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What you know matters more than what you do
Insight into Impact I recently had an interesting conversation with some colleagues. We were talking about a young researcher in our field who happens to ... Read more
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,098 posts.
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The Silencing of Maya
(Edited on 6/19/12 to add: A petition is now up on change.org asking that Speak for Yourself be returned to the App Store immediately and ...
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Mac Pro gets half-assed “update”
After two years, the Mac Pro was “updated” today, sort of: now we can choose slightly faster two-year-old CPUs at the top end, and the other two-year-old CPU options are cheaper now.
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The Elephant in the Bath-House
Mary Eberstadt’s Weekly Standard article The Elephant in the Sacristy shines a strong light on facts that will discomfit many of the politically correct. I don’t completely agree with her analysis; as Amy Welborn argues , Ms. Eberstadt is too quick to dismiss the role of the doctrine of celibacy in creating an…
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How I manage 40 people remotely
I’m Ryan Carson, and I’ve been a Founder CEO for 20 years, building, scaling and selling three companies.
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Eric Raymond: Why I think RMS is a fanatic, and why that matters
One of my commenters reports that he showed my essay on evaluating the harm from closed-source software to Richard Stallman, who became upset by it. It shouldn’t be news to RMS or anyone else that I think he’s a fanatic and this is a problem, but it seems that every few years I have to explain the problem again. I…
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New Data Science Certificate Program
Starting in the fall of 2012, the University of Washington will be offering a certificate in Data Science . The program has two sections: one located in Seattle and the other online. The certificate consists of three separate courses each lasting approximately 3 months. Thus the program can be completed in 9 months…
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What’s to love about C?
Antiquated, clunky, and unsafe. Though beloved to some, C is a language that many choose to hate. The mass opinion is indeed so negative it’s hard to believe that anybody would program anything in C. Yet they do. In fact a lot of things, even new things, are programmed in C. The standard was recently […]
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The Macroeconomics of Chinese kleptocracy
China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what ...
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Richard Feynman’s Caltech Graduation Address on Integrity
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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Beautiful Tools
We do this software development thing. I don’t have to tell you at times, it’s a very trying process. You shouldn’t have to deal with tools that get in your way or make your experience any less pleasurable. Okay. So you got the fancy chair. How about
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Why you should never use hash functions for message authentication
The general thrust of this post is: use a MAC function like HMAC to sign data, don’t use hash functions. Although not all hash functions suffer from the problem I’m going to illustrate, in general using a hash function for message authentication comes with a lot of potential problems because those functions aren’t…
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Work on unimportant problems
It seems obvious that some problems are important to solve and some aren't, as in, curing cancer is more important than delivering social gaming. Often, people lament the abundance of tech firms working on ultimately unimportant stuff, and advise to work on important problems and not just chase the money.
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My experiences at a woman's programming workshop
I heard about a Python tutorial that was going on this weekend, and with well over a decade of Python experience, I decided to volunteer to help students. I hadn't realized it was a women's workshop put on by PyLadies , but I'm glad I went because I came out of the event with a number of observations that extend out…
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Doom 3 Source code review
On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and released the source code of their previous engine. This time is was the turn of idTech4 which powered Prey, Quake 4 and of course Doom 3. Within hours the GitHub repository was forked more than 400 times and people started to look at the game internal…
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Vim: Buffers, Windows, and Tabs
If you’ve moved to Vim from an editor like Notepad++ or TextMate, you’ll be used to working with the idea of tabs in a text editor in a certain way. Specifically, a tab represents an open file; while the tab’s there, you’ve got an open file, as soon as you close it, it goes away. This one-to-one correspondence is…
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One way to fix your rubbish password database
Suppose for a moment that you are running a web site that has a poorly implemented password database that stores password hashes using some...
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E-mail addresses as user IDs: stupid policy
Once again, Apple is facing a "hacking" fiasco that may have resulted from its own amateurish user-ID policy. It's not that Apple was hac...
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