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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,129 posts.
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How to travel around the world for a year
While my last post covered my previous year traveling, writing and programming [http://old.alexmaccaw.com/posts/traveling_writing_programming], this article will go into the specifics of planning your own round the world trip, including flights, costs, activities and accommodation. I'll show you how affordable…
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Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell
I have heard the following from a bunch of people, one of whom was me six months ago: “I keep on reading all these posts by really smart people who identify as Reactionaries, and I don’…
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Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub
Since spring, and even before that, I have participated in a great collaborative effort on writing a book on Homotopy Type Theory. It is finally finished and ready for public consumption. You can get the book freely at http://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ . Mike Shulman has written about the contents of the book , so I…
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What asm.js is and isn't
This is going to be a bit long, so tl;dr asm.js is a formalization of a pattern of JavaScript that has been developing in a natural way o...
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This is a web page
We've become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things.
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What happened to innovation?
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of...
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An App Store Experiment
What happened when I built a 7-minute workout app in a single night and launched it quietly.
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Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the…
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Finding Sociopaths on Facebook
On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media. My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways…
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Blowback from the NSA surveillance.
There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed—aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade—and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance. Ron Deibert makes this point: But…
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Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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How to become a designer without going to design school
I got my job as a designer without going to design school. I had hacked together my own design education in 6 months while working a full-time job. I didn’t think I was ready but started applying for jobs anyway – and got a job at a great startup, Exec.
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On Scala
This is one of a series of posts on languages, you can read more about that here . Scala's blending of programming paradigms in a single language is impressive. It's fun to write code in and is a good language for leaning into the functional plus static typing paradigm. As much as I like
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Functional JavaScript: Closure
After a seemingly endless journey , the publication of Functional JavaScript is complete and books have found their way into peoples’ homes. Below is a list of useful links related to the book:
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Why I Just Closed My LinkedIn Account
Python, Linux, Bicycles, Books, Games, Etc.
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Evidence that the NSA Is Storing Voice Content, Not Just Metadata
Interesting speculation that the NSA is storing everyone’s phone calls, and not just metadata. Definitely worth reading. I expressed skepticism about this just a month ago. My assumption had always been that everyone’s compressed voice calls is just too much data to move around and store. Now, I don’t know. There’s a…
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Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe.
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Get Rid of the App Store’s “Top” Lists
At the bottom of my recent post on App Store pricing , I ended a three-paragraph footnote 1 with this:
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Watts Backlist
A part of new Peter Watts' novel.
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Effective Technical Leadership
Most successful projects have a single engineer responsible for driving the project forward while ensuring that strong technical decisions…
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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How FPGAs work, and why you'll buy one
Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did.
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Shakespeare.txt.jpg: A JPEG compression experiment
Experimenting with JPEG compressing text.