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Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location
I'm currently on a cruise ship somewhere in the Mediterranean sea, en route from Barcelona to Casablanca. Most people here are either retirees enjoying the easy life or younger fol...
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Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer
I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…
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Rotating Images
How to rotate an image, and a need trick to rotate a bitmap an arbitrary amount in a simple paint package.
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GoDaddy, Media Temple, and the Horrible World of Web Hosting
There’s potential for massive profits: most customers of shared hosting and VPSes never come anywhere near their resource allocations so the machines can be extremely oversold, and most dedicated-server customers keep paying the “new” price of the server every month for years after its value has plummeted through the…
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Callbacks are imperative, promises are functional
You will often hear it said that JavaScript is a ‘functional’ programming language. It is described as such simply because functions are first-class values: many other features that define functional programming – immutable data, preference for recursion over looping, algebraic type systems, avoidance of side effects…
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A determined 'hacker' decrypts RDS-TMC
RDS-TMC uses an encryption algorithm simple enough to be run using pen-and-paper hardware.
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San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
It's impossible to argue that San Francisco hasn't changed my life dramatically. When I moved to the Bay Area four years ago, I was an inexperienced kid who was working at a Genius Bar in an Apple Store. I didn't know JavaScript at all—hell, I could barely program and my useless liberal arts degree was doing nothing…
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Do the right thing, wait to get fired
I stumbled upon this bit of wisdom in Team Geek: A Software Developers Guide to Working Well with Others, and it resonated. It comes from Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan: Do the right thing, wait t…
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Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly
Just a little something I thought was worth pointing out. @notch , the creator of Minecraft, has been posting updates on his latest toy proj...
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How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)
Tech companies seem to be having trouble finding good technical talent. Maybe I can help. For you, the hiring person who is having trouble finding programming talent, I’ve created this brief hiring guide. It is based on my experience over the years both as a prospective employee and as a person doing the hiring.
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Worst CAPTCHA Ever
By definition, CAPTCHA should be easy to read by humans but hard to read by machines. Apparently, they don’t agree with that at D&B:
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Command-line tools for data science
Blog article by Jeroen Janssens. Sep 19, 2013. 21 min read. Data science is OSEMN (pronounced as awesome). That is, it involves Obtaining, Scrubbing, Exploring, Modelling, and iNterpreting data. As a data scientist, I spend quite a bit of time on the command-line, especially when there’s data to be obtained, scrubbed…
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Air Gaps
Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible. I also recommended using an air gap, which physically…
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Ang Lee and the uncertainty of success
Recently I was going through some old things I had put away for safekeeping, and I found these: In 1993 I interviewed film director Ang Lee before the US premiere of his second movie, “The Wedding …
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Soylent: What Happened When I Stopped Eating For 2 Weeks
Tim Ferriss Intro Hundreds of people have asked me about Soylent, a controversial Silicon Valley team trying to replace food with a grayish liquid. “Does it really deliver all the nutrients the human body needs?” “Is it safe?” “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” [Hint: they have] And most often: “What do you think…
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