Virtue

Friday, January 12, 2007 at 03:04 PM

Some props for Mr. Governor.

Vox Populi

Friday, October 27, 2006 at 04:36 PM

A paper by Sir Francis Galton first published in the March 7, 1907 issue of the scientific journal, NATURE. The paper provides what appears to be the first solid explanation for why Google's ranking algorithm, not to mention the form of government we've come to know as "democracy", are so capable.

Why Ogg Matters

Sunday, August 03, 2008 at 11:55 PM / weblogs.mozillazine.org

Interesting. This is the first time I've seen mention of Firefox shipping with Ogg Vorbis and Theora built-in. That could definitely change the horrible pace of adoption we've seen thus for.

Ruby's $LOADED_FEATURES (Array of stuff that's been required)

Saturday, June 28, 2008 at 06:33 PM / devclue.blogspot.com

Not sure how I've never stumbled on this before. You can remove items from the list to cause require to reload a file.

Dead media strike again

Monday, June 23, 2008 at 03:56 PM / rc3.org

Rafe on Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project: "... a catalog of media formats that are no longer in use. In many cases, media stored in these dead formats can no longer be read because readers are no longer available for them."

Babelmark — Markdown Testbed

Wednesday, June 04, 2008 at 12:01 AM / babelmark.bobtfish.net

Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I've ever come across and then some...

Scott Chacon's Git Talk at RailsConf (slides)

Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 09:50 PM / github.com

If you move the slides quickly, it feels a bit like playing Desktop Tower Defense.

To a T

Friday, April 04, 2008 at 01:10 AM / worldwidewords.org

"... tittle is easily the most likely source, since to a tittle was in use in exactly the same sense for nearly a century before to a T appeared (it’s first recorded in a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher of 1607) ..."

The Rec.humor.funny Ban

Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 08:55 PM / netfunny.com

"John McCarthy, better known to many as the originator of the LISP computer language, called me up to say he would be leading the fight at Stanford to reverse the ban." - Could the man possibly be any more credentialed amongst hackers?

It's Pi Day!

Friday, March 14, 2008 at 07:03 PM / news.bbc.co.uk

"Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi."

HyperText.m - source to TimBL's first implementation of hypertext (Sept. 25, 1990)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 05:55 PM / w3.org

From the comments: "HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts."

A Nice Big Purple Reddit Stack Trace

Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 01:55 AM / img46.imageshack.us

reddit.com is running Pylons-0.9.6, Paste-1.4.2, Routes-1.7, Beaker-0.7.5 on FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (amd64). Wow. Nice environment.

Ubuntu's Upstart event-based init daemon

Monday, February 11, 2008 at 12:49 PM / linux.com

I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu's new init system (Upstart) I've seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.

Mercury is a new, purely declarative logic programming language.

Sunday, February 03, 2008 at 08:15 PM / mercury.cs.mu.oz.au

What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It's like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).

Ballmer: I'm completely out of ideas

Sunday, February 03, 2008 at 10:23 AM / fakesteve.blogspot.com

"... Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He's not really a tech guy. [...] He's a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It's Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can't think of anything else to do."

Numb3rs

Saturday, February 02, 2008 at 05:13 PM / dehora.net

Bill de hÓra making all kinds of sense on the topic of Android, mobile platforms, the cloud, and other things.

How I lost my faith (in lisp) - comp.lang.lisp

Friday, February 01, 2008 at 12:59 PM / groups.google.com

"Between 1988 and 1991 I worked on the research program that led to the Mars Pathfinder rover [...] All three of [the prototypes] were programmed not in Lisp, but in little mini-languages whose compilers were written in Lisp."

The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power (Time's Cover Story on Scientology)

Monday, January 28, 2008 at 01:54 AM / time.com

Time Mag pulls back the curtain on Scientology and reveals the cult for the batshit criminal organization it is. It's about time. EDIT: sorry, this was published in 1991 :-(

Reddit: "merely a collection of trivia, narrow, shallow, and sensational"

Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 09:36 PM / lists.canonical.org

Kragen throws some useful criticism at Digg/Reddit: "If you fill your head with 'merely a collection of trivia, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational', it won't stay there; it'll trickle right out again."

LEDs in your contact lenses?

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 at 07:07 PM / news.com

Contact based HUDs are coming: "Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a prototype contact lens that incorporates an imprinted electronic circuit and lights."

On: “working alongside some of the better developers”

Monday, January 21, 2008 at 11:45 AM / redmonk.com

Why RedMonk is succeeding where other analyst houses fail: "Other analyst firms primarily target sell-side or buy-side. We really don’t see the world that way. RedMonk’s core constituency is 'make-side': the makers and doers, hackers and players."

Programs on the scale of a million lines of code are getting more common. But how big is that?

Sunday, January 20, 2008 at 09:08 PM / embedded.com

"A million lines of code is not ten times more than 100,000. It's well-known that schedules grow faster than the code ... so the schedule for developing a million lines of code is 22 times bigger than for 100,000 LOC."

