chillpenguin

Very cool, thanks for the suggestion!

+1 for Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger. It was eye-opening for me because it really made me understand the unix philosophy of composing programs out of smaller programs.

Can you give more info on "algebras"? I think I have heard the word used in this way before, but I don't exactly understand the meaning.

I could be wrong, but I think the OP was asking about "CS Theory" meaning the branch of computer science that deals with the theory of computation. Turing Machines, Automata, The Halting Problem, etc. Although those things are all old. I'm not sure what's new, so I can't answer his question.

I agree. But regarding

> I can't think of many more elegant ways to convert a list of ints to floats, in any language, than `[float(i) for i in integerlist]`.

I think something like `integerlist.map(float)` is at least a contender.

I agree, those animations were way too fast. I'm only 30 so it's probably not an age thing!

I once heavily considered becoming a Surveyor for similar reasons. Uses math + computer skills, but you get to spend time outdoors.

Honestly that doesn't surprise me haha

Nothing beats "Hackers" (1995) imo. Since you've already seen that, I think you've already experienced the best we have to offer, unfortunately.

In terms of books, I liked Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon". It was written in 1999 and really captures the 90s startup culture, and has some cool hacker scenes. The detail is good too, where the author even explains the specific unix commands that are being executed in some scenes (such as grep).

I feel you. My interest in video games is what led me to getting into computers and becoming the software developer I am today. But the fact is, as you said, it takes away from other things including relationships. In low doses is probably fine, but the risk is that you are kidding yourself about how much time you actually spend. If you really can manage low doses, good for you! But many of us end up spending more time than we care to admit, and that is when it is a problem. Although, as you raise your standards for how your time should be spent, even 1 hour a day of video games might sound like a lot. You could be building relationships, or reading great literature for example.

For me personally, it works best if I cut video games out completely.

Anyone know of a comparable program for macOS?

Just read Cyptonomicon (the only Stephenson book I have read so far) and was thinking about what to read next, so this post was timely for me :)

I would say you should work on things that will have a bigger impact. Some things might be fun/interesting but the impact will be extremely low (or none at all).

Another tip is to vigilantly avoid time wasting traps like instagram, facebook, video games, pointless youtube videos, etc. This will give you a LOT more time to pursue other things.

But yeah, this is a tough burden for us to bear. I mean, it is literally the oldest problem in human existence: our short time on this earth. It reminds me of a song from ancient Greece (literally the oldest surviving complete musical composition)[1]:

  While you live, shine
  have no grief at all
  life exists only for a short while
  and Time demands his due.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph

At my university the compilers course was optional. I always thought it was weird that such a foundational part of computing was an elective. We did have to take an OS course though!

Croquet's Greenlight app has the canvas idea in a web app. Also it is multi-user. Worth checking out.

Fitting with your list, I would add the Croquet team, who are continuing Engelbart's legacy of collaborative multi-user software. Some of them are on twitter as well.

Agreed! I also use it frequently in my wiki (I use TiddlyWiki).

Great paper, a classic. I assigned this as reading to my students. A worthwhile exercise is to try to refute the core idea regarding "essential" vs "accidental" complexity. You may find you end up disagreeing with him! But that is why I like this paper so much. Agree or disagree, it makes you think, and it's worth thinking about.

I use BrowserParrot for this. Works really well.

https://www.browserparrot.com/

I recommend "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop. It is excellent (and recommended by Alan Kay himself).

Fractals, Visualization and J By Clifford Reiter

I don't know if you have seen, but the old Croquet team is back: https://www.croquet.io/

This is great! The couple cards I generated were spot-on in terms of what felt like a realistic mtg card.

Some things won't work out of the box if your shell isn't posix compliant. For example, I once installed Ocaml, and its installer assumed my shell was posix, so some of the commands broke (I forgot the exact details now). Also NVM (node version manager) doesn't work with fish (or at least at the time).

Sometimes there are alternatives or workarounds, but the fact is that using fish does come with that downside. Doesn't come up often, but it is annoying when it does come up.

I like fish btw, just saying that I disagree with your "no reason to continue using zsh" comment. I use zsh because I was fed up with random things breaking due to not having a posix shell. And zsh can be customized to have most of the niceties of fish anyway. But it is pretty cool how fish comes with so many niceties out of the box!

The TLDR for how a bond that continues to pay interest forever can be valued at less than infinity dollars is due to the "time value of money", which states that $X in the future is worth less than $X today. This makes sense intuitively if you consider that if you had that money today, you could invest it and earn interest on it.

So since money in your hands is worth more than that same amount of money in the future, you can actually calculate how much a future cash flow is worth today by discounting it to its present value ("discounted cash flow" aka DCF).

To bring it back to perpetual bonds, if you DCF all of the future cash flows to their present value, you actually get a finite number (due to the diminishing nature of the cash flows that are further and further in the future).

For those who want to learn this in more detail, I recommend MIT's OCW course "Finance Theory I" with Andrew Lo.

Yes I agree, the writing is superb. I found out about it from Alan Kay, and so far every book Kay has recommended has been really good (you can find his reading lists easily online).

I use and recommend Brave. People should definitely stop using Chrome imo due to the privacy concerns.

Edit: the reason I use Brave over firefox is largely because firefox drained my battery and always turned on the fans on my macbook last time I tried it. Things might be better now but I've settled in on Brave and am happy with it.

In terms of computing history, The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop is incredibly good.

In terms of "how computers work" I agree with others who recommended Elements of Computing Systems (aka nand2tetris).

I could be wrong because I don't know much about Leibniz's monads, but aren't those a completely different thing from Haskell monads?

I don't just mean "slightly different" like how arrays in javascript are slightly different than arrays in C. I mean like they are completely different ideas/concepts that happen to share the same word. I think "Homonym" is the right word for this situation?

I had burnout before and I took an entire year off. It definitely helped. That might sound extreme, and probably I could have taken less time off with similar results, but that's what happened.

So yeah, I recommend taking time off. Maybe a lot.