely on the fact... See more