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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 435 posts.
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The first step is to start
Many people ask me, “How can I get started in web design?” or, “What skills do I need to start making web applications?” While it would be easy to recommend stacks of books, and dozens of articles with 55 tips for being 115% better than the next guy, the truth is that you do…
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Satoshi Kon's last words
Satoshi Kon, the director of anime movies Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Millenium Actress and Paprika, as well as the TV series Paranoia Agent, died on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at the age of 46. ( NY Times obituary .) He left behind a rambling but extraordinary document , which his family has posthumously posted…
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Programming will never be "easy".
There seems to be this idea going around the internet that the reason someone isn’t able to program, is because languages aren’t good enough yet. A couple of people I have seen with hav…
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How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin
What do the economics of publishing look like… really? (Photo: thinkpanama) (Special thanks to my agent, Steve Hanselman, and my anonymous sources within the world’s biggest publishing houses) Print is dead! This has become a popular headline, and a great way to get quoted, as Nicholas Negroponte has shown. Iconic…
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Homeless Experiment
On Thursday June 4 th of 2009 I left the comforts of my home in Austin, TX. with no food, no money and no place to stay for 5 days and 4 nights. I did this voluntarily as a small experiment to see what it was like to live on the streets of Austin, TX.
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25 Best Hangman Words
Mathematica analysis of picking the optimal words to win the Hangman spelling game. Code and link to Wolfram Demonstration are included.
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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 …
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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…
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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
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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 .