I always felt bothered about my superficial understanding of inode, hard and soft links in Linux. Here I attempt to structure my learnings into a simplified mental model. Corrections are welcome. What makes a file in Linux? At the storage … Read more
Yes: setf is entirely constructable within “ordinary” Lisp. There are two parts to the construction. Firstly, we need the name of the method that underlies a particular selector. It looks like a list – but it’s actually a symbol, constructed by setf … Read more
TL;DR: I am doing great and not going anywhere. Having some pressure but still holding up and trying to improve. Thank you and don’t worry! This is the 4th year since I have started doing Open Source. To be completely … Read more
It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting … Read more
Intro I’ve been programming in Clojure for a long time, but I haven’t been using transducers much. I learned to mechanically transform (into [] (map f coll)) to (into [] (map f) coll) for a slight performance gain, but not … Read more
I recently heard a phrase I love: Mental liquidity. It’s the ability to quickly abandon previous beliefs when the world changes or when you come across new information. It shouldn’t be controversial. But mental liquidity is so rare. Changing your … Read more
From the first time I wrote about Gen Z in 2015 (with Greg Lukianoff, in our Coddling essay) through my most recent discussion in a December interview with Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal, the main criticism I have … Read more
I’m around 40 and recently I have been asked to port an API from one language to another. The code I’m porting is average code, not terrible, but plenty of little things to complain about. I feel like my past … Read more
In late summer 1978, tensions broiled between then Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. For nearly two weeks, United States President Jimmy Carter and scores of advisors struggled to help the leaders reach an agreement that … Read more
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. … Read more