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Many McGill Education Students Cannot Calculate an Average
This is a story about McGill education students that cannot calculate an average, and the professor who admitted he didn't care. Fina...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 7,744 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
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The Expert in a Year Challenge
The Expert in a Year Challenge took place in 2014 and followed novice table tennis player Sam Priestley's journey from complete beginner to mastery.
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Memrefuting
(in which I bring this blog back to the “safe, uncontroversial” territory of arguing with people who think they can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time) A few people have aske…
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The Apprentice Programmer (2013)
I dropped out of school when I was 16 years old. School was not for me. To me, computers were so much more interesting. Right or wrong, I felt like I wasted my time there and my real education was starting when I came home. I lost respect for the institution and of course this meant that I no longer bothered to put any
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A Tale of Two Zippers
Recently, Akiba took me to visit his friend’s zipper factory. I love visiting factories: no matter how simple the product, I learn something new.
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Screw motivation, what you need is discipline
If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…
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Cultivated Disinterest in Professional Sports
Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to become a football fan. Several years ago, I was at a talk by Michae…
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A Note to My Readers
One of the things I’ve always tried to do at the Dish is to be up-front with readers. This sometimes means grotesque over-sharing; sometimes it means I write imprudent arguments I have to withdraw;…
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That Didn’t Need to Take an Hour
Have you ever finished something and thought to yourself, “That didn’t need to take an hour?” In my world, I have an endless stream of requests to do something for
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All the Technology but None of the Love
This post has been re-written several times, so please forgive me if it does not come across as coherent as I would like to. The main reason for the re-write was this post by Martin Wedge . Originally I planned to scrap the whole thing but maybe having a different perspective will help, I’ve deleted those parts that…
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Predominantly
Predominant.ly brings an element of serendipity back into music discovery, making the experience as personal and delightful as stumbling across a long-forgotten favourite in a second- hand record store.
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Coding is not the new literacy
Despite the good intentions behind the movement to get people to code, both the basic premise and approach are flawed. The movement sits on the idea that “coding is the new literacy,” but that takes a narrow view of what literacy really is.
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The Clock
Simply named " The Clock ", this piece of art is not only doing what is supposed to do "keeping time" But also is visually extraordinary. What you see, is not only the time that it shows, but all of the electronic parts that you would find inside the microchip of a wrist watch if you would normally be looking through…
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You’ll Always Miss Being in the Basement
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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So you want to abolish time zones
Laudable! Let's take a look at some of the changes that arise from this, through a simple case study: making an international phone call to a relative. Before abolishing time zones I want to call my Uncle Steve in Melbourne. What time is it there? Google tells me it is currently...
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But Where Do People Work in This Office?
Matt Blodgett on topics occasionally germane to software development.
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Frameworks are for hacks, libraries for seeds
I find that I operate in one of two modes when I’m writing software. I’m either approaching a project as a quick hack or as developing software . As much as anything else, this affects how I approach the project and what kinds of results that I get.
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A Liquid Nitrogen Cocktail Party
Dewars, safety rules, barware, and drinks: how to throw a liquid nitrogen cocktail party, in the spirit of Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence, without anybody losing an eye.
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“Nothing you can do impresses me”
Because of the urgent need for new blood / ideas in the tech world, our lack of ability to reward new developers is a particularly profound example of shooting oneself in the foot.