The Algorithm: Idiom of Modern Science

Saturday, January 19, 2008 at 02:50 PM / cs.princeton.edu

“The Algorithm's coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”

ArchitectNotes - Varnish

Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 07:33 AM / varnish.projects.linpro.no

"I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975."

The Pirate’s Dilemma

Thursday, January 10, 2008 at 04:40 AM / torrentfreak.com

"We live in a world where it is legal for a company to patent pigs, or any other living thing except for a full birth human being, but copying a CD you bought onto your hard drive is considered an infringement of someone else’s rights."

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

Thursday, January 03, 2008 at 03:13 AM / ds9a.nl

"Like with unix, cells are not 'spawned' - they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things."

The Right and Lawful Rood

Friday, December 14, 2007 at 04:09 AM / robweir.com

... the primary activity depicted here is standards development, particularly the historically mandated procedure for determining the linear measurement known as the "rood", related to the English "rod", the German "rute" and the Danish "rode".

What has the government done to our money?

Friday, December 14, 2007 at 03:59 AM / robubu.com

"Why is the dollar the world’s reserve currency? How does the government fund it’s debt? and what the hell causes inflation?"

In software, some developers take up residence on planet architecture, an otherworldly place where software is eternally planned and discussed but never actually constructed.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007 at 01:48 AM / codinghorror.com

Atwood's had a great year.

VMWare: Coming Out of the Cloud?

Friday, December 07, 2007 at 03:17 AM / redmonk.com

EC2 is my current pick for most interesting / innovative tech development of the year. Everyone will have to have an EC2 clone by the end of 2008.

Hotwire graphical terminal

Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 01:15 PM / howtoubuntu.com

Looks like they're bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.

adamssl on anonymity

Friday, October 12, 2007 at 03:23 AM / ourstereo.com

Now this is an interesting theory on John Gabriel's GIFWT.

BoingBoing TV!

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at 11:50 PM / tv.boingboing.net

This'll be a fun ride.

Software Is Hard

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at 10:32 PM / gamearchitect.net

"Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we'll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there's a lack of solid evidence to support any of them."

Sun’s Ruby strategy - Engage and Contain?

Saturday, September 22, 2007 at 10:02 AM / logiccolony.com

"Maybe I’ll start to believe when they start promoting Ruby on Rails at JavaOne, as opposed to promoting JRuby on Rails at RailsConf."

begthequestion.info

Friday, August 10, 2007 at 02:39 PM / begthequestion.info

"... it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must distinguish between the traditional and erroneous modern usage. This is why we fight."

Ten Strange Facts About Newton [neatorama.com]

Thursday, August 09, 2007 at 03:51 AM / neatorama.com

I'm in the middle of Newton infatuation having just finished the first leg of Stephenson's Quicksilver. Did you know they're publishing the Baroque Cycle in three smaller trilogies now? The first is worth reading without any further committment.

Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes notice [studentprintz.com]

Monday, May 14, 2007 at 01:20 PM / studentprintz.com

"It's easy to make, unpatented and could be added to drinking water. Imagine, Gatorade with cancer control."

Pop Quiz on the situation in Iraq [truthdig.com]

Sunday, May 06, 2007 at 01:11 AM / truthdig.com

I've been looking for a essay-sized historical account of the Shiite/Sunni conflict for a long time now. A former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector lays out what appears to be a fairly comprehensive story over three pages.

National Survey Reveals More than 70% of Americans Don't Know Plastic is Made from Oil

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 02:32 PM / biz.yahoo.com

Everything is made from oil. It's crazy.

Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy

Sunday, March 11, 2007 at 10:40 AM / scribd.com

Being neither unhappy or intelligent, I wouldn't know :)

UNIX® Load Average Part 1: How It Works

Wednesday, February 21, 2007 at 02:15 PM / teamquest.com

Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn't understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 02:43 AM / aaronsw.com

Aaron Swartz reviews a newish book on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Insanely good topic, bad book?

Schneier on Video: Security Theater Against Movie Plot Threats

Saturday, February 10, 2007 at 10:47 PM / schneier.com

Oodalolly!

Please drop SVN

Thursday, February 08, 2007 at 01:10 PM / iovene.com

Oh wow. The concept of logical patches is something I never considered before. Darcs has a "record" command that let's you split multiple changes to a single file (or files I assume) into logical changes ("hunks").

Making Fedora RESTful

Saturday, February 03, 2007 at 09:32 PM / fedora.info

Wow, I'm surprised I've never seen anything about this before.

PHYS771 Lecture 9: Quantum

Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 06:19 PM / scottaaronson.com

The second way to teach quantum mechanics.

Where were you on Saturday, November 9, 2002?

Tuesday, January 02, 2007 at 05:37 PM / weblog.raganwald.com

Crazy.

