Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture
A chat with Votizen co-founder Jason Putorti. I am particularly interested in how startups work, their internal processes and culture, rather than their external pitch and product features.
SEOmoz raises 18 million from Ignition and Foundry
Today is a good day. Whether you're employed at Moz, a fan of what we've built, a Seattle-startup supporter or even tangentially involved in the field of web marketing, there's reason to celebrate. After 5 years of organic growth (from our initial funding in 2007) and two tough, failed attempts at…
One sentence per line, please
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
Writing Browser Extensions - Comparing Firefox, Chrome and Opera
MediaPlus is a browser extension that gives users more control over media elements like video, images, games, flash, etc by allowing them t...
Ideas for Raspberry Pi Projects
 Ideas for your Raspberry Pi!The chances are you have a Raspberry Pi or there's one on the way to you, n
Machine Learning for Hackers Table of Contents
ZIA is a place for me to “think out loud,” about my current and future research. As the author, my goals are to share my ideas, highlight new research, and possibly develop new tools along the way.
Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem
We finally moved Django to GitHub late yesterday. Here's a postmortem, to keep the community updated and for the benefit of any projects that take this leap in the future.
Kolmogorov Complexity - A Primer
The Complexity of Things Previously on this blog (quite a while ago), we’ve investigated some simple ideas of using randomness in artistic design (psychedelic art, and earlier randomized css …
Finding Unity in the Math Wars
I usually avoid current events, but recent skirmishes in the math world prompted me to chime in. To recap, there've been heated discussions about math…
A group of Finnish math teachers write an open textbook in a weekend hackathon
A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a booksprint. The event s...
Startup Culture
It's with a culture where people can thrive and tackle problems they find interesting. It's not with offering standing desks and beefy computers; every Silicon Valley startup offers that.
The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote
2008 blast from the past: me, Mike Wallin, and Derek Sivers, the subject of this post. (Photo: A3maven) [Total read time: 3-5 minutes.] Derek Sivers is one of my favorite people. He is a programmer who lost his stage fright by doing more than 1,000 gigs as a circus ring leader (!!!). He’s also a […]
The Core Memory Module from my dad’s homebuilt PDP-11/05
This is basically the 1974 version of a DIMM. It measures 16″ by 11.5″ and holds 16 kilobytes. It’s technically 18 bits wide but only 16 were used in the PDP-11. The raised part in the middle is where the cores are actually stored. Each bit is a little ring with 3 wires running through the middle. By running current…
OrmHate
Object-Relational Mappers get a lot of hate from people who misjudge the complexities of the task.
Interviewing at Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Dropbox, Fog Creek, etc
An overview of interview questions at some of Silicon Valley and NYC's largest tech companies
IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft
Yeah you read that right. I just received an interesting email from Brightcove (the video delivery guys) about issues with their Flash based solution and Windows 8 running the new Internet Explorer 10. To quote: