Thank you for sharing Mike Hoye's "Citation Needed" (which documents the strange-but-true origin of the programming-language convention of array indices starting at zero, instead of one.)
A piece of writing born of someone's realization that nobody else has investigated this,as with "Citation Needed." Part of that magicalness comes from the novelty of the discovery, which, in the hands of a good writer, will be unfolded for the reader so that it feels like they could have discovered it, too. Another part of the magicalness is the same feeling one gets when one reads about an archaelogical or historical find from the unlikeliest of places: you mean we didn't know?! As you said in your reply, so much of computing history is being lost to time every day.
Is it correct to say that a type system needs to implement dependent types if it is to allow the expression of an integer that can only decrease? The goal would be to define a type R Integer such that a function R Integer -> R Integer would only compile if the Integer inside the output value was equal or less to the one inside the input.
From September 2019 through October 2020, I catalogued the rarest syllables of Modern Standard Mandarin. Occasional notetaking turned into a systematic search, and I believe this list is close to complete. To the best of my knowledge I am the first to compile much of this information -- but perhaps others have done so, somewhere beyond the reach of my search-fu.
During this investigation, I was specifically concerned with syllables which are rare regardless of which tone they are pronounced in. This meant that even certain uncommon tone-syllable pairings were not rare enough for me; for instance, only two characters are pronounced qiong in fourth tone, but qiong was not eligible for my list because there are many other characters pronounced qiong across the other three tones.
What do you get when you put 10 website geeks in a room? Exactly what you might expect: lively conversation about unconventional uses for RSS feeds, "retro grouching" about old-school UNIX tools, and spitballing of potential session topics for IndieWebCamp 2020 East, coming up on November 14th and 15th. Here are the collaborative public notes we took during our discussion.