Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .

It's fairly common for programmers to expect that hardware will solve all their problems, and then, when that doesn't happen, pass the issue onto the user, explaining why the programmer need't do anything to help the user. A question one might ask is how much performance improvement programmers have given us. There are cases of algorithmic improvements that result in massive speedups but, as we noted above, Discourse, the fastest growing forum software today, seems to have given us an approximately `1000000x` slowdown in performance.

How Web Bloat Impacts Users With Slow Connections

danluu.com

When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built [Lisp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_%28programming_language%29) (1960) and [APL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29) (1966) and [sketchpad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad) (1963). With over 5 million programmers today, the best we can do is Rust and React.

I Hereby Pardon All Junior Engineers

Taylor Troesh

History is mostly the study of surprising events. But it is often used by investors and economists as an unassailable guide to the future. Do you see the irony? Do you see the problem? It is smart to have a deep appreciation for economic and investing history. History helps us calibrate our expectations, study where people tend to go wrong, and offers a rough guide of what tends to work. But it is not, in any way, a map of the future.

The Psychology of Money

Morgan Housel

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