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P vs. NP for Dummies
A reader named Darren commented on my last post: I have this feeling that this whole P and NP thing is not only a profound problem that needs solving, but something that can be infinitely curious t…
Start-Up Chile: $40k to Live There and Start a Company
Governments round the world are trying to stimulate entrepreneurship. The Chilean government recently announced a bold initiative that stands apart from the usual innovation and start-up handwaving…
Threads (in Ruby): Enough Already
For a while now, the Ruby community has become enamored in the latest new hotness, evented programming and Node.js. It's gone so far that I've heard a number of prominent Rubyists saying that JavaScript and Node.js are the only sane way to handle a number of
Scott Aaronson explains his $200k bet (8 Signs A Claimed P≠NP Proof Is Wrong)
As of this writing, Vinay Deolalikar still hasn’t retracted his P≠NP claim, but a clear consensus has emerged that the proof, as it stands, is fatally flawed. The first reason is that weR…
Kindle vs. iPad Displays: Up close and personal
Programming, creative coding, tutorials by Keith Peters
My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation
All you need to know on Ruby on Rails. Know what you should go for & why. Read up to understand RoR in 2021.
Design For Hackers: Why You Don't Use Garamond on The Web
Garamond is widely considered one of the greatest fonts ever made. But the things that make Garamond so beautiful also make it a problem.
What Happened to Yahoo
August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…
Racket vs Clojure (it's all about the data structures)
I've been asked by several people to explain why I use Clojure for my professional work rather than Racket. ABOUT RACKET I have been using R...
Update on Deolalikar’s Proof that P≠NP
An update on the P not equal to NP proof Timothy Gowers, Gil Kalai, Ken Regan, Terence Tao, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian are some of the top people who are trying to unravel what is up with the cl…
Teach Like You're the Student
“I never have let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain Every time I see my graduate students try to teach for the first time, it’s usually so painful I bite my lip. Then I …
How to Take a Walk
It was cool and mildly breezy around 8 PM today. So I went for a walk, and I noticed something. Though I passed a couple of hundred people, nobody else was…
Issues in the Proof that P ≠ NP
Some further comments into the recent claimed proof that P is not equal to NP Yuri Manin is a great mathematician, who has worked in various areas and also is well known for his many excellent expo…
Beyond the 10,000 Hour Rule: Richard Hamming and the Messy Art of Becoming Great
What Makes Great Scientists Great? In March of 1986, an overflow audience of over 200 researchers and staff members from Bell Laboratories piled into the ... Read more
Fun - a new programming language for the realtime web
What if you could build realtime web apps with the same ease as you build static web pages in PHP today? Without long polling, event handling and state synchronization, the engineering complexity of realtime web applications would drop by an order of magnitude. There would be a fundamental shift in the way we build…
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
There's a bit more below, but I also wrote a follow-up 5 years after the illustrated guide which may be of interest -- HOWTO: Get tenure .