Vitamin C is a bug that needs to be patched
So Maciej Cegłowski has updated his blog for the first time in four months. Upon encountering the novel task of "actually generating HTML", his gimcrack blogging software sprayed a couple random posts across his RSS feed, one of which was the venerable 2010 essay on scurvy in Antarctic exploration. Which, combined…
Stack Exchange Machine Learning Contest
Over the last 4 years we've built up quite a bevy of moderation tools here at Stack Exchange. We've got closing, editing, deleting, flags of all sorts, voting, commenting, review queues, and more.
A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB
Amazon’s recent release of DynamoDB, a database whose name is inspired by Dynamo, the key-value database the distributed datastore they’ve been running in production for a good five to six years now. I think it’s great they’ve finally done it, though from my obverservations, there’s little resemblance of what the…
I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets
When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get ...
A Stroll Through the Craigslist-Crusher Startup Graveyard
I’ve been thinking about hopeful Craigslist-crushing startups this weekend as a result of all the Padmapper drama over the past few days. Padmapper is my #1 site for apartment hunting and I really sincerely hope that Craig and Jim will at least consider coming to some sort of agreement that is beneficial to both. Even…
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955 The End of Eternity, The Body Snatchers, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It, Rebel Without a Cause, Lady and the Tramp, To Catch A Thief, Picasso’s Don Quixote, […]
The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
The things first time founders do…
Last week @robfitz asked me on short notice to join a panel at #foundersexchange about what first time founders shouldn’t do. I qu...
We consistently underestimate kids.
I've long believed that we seriously underestimate kids. Hanging around with my friend's daughters who were 2, 3, and 5 when I was in college was really illuminating as I found myself interacting and conversing with his (admittedly smart) 2 year o...
Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
My foxhole radio
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
Twilio's first support hire joins engineering
Twilio posts cloud communications trends, customer stories, and tips for building scalable voice and SMS applications with Twilio's APIs.