Today's post is a simple question. Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two children, and one of them is a girl. What are the odds that person has a boy and a girl? Consider your answer carefully, without doing a
In a recent Joel on Software forum post Thinking of Leaving the Industry, one programmer wonders if software development is the right career choice in the face of broad economic uncertainty: After reading the disgruntled posts here from long time programmers and hearing so much about ageism and outsourcing, I&
If you’re at all familiar with computer history, you might have heard of Bill Gates’ famous 1976 letter to the Homebrew Computer Club. The letter was written to address rampant piracy of Bill ’s earliest product, Altair BASIC, which was being passed around quite freely by hobbyists in paper
I was thrilled to discover that Santa Claus left a little unexpected present on my doorstep on Christmas Eve: the two Lenovo ThinkServers that I ordered for stackoverflow.com [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/server/]! They weren't supposed to arrive until sometime next week. I immediately began unboxing
Does anyone remember the Turbo Button from older IBM PC models? A leftover from machines of five to ten years ago, the turbo switch still remains on many cases, even though it serves no purpose. In the early days of the PC, there was only IBM, and there were only
I was going to post another edition of Gifts for Geeks, as I did in 2006 and 2007, but my heart's just not in it this year. I don't know if it's the global economic apocalypse, or what, but I'm having a
Given the rapid advance of Moore's Law [https://blog.codinghorror.com/moores-law-in-practical-terms/], when does it make sense to throw hardware at a programming problem? As a general rule, I'd say almost always. Consider the average programmer salary [http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Sr._Software_
Are you familiar with the uncanny valley? No, not that uncanny valley. Well, on second thought, yes, that uncanny valley. In 1978, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something interesting: The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. If
Ever since creating my first home theater PC, I've archived my Netflix rental DVDs to files on the hard drive. I don't do this because I want to rip off the movie industry; I do it for convenience. It's easier to deal with a
I was fascinated to discover the auction hybrid site swoopo.com [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoopo] (previously known as telebid.com). It's a strange combination of eBay, woot, and slot machine. Here's how it works [http://www.swoopo.com/new.html]: * You purchase bids in
Inspiration for Stack Overflow occasionally comes from the unlikeliest places. Have you ever heard of the dating website, Plenty of Fish? Markus Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site
Although I've never been more than a bush league hacker (at best), I was always fascinated with the tales from the infamous hacker zine 2600. I'd occasionally discover scanned issues in BBS ASCII archives, like this one, and spend hours puzzling over the techniques and information