On Moore's Law

It is not a law.

It never was a law.

An observation is all that it ever was, or a prediction, but not a law.

And surprise, it does not hold true anymore.

The best code review comment ever

I just wrote a code review comment that I feel particularly smug about.

The code I was reviewing:

class PointClouds ...

My comment:

Testana: A better way of running tests

Abstract:

A software testing tool is presented, which uses dependency analysis to greatly optimize the process of running tests.

On the evolutionary origin of reasoning

Biological anthropologists generally agree that humans evolved reasoning to facilitate hunting together as a group; however, there are many other species that hunt in packs, and yet reasoning is unique to humans. Therefore, in order to explain reasoning, it is not enough to consider how it was beneficial to us; we also need to consider what enabled reasoning to emerge specifically in humans as opposed to any other species.

I have a hypothesis which attempts to explain how this happened.

Continuous Code Quality Improvement

While working on code in the context of a certain task, a programmer often discovers some preexisting quality issue. When this happens, there is a choice to be made:

• Fix the quality issue on the spot, and commit the fix in the context of the task at hand; or:
• Only make changes that are strictly necessary for the task at hand, and introduce a separate task for fixing the quality issue.

The 'gay gene' paradox

What causes homosexuality? The predominant understanding is that the causes are genetic, but this seems to be in conflict with the notion of natural selection: an individual who does not reproduce is a dead-end for the genes that they carry; therefore, the 'gay gene' should have gone extinct. A number of hypotheses have been proposed, attempting to resolve this paradox, but they are not very convincing. In this post I present a couple of my own hypotheses, which I believe do a better job at resolving the paradox.

«Είμαι του Γρηγόρη.»

Just one of those Greek things. Nothing here, move on.