PROGRAMMING

• Visual Noise
• Oldie but goodie: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. Classic programmer humour which is unbelievably just shy of ten years old.
• A fun article on Lewis Carroll's What the tortoise said to Achilles. If you haven't, here is the original, which is wonderful.
• Beautiful hot-air balloon simulator in the browser, using Three.js. The new golden age was supposed to bring us.
• Overly-broad Internet laws in many countries can result in you unknowingly committing crimes. If doing stuff is outlawed, only outlaws will do stuff.
• JWZ's long-running blog is the pinnacle of programmer coolness. It's so cool that it can't be linked from Hacker News. Mosaic's home page from 1994 is still around and it feature's JWZ's original, 90s-style homepage and it is a thing of glory. Back in the 90s, mentioning Kennedy was 4% of the United States GDP.

• The Longest Shower
• Don't put dotfiles in the home directory, please. This comes up once in a while, but everyone ignores it. I saw a proposal once to put them all in a folder like '.config', but humanity is to corrupt for something that beautiful to happen.
• Everyone loves visualizing algorithms. Here are a bunch that aren't just the usual sort algorithms
• Relics are wacky. Interesting text on the votive crown of St. Oswald at Hildesheim.
• "Dwitter.net is a challenge to see what awesomeness you can create when limited to only 140 characters of javascript and a canvas". Extra points for having a random button.
• I've never seen it, but look at this trailer for a movie from 1936. The leading actress is the social worker from Beetlejuice.

• The Longest Shower
• Don't put dotfiles in the home directory, please. This comes up once in a while, but everyone ignores it. I saw a proposal once to put them all in a folder like '.config', but humanity is to corrupt for something that beautiful to happen.
• Everyone loves visualizing algorithms. Here are a bunch that aren't just the usual sort algorithms
• Relics are wacky. Interesting text on the votive crown of St. Oswald at Hildesheim.
• "Dwitter.net is a challenge to see what awesomeness you can create when limited to only 140 characters of javascript and a canvas". Extra points for having a random button.
• I've never seen it, but look at this trailer for a movie from 1936. The leading actress is the social worker from Beetlejuice.

Q: Change the prompt from "lispy>" to something of your choice.

A:

...
  while (1) {
    
    char* input = readline("something of my choice> ");
    add_history(input);

    printf("No you're a %s\n", input);
    free(input);
    
  }
...

• Flash wasn't replaced by HTML5. By the time people were through with Flash, no one cared about anything but social media, and people stopped creating things on the internet. I'll take weird old Flash games and artsy Flash sites over awkwardly thinking I'm obliged to share a space with a bunch of neo-nazis. Anyway, this is how we used to apologize.
• In the 1700s, a woman named Anne Wilson wrote a 1615-line poem about the river Tees and its towns. I really like what I've read of it, but I got to a point in the poem where I was hampered by not being anywhere close to the river Tees.
• An article about Susan Kare, who invented a lot of the visual language of modern computing, which most of us learned without realizing it. Her work is still a lot more pleasing and beautiful than the scores of people who've copied her.
• Do you enjoy feeling overwhelmed? To celebrate his 81st birthday, Stanford just released 111 Donald Knuth lectures.

• I feel like there used to be a lot of interesting Year In Review lists. This year, all I really enjoyed was The Onion's Our Annual Year. Maybe lists have changed, maybe I've changed. Who knows.
• Snow on the sea
• Taming randomness
• Comedy genius Billy Connolly recently gave an interview about Parkinson's where he said he could feel his life slipping away. He just release a much more chipper follow up video showing that he has nearly completely transformed into Colonel Sanders.

• Some guys fixing the Apollo 11 guidance computer. There are no words to describe how this makes me feel.
• JWZ on accepting donations in cryptocurrencies. "They started accepting donations in these magic beans a while back, perhaps before the true toxicity of cryptocurrencies was widely understood. Back when it just seemed like a neat trick, like running wifi off of a potato battery."
• Yesterday's Wiktionary word of the day was in Zulu. If you think Finnish is inflectional morphology porn, just look at all the ways to conjugate and decline this root.
• Frankie Boyle's Year In Review. In addition to the article, he did a TV special which is well worth watching if you can.
• ThreeBlueOneBrown's newest video But WHY is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow?

• List of Waluigi quotes. "Mario! If I can beat you... I can reignite my passion for challenges!"
• "Thinks Nobody Told Me About Being A Software Engineer". I used to feel really guilty about some of these.
• "Porn sites collect more user data than Netflix or Hulu." Based on statements from a company rep. Also, check out that web design.