About a year and a half ago, my mother’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than six months to live. Since then it has been treatments, pain, and truly miraculous victories - but the word “terminal” is pretty clear; at some point you will lose. I flew home as soon as things started to take a…
By rotating, positioning and dropping a predetermined sequence of pieces, the Tetris Printer Algorithm exploits the mechanics of Tetris to generate arbitrary bitmap images.
Well, it's that time again. We're pretty excited.
Last week, I stumbled across a BBC News article entitled How to eat healthily on £1 a day via a story on hacker news . Healthy eating on a budget is something I’m really interested in, but I was horribly disappointed by the article, because i) it didn’t show you how to eat healthily, and ii) it didn’t show you how to…
Edward Snowden said that he stepped forward because he came to realize that the US government is engaged in invasions of Americans' privacy on a vast and unprecedented scale, and was hiding its int...
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working off-and-on on a little side project. The idea is that there are lots of people that are not in a position to visit a university or that don't have a public library with 'access' at their disposal but that do need to be able to read scientific papers. Ever since the…
One of my favorite phrases is “Do things, tell people”. I came across it in Carl Lange’s eponymous post and could instantly relate.
Just when you thought it couldn't be crazier in Redmond, today they are ...
Last week, while working on new features for our product, I had to find a quick and efficient way to extract the main topics/objects from a sentence. Since I’m using Python, I initially thoug…
[DISCLOSURE: As always when I write about Amazon, I'll note I worked there from 1997-2004 and that I still own some shares in the company. I still have many friends who work there, though I have no more idea what Amazon is working on now than any of you in the public.] With every quarterl
We’re told studies have proven that drugs like heroin and cocaine instantly hook a user. But it isn’t that simple – little-known experiments over 30 years ago tell a very different tale. Drugs are …
[[Update: As of August 2015, I have partly implemented the approach in the first example below (but not the second example). ]]
(continued from part 1) Diagnosis and prescription The family doctor stared at me sternly, then issued his diagnosis and prescription. He explained that my guts were mostly like in a bad state of …
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
Explore thought leadership, industry insights, and other resources related to cybercrime detection, disruption, and takedowns.
When I was 17 years old, I wrote a little Applesoft BASIC program to help myself memorize vocabulary for my Spanish class. When I went to college, I wrote a new version for the Mac, adding special features for Japanese. Senior year I wrote two new versions – one for my
I began with inanimate objects living in a world of forces, and I gave them desires, autonomy, and the ability to take action according to a system of
