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Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed
It is greatly ironic that algorithms, the quintessential example of all that is not human, would be so fundamental to social media. Last week I wrote a post about how Google gathers user data. This week I continue by exposing how popular social media websites use algorithms to ut...
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Rutgers Graduate Student Finds New Prime-Generating Formula
Studying prime numbers is like playing the guitar. No, really, let me explain. The guitar is a simple instrument: six strings, some frets,...
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Making Rails 12X Faster
They told you it can't be done, they told you it has no scale. They told you lies! What if you suddenly had the ability to serve mutliple co...
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Soon it will be time to start over, again
A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new…
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Why Learning Haskell/Python Makes You a Worse Programmer
A rant about how annoying programming in C# is, really.
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Quit your job
Today I saw a great special on Fine Living TV called Quit Your Job!. Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some…
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Edward O. Wilson: Marx was right, he had the wrong species
Among many other things, Edward Wilson is a myrmecologist and two times Pulitzer-prize winner. There is a picture taken by him of an ant holding between its mandibles a banner with the words: 'Onward Sociobiolo�gy!'. Following the publication in 1975 of his book Sociobi�ology, the New Synthesis , he became both to…
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Sequoia Capital: Armchair quarterbacks
Sequoia Capital’s “R.I.P. Good Times” deck made the rounds on the web last week. It’s Sequoia’s take on what happened with the economy and what their portfolio companies should do to weather the storm. Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturnView SlideSh…
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Why thinking in the shower may be an ideal model for "creative pause"
I imagine we’d be hard-pressed to find anyone reading these words who hasn’t had an epiphany, big or small, under the cadence of falling water.
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StackOverflow.com : the new venture from Joel Spolsky
What is stackoverflow.com? Nothing, yet. But here’s the concept: Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number…
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I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your…
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About the origins of the equals sign
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The Fourth Quadrant: a Map of the Limits of Statistics (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think…
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John Resig on TraceMonkey
I’ve been waiting to blog about this for a long time now. A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a techniques, called trace trees (PDF), which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey.
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Why we disagree with Don Norman
Don Norman, an author, professor, and partner at the Nielsen Norman Group, read the Wired article about us and wrote a piece asking, “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” Hansson said: “I’m not designing… for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes.…
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