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Mitch Hedberg and GIS
Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. Last night after the kids were asleep, I sat down with a beer (Sierra Nevada) and figured out how I could get the data and perform the calculation.
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The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
Update: I originally quoted the average price of office space as $36 / square foot / month, where ...
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Dear clueless assholes: stop bashing bash and GNU
This is a defense of the most prolific and dedicated public servant that has graced the world in my lifetime. One man has added hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of value to the global economy. This man has worked tirelessly for the benefit of everyone around him. It is impossible…
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A Traditional City Primer
The Traditional City simply refers to the pattern of development that human civilization has built in for millenia.
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The worst year of my life
Anna Debenham, based in London, UK
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We may have witnessed a NSA "Shotgiant" TAO-like action
Last Friday, the New York Times reported that the NSA has hacked/infiltrated Huawei, a big Chinese network hardware firm. We may have witne...
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US bans students from “blacklisted” countries from getting access to Coursera
I’m following a Coursera course entitled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” and just received a rather odd email. All students from Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba will no…
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Firm Inefficiency
Economists are often stereotyped as claiming that firms are very economically efficient, i.e., that they very effectively minimize costs and maximize profits.
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Yik Yak Hack
Yik Yak is an anonymous, controversial social media application that allows people to make posts that are visible to other users within ~2 miles. Often landing a top 10 spot in the iOS App Store, this app has become increasingly popular with high school and college students. Due to the anonymous nature of the app…
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What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers?
Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, …
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iOS 8 Privacy Updates
A summary of all iOS 8 Security and Privacy updates and their importance.
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Meanwhile, at code.org
In Mindstorms I made the claim that children can learn to program and that learning to program can affect the way they learn everything else. I had in mind something like the process of re-empowerment of probability: the ability to program would allow a student to learn and use powerful forms of proba- bilistic ideas…
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Amusing ourselves to death
This is perhaps one of the most striking passages I have read for a while. It describes the modern world with startling accuracy. In our fear of an increasingly authoritarian rule, we have allowed …
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The Economy
I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago in which I said macroeconomic collapse “may happen” and a few friends asked me why. To be clear, I don’t think it’s the likely outcome—I think we’ll find a way...
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Who smeared Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman's FBI file contains one very pointed, personal, anonymous attack. But can we figure out who wrote it from the context?
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Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
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Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa
I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or...
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Feedly gets hit by DDoS attack, refuses to give in to blackmail
Feedly reports that it is suffering from a denial-of-service attack that could impact users’ ability to catch up with the latest updates from their favourite websites.
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