Marc Andreessen is one of my role models and favorite thought leaders in entrepreneurship. Back in simpler times, he used to write a blog of sagely startup advice . But since joining Twitter, Marc now shares his thoughts in small bursts of related tweets, forcing me to read his thoughts in a disjoint, reverse chronological order. I decided to use Python fix this terribly pressing problem. The idea…
TL;DR: I’m making a game in a browser based functional language called Elm. Here’s a simple Hello World-type demo . Inspired by purely functional retro games and Steve Losh’s The Caves of Clojure series , I’ve decided to write a roguelike game in a variant of Haskell called Elm . I call the game “The Enchantments of Elm”, keeping with Steve’s alliterative naming. According to the language’s…
“Bits and bobbles” is a (supposedly) weekly, curated list of cool things I’ve seen people making on the Internet. 1. Web Services as Functions A Twitter engineer explains how they they model their asynchronous RPC using futures and combinators. Although written in the form of an academic paper, this contains plenty of interesting discussion on real-world benefits and tradeoffs. 2. DIY Desktop CT…
“Bits and bobbles” is a weekly, curated list of cool things I’ve seen people making on the Internet. 1. Nootropics People already take caffeine to stay alert. Why stop there? This guy find out whether off the shelf, mind-altering drugs can improve your personality and intelligence. 2. Puzzlescript Puzzlescript lets you create full-featured 2D games in a 100% declarative way. This isn’t your…
“Bits and bobbles” is a weekly, curated list of cool things I’ve seen people making on the Internet. 1. Foolproof Gardening My dream is to have an automated vegetable garden which provides me all the produce I need. Projects like the Nourishmat give gardening a better UI. 2. Spark and Mesos Spark is a data processing framework that is meant to compete with Hadoop. There are benchmarks that claim…
“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect” - Teller (of Penn and Teller) I recently came across an interesting concept called sprezzatura . It’s an Italian term that means “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort.” In many ways, sprezzatura is the antithesis of…
I logged into Facebook today to find my friend’s 5 days old post on the top of my newsfeed. It wasn’t particularly popular so I was curious to see why it had resurfaced nearly a week later. Turns out it was “Sponsored”. I’ve included the post below: I headed to the Facebook Help Center to double-check what this meant. I found the following. What are sponsored stories? Sponsored stories are…
Taking a look around you, you would believe that humanity is on a steady march of progress that carries on without bound. Today we live at the height of freedom and convenience. Some even claim this is nothing compared to what is in store. As a society, we feel disappointed in ourselves unless we keep up at least a 7% economic growth rate and double our technological power every few years. If you…
This morning, HN user sw007 reached out the community to explain why he/she hates Hacker News . sw007 is not the first to notice the vile demeanor of the site but it was his/her post that got me thinking about how to improve the community I love. I hope these suggestions might inspire the community leaders to consider how small changes to the site can inspire larger social changes in the HN…
The other day I encountered this blog post in which an entrepreneur accidentally meets Russell Kirsch, computing pioneer and inventor of the first digital photo. Kirsch, at the wise age of 81, informs the author of two principles he follows. Do things that have never been done before Nothing is withheld from us what we have conceived to do. Russell Kirsch’s advice to work with determination and…
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery Designing an engaging and pleasant user experience is a very fragile art. It takes painstaking work to distill the power of a website or software into something that the everyday user can understand. But products from Twitter to Minecraft have become phenomenal…
I discovered this open letter to developers in an HN comment thread the other day. The author points out an concerning trait of many software developers to be overly critical and hateful towards beginners. Almost every accomplished designer I know has disparaged Twitter Bootstrap and (implicitly) the people who use it. I admit I have the same tendencies. As a backend Web developer, I wince just a…
Imagine you have a landlord who collects your rent check and deposits it in a very unpredictable way. Sometimes he does it immediately. Sometimes he collects the checks for months before cashing them. Initially you feel happy about this system because you get to live in your apartment without the money actually leaving your bank account. But soon you realize that the extra money is just a mirage.…
