This Thanksgiving I was hanging out with my little cousin, who was dealing cards from a standard 52 card deck. I asked her the question: “How many times could you deal the whole deck and see a unique order of cards – different than every other time you dealt the deck in the past?” Or to put it another way, “How many unique deals (‘permutations’) of all 52 cards are there?” If you’ve done any number theory (or looked at…
Bret Victor just put out a great post about various projects one could work on as a technologist to help with the climate crisis. Many of these are great suggestions for an individual’s ~5 year project, but it might be hard to see how a normal engineer working in the industry could start working on climate change problems. I’m here to show that you can help fight climate change even if starting a clean tech company or working on a…
Imagine your ideal job. No, really – give it a shot… I’ll bet more than a few of the people reading have imagined being a scuba instructor in the caribbean, or just being paid to play Super Smash (which I still can’t believe is now real job – I love the internet!). While it might be an improvement from your current position, I believe the job you imagined wouldn’t keep you happy for long. After three full-time jobs and five years…
This one will be brief: the company I’ve been at for the last year, Clever, is hiring like crazy after getting a series B. We’re doing ambitious things in the education space: tech in schools has been very broken for a very long time, and way too much class time is wasted on logins. We’re inviting you to help us – come join the team! Drop me a line if you want to know more. – Schimmy
I was chatting with someone the other day who loved the soundtrack from TRON: Legacy. (This person is awesome, he is part of the amazing band Knower and creates their very-TRON-inspired visuals). He got a kick out of how I will sometimes put on that TRON soundtrack when I really need to crank out some code. This is ironic, as the main plot point relies on a computer-programmer protagonist getting so wrapped up with what he is doing that he ends up in…
This article about how awful programming is has been making the rounds, amongst my non-coding friends as well. It’s a great article, using witty analogies to describe the absurd underpinnings of the technical systems we take for granted. For instance: “Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don’t have the slightest clue what’s wrong with it, and it’s really…
The other day I was at Dogpatch Boulders and a realization struck me: At least for the tech industry, climbing is the new golf. What does this mean? Well, for decades golf has been the sport of business. You could catch up with a business partner, pitch a deal, have a low-key brainstorming session, develop your plan to kick Larry off the board, etc. while hitting small balls in acres of green fields set aside from the real world. Exclusive,…
So one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to eat meat less than 50% of days. However, I’ve been having trouble tracking it, and therefore have not been doing a good job of sticking with it. It’s hard to remember to update a calendar. You have to remember the days you did or did not eat meat that week, and there’s no easy way to see if you are doing better than 50%. Yet, there is a shortcut we can…
Average is Over, by Tyler Cowen “Tyler Cowen may very well turn out to be this decade’s Thomas Friedman” was a quote on the back of the book. This quote is accurate. In a more serious vein, while I have a ton of problems with his conclusions and writing, his heuristic for how to choose a career is very valid: In your work, are you competing directly against something a slightly smarter machine could do (aka assembly line worker)? Yes? You’re…
This is a totally eye-opening view of how capitalism and technology advances interact. This is going to be on my list of must-read books for anyone, especially anyone working in or investing in tech. In “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital”, Carlota Perez argues that the technological advances and financial capital interact to create “surges”, what others generally call “long waves”. This surge encompasses the lifecycle of an entire “techno-economic paradigm”, a fancy word to describe how a society and its…
A little while ago I finally got around to watching Bret Victor’s “Inventing on Principle”. Transcript here. The main realization that Brett is trying to get across is that the most successful and most satisfied humans are those who have devoted their life to a driving principle. An example of this is would be Richard Stallman with free software, Alan Kay with a goal to ‘amplify human reach, and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed…
So you are an activist trying to keep a pulse on the community you’re serving. Unfortunately, you have little time and a lot of web pages, groups, and updates to keep track of. Luckily, by using a few simple tools, you can automate away much of your busy work, leaving you more time to tackle the hard stuff. This post will show you how to use these tools to automatically monitor any web page to notify you when there are…
Thinking about the recent Verizon/PRISM/Muscular releases, the StopWatchingUs protest, and seeing the same “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument come up again, I’ve been thinking that perhaps the way to solve this from a public image perspective is to change the narrative in society. Instead of fighting for privacy arguing about privacy’s intrinsic value, we can discuss privacy as a form of personal property and gain some of property’s protections for privacy. That idea may have some cons, but perhaps could…
It’s late. You’ve been coding up a greenfield project and it needs to be done by tomorrow. Yes, the team could have gone with a similar tool that has some of the necessary features, but damn, that thing written in PHP! This is your chance to write a totally new project and to show the company that python/ruby/go is the future. I mean, PHP, really? No, didn’t think so. Ok, ready for reviewboard. diff –full-index –oh-crap-you-forgot-to-make-an-initial-commit Oops. This is dumb….