Condorcet's jury theorem

Saturday, December 23, 2006 at 01:06 PM / en.wikipedia.org

Interesting corollary to Vox Populi. (Via Aristotle Pegaltzis)

Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith

Thursday, December 07, 2006 at 02:56 AM / nymag.com

Nice article on burnout, which I have to admit I've been struggling with on and off for the past six months or so :-(

Intelligent Abstractions

Monday, December 04, 2006 at 04:49 PM / aaronsw.com

Sometimes I think Aaron's brain is my brain in the future. I've had all of these same ideas rattle around in my brain before but they never seem to line up so neatly for me. It bugs me a little.

Radio Lab: Emergence (February 18, 2005)

Friday, October 27, 2006 at 11:07 AM / wnyc.org

This is my favorite episode of WNYC's RadioLab and maybe my favorite piece of radio, period. The segment, "The Invisible Hand" is outstanding. The show is now in podcast and the last five eps are available in mp3. "Emergence" is only available as a RealAu

360 in a circle, 60 minutes and 60 seconds… What is so special about 60?

Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 12:30 AM / shaunmccarthy.wordpress.com

Blame the Babylonians - they used the Sexagesimal system. Don’t get excited - it means that instead of using base 10 (as we do) they used base 60.

Feynman Interview: The pleasure of finding things out

Monday, April 17, 2006 at 02:42 PM / video.google.com

Nice little Feynman short on google video. Feynman talking, Feynman painting, Feynman being the complete bad-ass that only Feynman can be... I can't get enough of him.

Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp

Sunday, April 16, 2006 at 09:26 PM / steve-yegge.blogspot.com

So I'm considering automating my del.icio.us to just automatically add links with "statistically infrequent" words as tags to all Steve Yegge's posts...

gladwell.com

Friday, February 24, 2006 at 06:18 PM / gladwell.typepad.com

Malcom Gladwell's blog :)

Space Time - Relativity, Quantum Physics and the Universe

Saturday, February 04, 2006 at 09:56 PM / thebigview.com

Google Campus Video Tour

Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 04:12 PM / abcnews.go.com

ABC's Bob Woodruff got a camera in there somehow..

HOWTO: Be more productive

Thursday, January 05, 2006 at 07:15 AM / aaronsw.com

Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.

What I Did this Summer

Thursday, October 13, 2005 at 05:38 PM / paulgraham.com

Paul Graham reports on the first class of Summer Founders...

Who knows? Maybe nonstandard arithmetic is just unavoidable

Saturday, June 04, 2005 at 11:13 AM / recycledknowledge.blogspot.com

Some interesting thoughts on Gödel's Proof and its implications on nonstandard numbers.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at 08:26 AM / poignantguide.net

Holy crap this is the coolest language book I've ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters - there's regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.

George Dyson - Von Neuman's Universe

Tuesday, April 26, 2005 at 08:49 AM / itconversations.com

More great stuff from IT Conversations. This time a look at Von Neuman's impact on math, science, computing, etc.

Mentat Wiki

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 at 12:12 AM / ludism.org

"... a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker."

Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review

Friday, April 15, 2005 at 09:45 PM / dlib.org

Oh wow - this is the definitive work thus far I guess.

The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel

Thursday, April 14, 2005 at 12:13 PM / itconversations.com

And the hits just keep on comin' - IT Conversations / Tech Nation has an interview with the author of a Godel biography.

Radical Simplification

Tuesday, April 12, 2005 at 03:00 PM / intertwingly.net

Everything I ever wanted to say about the current state of software development in ~50 slides. Thanks, Sam.

Yahoo! Buzz Game

Wednesday, March 16, 2005 at 10:47 AM / buzz.research.yahoo.com

Interesting prediction market that uses buzz around different technologies. I split my starting cash between REST, delicious, and Python.

The Selfish Class

Sunday, March 13, 2005 at 03:23 PM / joeyoder.com

How programs adhere to the basic laws of Darwinian evolution.. Seems to gel with everything I've learned.

AMERICA - ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN

Monday, March 07, 2005 at 08:17 PM / archive.scotsman.com

Simon Willison showed me this scan of a Newspaper from April 14, 1865. It looks like a blog.

Malcolm Gladwell - Tech Nation

Friday, February 18, 2005 at 04:22 AM / itconversations.com

Nice. Gladwell talks about his new book "Blink" on IT Conversations. I haven't listened yet but it's impossible for Gladwell to say anything that is uninteresting.

cluetrain/hughtrain

Monday, January 31, 2005 at 02:19 AM / gapingvoid.com

Cluetrain Manifesto: "This is why we hate you." Hughtrain Manifesto: "This is how we're going to fuck you up."

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Thursday, January 20, 2005 at 12:38 PM / paulgraham.com

Paul Graham takes the honest route with High School kids and tells them what they should really be worried about. Great quote: "Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience."

A del.icio.us study

Wednesday, January 12, 2005 at 07:40 PM / ideant.typepad.com

I need to read this a couple times when I get some times..

Iocaine Powder Explained (How to win Paper, Rock, Scissors)

Wednesday, January 12, 2005 at 07:26 PM / google.com

Doesn't this qualify as a genetic algorithm?