In Seeing Like A State ¹ the author discusses how the state necessarily “makes legible” its people and resources — and in doing so necessarily loses information. The author in particular focuses on what is termed " high modernism" which is defined as the ability to design and operate the state. the book then becomes primarily around failed state planning. These are some thoughts I have about the content. It isn’t a summary but more of some weakly held thoughts.

As a general rule, we try to not believe things without sufficient evidence. What defines sufficient evidence is complicated. ¹

However, not everything can be discovered via direct comparison, randomised trials, or similar efforts.

Software Engineering is its own discipline and trying to directly transplant, e.g. medical research techniques aren’t conducive to generating understanding. "It needs to be studied with tools that borrow as much from the social and cognitive sciences as they do from the mathematical theories of computation."

Sometimes things are so useful, or so obvious, that you won’t find research supporting the claim. For example, no evidence that parachutes actually prevent death from falling exists. ² In fact, in one study, it was shown that parachutes do not reduce injury above a normal backpack. ³

All the failing features, all the failing features
All the failing features, all the failing features
All the failing features, all the failing features
All the failing features
Now put your PR up

Up in the day, we just broke release
I’m doing my own little thing
Decided to skip and now you wanna see
Cause another feature depended on me
I released a change, he released a change
Don’t pay it any attention
Just marked it deprecated, for three good years
Ya can’t be mad at me

Intro

A common piece of programming advice is only have a single return statement. This is sometimes called the ‘Single Return Law’. It is even codified in some coding standards such as MISRA C ^{1 2}.

The goal of a post-mortem is an opportunity for a team (or the broader organisation) to learn as much as they can, in a relatively short period of time, about how people normally perceive and perform their work. This is because the people involved were in their normal work when the incident happened. Questions should focus on the ways that the organization prevents this sort of event from happening all the time, not by asking what allowed this singular event to happen.

Over the last year or two I’ve been on a bit of a kick of reading the original sources for several common CS (or other) topics. You’d be surprised about how many ‘oft quoted’ concepts don’t have the origin you’d expect.

There is an old joke:

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.

Which I found at the above quoted ‘guppylake’ website¹. However, when I found the CSCW ‘92² scan of the same article the quote itself is missing (and the text differs in other slight ways as well). All other references to the quote drastically postdate both of the previous references.

Code review and CI/CD are one the few practices with actual empirical support.

Meta Comment

This post was written in reply to a specific post discussing removing code reviews entirely.

If you set your HTTP proxy to theoldnet.com with port 1999, and add an exclusion for web.archive.org, then all your web pages will come from 1999, via the Wayback Machine. You can pick a different year by changing the port.

Example

$http_proxy=theoldnet.com:1996 no_proxy=web.archive.org curl http://nintendo.com

Source

LeoPanthera. (2024, January 19). Comment on ‘Surf the web like it’s 1999’ [Comment]. Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39058806

Recusal motions for judicial bias were unknown at common law in England, and none would exist in federal courts until 1911. There was no standard of appearance of partiality, and none would exist in federal courts until 1974.

Source

Reginald Alleyne. (2003). Arbitrators’ Fees: The Dagger in the Heart of Mandatory Arbitration for Statutory Discrimination Claims. 6. page 35-37

“The Annotated Turing” by Charles Petzold ¹

Many of us have learned about ‘Turing Machines’ or ‘Turing Completeness’ but have never actually read the motivating text and explanation. This is a phenomenal book that goes through paragraph by paragraph the paper “On Computable Numbers” ² by Alan Turing in a rigorous way explaining the concept intuitively and completely. Not only does it explain the text, but it also gives enough background so that one could understand and follow through the proofs themselves. It is well written and clear without feeling like a textbook. It is divided into fours sections: