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Lessons learned from a failed poker software business
This story begins in March ’08. Bored with the project I was working on and overly optimistic because of TechCrunch articles, I decided to create some sort of online business. I hesitate even…
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Iamelgringo's first big project using Mechanical Turk
I just finished my first big project using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. I'm in love. I had a list of over 6000 business names, addresses and url's of dubious quality that I needed to make sure was accurate. For a brief moment, I thought about checking them myself. But after doing several dozen by hand, I realized…
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Announcing my free book on Vim
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Google: we're having scaling issues, please stop distributing your FF extension
Google's public relations efforts are exemplified by their friendly communication regarding a user's Firefox extension, showcasing a collaborative approach over legal threats.
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Jim Hefferon's Linear Algebra: A free textbook with fascinating applications
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
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The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment
Introduction I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being …
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Do you know any programmers who exhibit these personality traits?
I’ve been observing an unusual programmer friend of mine for some time now. (Yeah… a “friend”, that’s it….) He has such a strange combination of potential and in…
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LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer
I’ve earlier performed a little test , comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change…
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The most important thing to understand about new products and startups
First, a quote from Marc Andreessen's " Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters " If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of te...
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Stack Overflow Launches
You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back: A bunch of links to discussi…
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Diary of a Failed Startup: Aftermath
It's now been 5 months since Diffle folded, so I figured I'd write one last post to wrap up this blog. There seems to be a lot of curiosity...
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Get that job at Google
Thanks, Steve; that was very helpful, although it would've been more helpful before I had a phonescreen with you guys last fall and totally brainlocked on a tree traversal. I kid you not, I could hear the guy interviewing me impatiently tapping his fingers on the table. He was just ITCHING to pencilwhip my ass out of…
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The Wrong Way to Get Noticed by YC
So, I’m sitting at my kitchen table the other night thinking about startup type things when an idea pops into my head: Create an index for Hacker News. Now, this isn’t the first time th…