Articles tagged “links”
Wednesday, 28 November, 2018 —
links
In The Hardest Program I’ve Ever Written – journal.stuffwithstuff.com, Bob Nystrom writes:
The hardest program I’ve ever written, once you strip out the whitespace, is 3,835 lines long. That handful of code took me almost a year to write. Granted, that doesn’t take into account the code that didn’t make it. The commit history shows that I deleted 20,704 lines of code over that time. Every surviving line has about three fallen comrades.
If it took that much thrashing to get it right, you’d expect it to do something pretty deep right? Maybe a low-level hardware interface or some wicked graphics demo with tons of math and pumping early-90s-style techno? A likely-to-turn-evil machine learning AI Skynet thing?
Nope. It reads in a string and writes out a string. The only difference between the input and output strings is that it modifies some of the whitespace characters. I’m talking, of course, about an automated code formatter.
This is an interesting walkthrough. In particular, I like the extra detail on paths pursued and later abandoned in the face of new information, new optimizations, or, particular code paths raising the Halting Problem.
Another element I appreciate here is Nystrom not trivializing the amount of work that went into the project.
Tuesday, 7 August, 2018 —
civics
links
Dylan Scott Writing for Vox:
Dr. Gajendra Singh walked out of his local hospital’s outpatient department last year, having been told an ultrasound for some vague abdominal pain he was feeling would cost $1,200 or so, and decided enough was enough. If he was balking at the price of a routine medical scan, what must people who weren’t well-paid medical professionals be thinking?
The India-born surgeon decided he would open his own imaging center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and charge a lot less. Singh launched his business in August and decided to post his prices, as low as $500 for an MRI, on a banner outside the office building and on his website.
There was just one barrier to fully realizing his vision: a North Carolina law that he and his lawyers argue essentially gives hospitals a monopoly over MRI scans and other services.
I hope Dr. Singh’s lawsuit succeeds. American healthcare in 2018 is supposed to be driven by consumerism. Call around to different providers and determine how much you’ll pay for quality care. Choose a provider based on wherever you want to land on the quality/price matrix that accepts your insurance and you’re golden, right?
No.
Healthcare is not a market. First, not all qualified players can join the market, as is the case here. That effectively prevents Dr. Singh (and others) from putting downward pressure on prices. Second, medical pricing isn’t necessarily discoverable, transparent or negotiable.
Wednesday, 25 July, 2018 —
development
links
Jorge Manrubia writes:
I remember thinking that Rails was focusing on the wrong target when DHH announced Turbolinks in 2012. My conviction back then was that offering an instant response time to user interactions was key to excellent UX. Because of network latency, such interactivity is only possible if you minimize your dependency on it and, instead, manage a lot of state on the client.
I thought this was necessary for the kinds of apps I was working on. And with that in mind, I tried many approaches and frameworks for implementing the same pattern: Single-page applications (SPA). I believed that the SPA wagon was the future™. A few years of experience later, I am not sure what the future is, but I really want to have an alternative.
This piece really spoke to me. There’s a wide world of possibility with JavaScript, front-end frameworks and Single Page Apps these days. JavaScript’s maturing and growth over the past few years are a fantastic story. What I’m less enthusiastic about is the complexity that seems to pervade front-end development work.
I think a lot of it is getting used to having these rich tools available to solve problems. I also think, in many cases, we’re over-applying these tools when simpler solutions would fit many problems better than the full framework Single Page App approach.
Monday, 1 January, 2018 —
links
civics
The team at Mapping Police Violence has released their 2017 report. The
report covers general statistics behind the 1,129 people killed by police
across the United States in 2017 with some effective visualizations.
Of note, the discrepancy in the number of killings against the number of
incidents where an officer was charged with a crime. Related are the number of
killings where a video record exists.
Sunday, 31 December, 2017 —
links
photography
Zed A. Shaw writes:
Photographing art turns out to be very difficult. You would think that you
could just point a camera on your phone at a piece of art and it would come
out correct. In fact if you’re at a museum it might actually work because the
museum controls the light that is on every painting. In my house though I do
not have high quality museum lights. What I have are crappy, yellow,
florescent, warm, and plain terrible lighting. So when I take a photo of my
paintings it usually comes out looking kind of like I took the photo under a
streetlamp.
I like this post as an example of explaining a problem by writing through the
thinking process to solve a problem. It’s not written as a professional
photographer, it’s written as a painter who needs to solve a photography problem.