Last Sunday, David Miranda was detained while changing planes at London Heathrow Airport by British authorities for nine hours under a controversial British law—the maximum time allowable without making an arrest. There has been much made of the fact that he’s the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter whom…
If you are trying to trick somebody with your data, never share the raw data; only share the conclusions. Bonus points if you can’t share the data because it is somehow priviledged or a trade secret. The last thing you want is to allow other people to evaluate your analysis and possibly challenge your conclusions.
Yesterday was my last day at Twitter. I left to start my own company. What I'll be working on is v...
Amber on Rails
In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
Over the past six months, “fans” of this Web site and its author have shown their affection in some curious ways. One called in a phony hostage situation that resulted in a dozen heavily armed police surrounding my home . Another opened a $20,000 new line of credit in my name. Others sent more than $1,000 in bogus…
It's really only in the past year or so that I had grown aware of him at all; one hears a lot of names over the course of following the industry and the Internet scene, and I'd naturally heard of him. But it was only recently that I had come to realize that I kept hearing about him in matters that were of particular…
I am a software engineer, Manager, and architect in Seattle, WA. Read my articles.
Everything that used to be fax machines, contracts, and invoices and purchase orders in triplicate are going away. What's replacing it? The API. Before Stripe, you had to fill out a ton of forms...
Hey! This is a bit old! Things may have changed and I haven’t necessarily fixed them. Most computers can’t create true random numbers. They use a formula which makes a very long stream …
Julia is a new language for scientific computing that is winning praise from a slew of very smart people, including Harlan Harris, Chris Fonnesbeck, Douglas Bates, Vince Buffalo and Shane Conway. As a language, it has lofty design goals, which, if attained, will make it noticeably superior to Matlab, R and Python for…
Web development in Haskell is efficient, contorting, rewarding, frustrating and elegant all at the same time. 12 Months building production quality Haskell has taught many lessons, and in this talk we will discuss the amazing, with the downright painful, and hope to provide a glimpse at what it is like building real…
I’ll let the horror of automation speak for itself. Not that you need further reassurance that there are no “souls” aboard this ship. WARNING: Some naughty language (this is compl…
If you ignore the practical issues of computers like size, weight, cost, heat, and so on, what do you really need in a programming language? Let's play around with this question.
tl;dr: You can perform non-blocking multi-object atomic reads and writes across arbitrary data partitions via some simple multi-versioning and by storing metadata regarding related items.
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
NOVEMBER 20, 2011. We hear a lot about the importance that all children master algebra before they graduate from high school. But what exactly is algebra, and is it really as important as everyone …