XKCD’s “Nerd Sniping” is the epitome of rabbit holing ##The geek’s Achille’s Heel I recently decided practice my algorithms skills everyday by working through Skiena’s Algorithm Design Manual and doing some Interview Street problems. To make it somewhat more interesting I decided to do all the exercises and problems in Haskell. On my second day of practice, I felt the urge to find a better Haskell…
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard the fanfare about HTML5 and all it eye-catching splendor. What you don’t know is that HTML5 completely dropped the ball on ensuring that the web will stay free and open. ##”Shut up, you stupid hippy” That’s the first thing I think whenever I hear someone preach about the “free and open Internet.” Such rants are heard too often from…
I was reading a review of Backbone.js when I came across a quote that anyone who is writing a software library or programming framework should keep in mind. I look at Backbone, and I say to myself, “Oh, this is code I’ve written, or wish I’d written only better reviewed and field-tested than the last ad-hoc implementation of this I came up with.” That’s it. You don’t need a boatload of features…
Chris Brown (Pretty Boy) and T-Pain (Nappy Boy) consistently produce radio hits together One of the most common problems I hear from friends looking to get into startups is the difficulty in finding a cofounder. While I was fortunate enough to stumble upon my own cofounders, I can empathize. It seems that the interests of business people are at odds with those of engineers. It's easy for one party…
I've been using a nifty app called Chains to keep track of my New Year's resolutions. It is based on Jerry Seinfeld's principle of "Don't Break the Chain," in which you strive to accumulate as many consecutive days of keeping to a certain habit. The idea is that the longer your "chain" becomes, the more impetus you have to not break it. Chains has been working wonders for me so far. I don't get…
I have a tendency to wax philosophical on this blog so I am hoping to bring a new sense of pragmatism by posting "real-world" things such as code snippets and tutorials. To help with this, I've installed a syntax highlighting script on my page. Let's see if this works: public static void main(){ System.out.println("Hello World"); }
Traditional life coaches think you are too weak to be able to accomplish multiple things at once. Common wisdom says you should only try training for one goal at a time so you don't run out of motivation. That's complete nonsense. In fact, there are millions people who specialize in training for painfully rigorous things, not just one at a time but in batch. They aren't extraordinary…
Last week, I wrote a (botched) attempt to run supervised user-generated code on the JVM. (It's a cardinal sin, I know, I know). In the process, I wrote several hooks into the JVM runtime to make sure the insecure code was not attempting to use unsafe features. (If you're curious, it involved custom class loaders and security managers). It dawned on me that I was writing a Java program that was…
People like me are widely misunderstood. I am disappointed when people think of computer geeks as practitioners of soulless, mechanical endeavors. I like to think of what I do as an art and a craft. Yet I agree my job is steeped in arcane acronyms and daunting terminology that makes it seem like a form of witchcraft for geniuses. As ubiquitous as computers are today, the layperson probably has a…
Everyone who used the Internet in the 1990s remembers the ubiquity of "AOL Keywords." They were short phrases that served as proprietary URLs within the AOL portal; for instance, you could navigate to the cryptic " http://www.oprah.com " or you could simply type "OPRAH" into your AOL keyword bar and be taken directly Oprah's special page hosted on the AOL network. Guess which one most people used?…
This little tidbit , entitled "Apple's Attention to Detail, has been making rounds around the Internet recently. It describes how the Mac sleeping indicator blinks in a way that emulates human breathing patterns. I am skeptical if it is really a great example of attention to detail. This kind of "subliminal messaging" gets bandied about in design huddles everywhere. "Let's make the background…
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. - Henry David Thoreau, Walden Like Thoreau, I've decided to leave behind the trappings of modernity— in my web apps, at least. For my next project, I am setting out to build the simplest idea that will actually make me money. For once (and it pains me…
If you are reading this blog, chances are that you describe yourself as a technology enthusiast. But all these things could be preventing you from building. Like many of you, I face the problem of being overimmersed in tech culture. My RSS reader has me reading 12 different tech blogs daily and I've probably played around with every reasonably stable development tools released in the last 2 years.…