October 5, 2016 by Chris on Web Bookmarks

Bookmarks for October 5th

Never accept a counter-offer – Vardan Torosyan’s Blog –
Postgres full-text search is Good Enough (2015) | Hacker News –
Ask HN: How do you get people to use your product when you suck at networking? | Hacker News –
Excerpts from Digital Restoration, First Edition –
Photos Restored Digitally by Ctein –
Writing For Half-Life – Marc Laidlaw – PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake that sort of thing. The title of this file was “CGDCTALK” but I don’t remember ever giving a talk anywhere until years later, after the success of HL2. It might have been published somewhere (perhaps near Geoff Keighley’s piece on The Last Hours of Half-Life), but if so it was probably edited, and there might be some value in the unedited braindump. If this was indeed written right as we shipped the game, then I would not be surprised if it conflicts with things I’ve said in decades since. But the guy writing this little article was there, and his memory is much better than the old guy writing this preface, so I’d be inclined to believe him over me.
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The Half Life Saga Story Guide –
GitHub – Gargron/mastodon: A GNU Social-compatible microblogging server –

September 5, 2016 by Chris on Web Bookmarks

Bookmarks for September 4th through September 5th

These are my links for September 4th through September 5th:

August 19, 2016 by Chris on Web Bookmarks

July 25, 2016 by Chris on Web Bookmarks

These are my links for July 24th through July 25th:

July 11, 2016 by Chris on Web Bookmarks

These are my links for July 20th through July 24th:

Ask HN: Best-architected open-source business applications worth studying? | Hacker News -
Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures | Hacker News -
The language of choice - Propositional logic was discovered by Stoics around 300 B.C., only to be abandoned in later antiquity and rebuilt in the 19th century by George Boole’s successors. One of them, Charles Peirce, saw its significance for what we now call logic circuits, yet that discovery too was forgotten until the 1930s. In the ’50s John McCarthy invented conditional expressions, casting the logic into the form we’ll study here; then in 1986 Randal Bryant repeated one of McCarthy’s constructions with a crucial tweak that made his report “for many years the most cited paper in all of computer science, because it revolutionized the data structures used to represent Boolean functions” (Knuth).1 Let’s explore and code up some of this heritage of millennia, and bring it to bear on a suitable challenge: playing tic-tac-toe.
Then we’ll tackle a task that’s a little more practical: verifying a carry-lookahead adder circuit. Supposedly logic gets used all the time for all kinds of serious work, but for such you’ll have to consult the serious authors; what I can say myself, from working out the code to follow, is that the subject offers a fun playground plus the most primitive form of the pun between meaning and mechanism.

You’re encouraged to read with this article’s code cloned and ready