Play the algorithm. Put the reader in the "mind" of the algorithm (first person) while also seeing the algorithm's high level behavior (third person).
I want to be extremely clear about three things. First, this is my personal opinion – insert full standard disclaimer. Second, this is not a condemnation of everyone at RSA, present and past. I assume most of them are pretty okay, and that the problem is confined to a few specific points in the company. However, “unknown problem people making major decisions at RSA” is a bit unwieldy, so I will just say RSA. Third, I'm not calling for a total boycott on RSA. I work almost literally across the street from them and I don’t want to get beat up by roving gangs of cryptographers at the local Chipotle.
RSA's denial published last night is utter codswallop that denies pretty much everything in the world except the actual allegations put forth by Reuters and hinted at for months by [other sources](http://li
Do your part to resist Government surveillance and take back your privacy:
A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article.
The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.
What can you say?
This article has been given a more permanent home on my blog. Also, since it was first written, the development of the Promises/A+ specification has made the original emphasis on Promises/A seem somewhat outdated.
Promises are a software abstraction that makes working with asynchronous operations much more pleasant. In the most basic definition, your code will move from continuation-passing style:
getTweetsFor("domenic", function (err, results) {
// the rest of your code goes here.
| /** | |
| * The reverse of the EaselJS Graphics.decode method for | |
| * compactly encoding paths. | |
| * | |
| * @author Brett Johnson, periscopic.com | |
| * | |
| * @example | |
| * var ep = new EncodePath(); | |
| * ep.moveTo(-150, 0).lineTo(150, 0); | |
| * var shp = new Shape(); |