Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,905 posts.
Sprite3D.js: a javascript library for 3D positionning
This page is slowly getting outdated. In my spare time, I've been working on a major syntax revision, Firefox compatibility issues and a new version of this page.
Using Python and heat maps to determine the best place to aim on a dart board
Over break I went out with a buddy of mine and played some darts. This got me to thinking, where exactly should someone aim in order t...
Yet Another "People Plug in Strange USB Sticks" Story
I’m really getting tired of stories like this: Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed. Of course…
Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
A Healthy Diet For The Mind
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
Why I regret going to TechCrunch Disrupt
Several months ago I decided to bring my startup from Ottawa, Canada and exhibit in Startup Ally at TechCrunch Disrupt. What better place than Disrupt to absorb insight, meet visionaries and explor…
Recycling Capital: The Key To The Startup Economy
The Gotham Gal and I have been fortunate to accumulate signficant capital over the past fifteen years. And the vast majority of it is invested in startups. We get distributions from a sale of one company and within months that capital (after taxes) is invested in more startups (including non profit startups). This has…
Django and Python 3
About 18 months ago I blogged about Django and Python 3, I gave the official roadmap. Not a lot has changed since then unfortunately, we’ve dropped 2.3 entirely, 2.4 is on it’s way out, but there’s no 3.X support in core. One fun thing has changed though: I get to help set the roadmap, which is a) cool, b) means the…
Faster pathfinding using Jump Point Search
This is the final article in my three-part look at symmetry reduction algorithms for speeding up pathfinding on uniform-cost grid maps. Recapping the story so far: Part one introduces the notion of…
Google 2000 vs. Google 2011
I sometimes hear people say “Remember when Google launched and the results were so good? Google didn’t have any spam back then. Man, I wish we could go back to those days.” I know…
Amazon shuts down Lendle
Link to: https://twitter.com/lendleapp/status/49919939456409601
Quirksmode is seeking to raise € 2,500 in donations
I have no idea if this is going to work. I’ve never tried it before. But if I never try I’ll never know, so here it goes. And I’ll give you fair warning: there’s a blackmail aspect to all of this.
The State of HTML5 Audio
When I started to work on my JavaScript Game Engine back in October 2009, the biggest problems I encountered were with the new HTML5 Audio Element. The Canvas Element already worked nicely in all browsers that supported it at the time, albeit some were a little slow.
Build a CMS, no forms allowed
You may have noticed that quite a lot is happening in the Midgard land. Nowadays Midgard2 itself is a generic content repository that can be used for both desktop and web applications. Midgard MVC is a generic web framework for PHP5 that can be used with Midgard2 or without it. And then there is Midgard Create, the…
What’s New In Emacs 24
Part one of my annotated NEWS file for Emacs 24