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Idealog

A collection of 24 issues

npm fund

In November 2019, npm introduced the npm fund command. If you've run npm install recently, you've seen the gentle reminder: "4 packages are looking for funding. Run npm fund for details." As npm’s former CEO, Isaac Schlueter, noted, maintainers have historically had “very

From Vibe Coding Assistants to Coding Assistants

Modern coding assistants often firehose code: a single prompt yields pages of plausible implementation that the developer must reverse‑engineer, reconcile with project conventions, and defend in review. That behavior is optimized for vibe coding—outputs that look complete and fluent—rather than for actual coding, where teams must understand,

Reading Readers' Needs

With Gaurav Gandhi The books people pick to learn from often fail them. All too often, the book has intimidating jargon, or the examples are irrelevant to the reader, or there is too much duplication. Or the content is just wrong. Readers make poor choices about books because finding a

Cracking the Code: Addressing Some of the Challenges in Research Software

Macro Concerns 1. Lack of Incentives for Producing High-Quality Software. Software’s role in enabling and accelerating research cannot be overstated. But the incentives for producing software in academia are still very thin. One reason is that people do not cite the software they use; the academic currency is still

Building Code: Making Government Code Publicly Available

Very little of the code that the government pays for is open-sourced. One of the reasons is that private companies would rather the code remain under wraps so that the errors never come to light, the price for producing software is never debated, and they get to continue to charge

Build Software for the Lay User

Most word processing software helpfully point out grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Some even autocorrect. And some, like Grammarly, even give style advice. Now, consider software used for business statistics. Say you want to compute the correlation between two vectors: [100, 2000, 300, 400, 500, 600] and [1, 2, 3,

Campaigns, Construction, and Moviemaking

American presidential political campaigns, big construction projects, and big-budget moviemaking have a lot in common. They are all complex enterprises with lots of moving parts; they all bring together lots of people for a short period, and they all need people to hit the ground running and execute in lockstep

everywhere: meeting consumers where they are

Content delivery is not optimized for the technical stack used by an overwhelming majority of people. The technical stack of people who aren’t particularly tech-savvy, especially those who are old (over ~60 years), is often a messaging application like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. They currently do not have a

Incentives to Care

A lot of people have their lives cut short because they eat too much and exercise too little. Worse, the quality of their shortened lives is typically much lower as a result of avoidable' illnesses that stem frombad behavior.’ And that isn’t all. People who are not feeling

Clarifai(ng) the Future of Clarifai

Clarifai is a promising AI start-up. In a short(ish) time, it has made major progress on an important problem. And it is rapidly rolling out products with lots of business potential. But there are still some things that it could do. As I understand it, the base version of