Jonathan
So my editors at HipHopDX told me that my rap world centered heavily around the East and West Coasts, and I realized that they were right. I mean, my list of Top 10 rappers is heavily NYC-centric: Jean Grae…Talib Kweli…Pharoahe Monch….and so on. While I think it’s for good, justifiable reasons that
Featured Stories And why simple manners can transform your relationships Paul Ford Aug 13, 2014 · 9 min read The Good Boy, 1837 M ost people don’t notice I’m polite, which is sort of the point. I don’t look polite. I am big and droopy and need a haircut. No soul would associate me with watercress…
The thinking behind Rizzo: Lonely Planet's component library Posted on May 15, 2014 | Anyone who has attempted to maintain a UI Style Guide over a long period of time will attest that it is a very difficult process. They are generally prioritised below the maintenance of your applications themselves…
The scariest thing I'll see in Yemen looms up at me before the plane has even landed. I have dozed my way from Abu Dhabi across most of the Arabian Penninsula, including the Empty Quarter, that vast uninhabitable sandbox in the interior were they didn't even bother to put in borders until fifteen y
Talib Kweli Greene Aug 23, 2014 · 12 min read When I left for Ferguson, MO my intention was to only deal with the people in the community. My intention was not to participate in spectacle. But we all know what the road to hell is paved with. After receiving several phone calls from a producer at…
Stewart is hungry. He's munching on potatoes smothered in chicken fat drippings, sitting by a long metal table that once served as a gurney in the morgue at the Treasure Island Naval Base. It's a prominent piece of furniture in what will be the kitchen area for Stewart's new startup. All told, the…
Idle Words > Talks > The Internet With A Human Face This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany. Marc [Thiele] emailed me a few weeks ago to ask if I thought my talk would be appropriate to close the conference. "Marc," I told him, "my talk…
What does it mean to be a software craftsman? You can read the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship and draw conclusions; but if you posed that question to different people across the software industry, you’d hear any number of different responses. And to some degree, they’re all true. Descriptions
In 1934, H G Wells arrived in Moscow to meet Soviet writers interested in joining the international PEN Club, of which he was then president. While there, Stalin granted him an interview. His deferential conversation was criticised by J M Keynes and George Bernard Shaw, among others, in the New…
When I was in high school, I didn’t have a typical job for my age. Instead ofwaiting tables or making sandwiches, I worked as a software developer. I couldn't believe my luck! I was making more money than my peers, doing something I loved. However, that enthusiasm was short-lived. The code I was…
Nice little video essay on information theory and Claude Shannon, "the most important man you've probably never heard of". Tags: Claude Shannon video
Tantek’s talk at the Personal Democracy Forum on the past, present, and future of independent publishing on the web.
Today marks five years since I launched the website that my mom still refers to as 'the other bedbugs'. Happy business birthday to me! Any site that aspires to be an archive starts life with a credibility problem. The Internet is strewn with the corpses (or in some cases, zombies) of sites that onc
Disclaimer : This is a very long piece, much longer than I would normally write on any subject. I have edited it back but on sending it to friends to read they agreed that there was no one bit that should be cut. I hope that you feel the same. If there’s one thing that software developers care…
Hi, Marc . I grew up using your work. Thanks to one of my parents being employed by a university, I got to use Mosaic to browse the early Web way before most people had even heard of it. My first software development internship was a summer spent using beta versions of Netscape technologies – what…
Comprehensive info. Time is of the essence, so forgive my inevitable errors. For those like me who communicate through high-bandwidth media, the FCC’s proposal would be particularly silencing. Better to delay the video I was working on and make this one, rather than do nothing and possibly see all…
American Spectator, Sep/Oct2001, Vol. 34 Issue 7, p68 Carver Mead The Spectator Interview Once upon a time, Caltech's Richard Feynman, Nobel Laureate leader of the last great generation of physicists, threw down the gauntlet to anyone rash enough to doubt the fundamental weirdness, the…
How do you like your eggs, Bob Dylan, How do you like your eggs? You're walking on broken legs, Bob Dylan, But you still make us beg, Bob Dylan. So how do you like your eggs?* You can't look at him. If you work at one of the arenas where he plays, you're not allowed to look at him when he makes his…
That’s quite a claim! I’m sure many will disagree with me, but since this is my blog you’re going to get my rant! :) The Problem Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking more and more about the general frustrations around web programming in 2014. For example: There are more programming languages…
Fascinating piece by Ezra Klein, for the newly launched Vox: Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts
Today I am going to examine a certain argument that is popular in any hobby or sport: who is the Greatest Of All Time? Usually, discussions of the GOAT revolve around little more than which Stan can argue more strongly for his favorite rapper, without actually examining what should be at the heart…
The Internet is the latest in a series of battles going back thousands of years to push the human condition forward. I am a programmer and I deal in information and instructions to transform it. This is what I do all day. It is easy, so easy, too easy, to get stuck in the groove saying that informa
What a fucking clusterfuck. In case you were absent from the Internet the past two weeks, or for some reason don’t care about tech shenanigans, the following has happened: Six years ago : Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript and founding member of Mozilla, donated $1,000 to support Prop 8, the…
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief. “Bad news, detective. We got a situation.” “What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?” “Worse.…
How did human beings who lived five thousand years ago view themselves? How did they make decisions and how did they reflect on their past? Julian Jaynes (1920 – 1997) proposes a radical answer to these questions: until a few thousand years ago human beings did not ‘view themselves’. They did not…
In concept videos and imaginings about the Future Of Computing we often see Intelligent Agents : smart computer programs that work on your behalf. But to be more specific, I’m interested in agents that don’t work through formal rules. An SMTP daemon acts on your behalf routing messages to your…
Several people have written to me about the so-called "Hemingway" app , which offers to give you detailed stylistic advice about your writing. One useful way to evaluate programs of this kind is to see what they do with good writing — and given this effort's name, it makes sense to check out its…
Last time, I encouraged you to think about creating side projects as a way to diversify your income. Yet with a busy job or freelance business, a family, friends, and other activities, it can seem incredibly hard to make time for these additional projects. This time I’m going to share some tactics…
If you’ve been in the media slipstream today you know the outrage and mockery directed at Tom Perkins, one of the world’s wealthiest and most successful Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for an oped he wrote in the Wall Street Journal comparing the rising critique of income inequality and “the 1%”…
Who are you, and what do you do? My name is John McAfee . I have spent my entire life (I am currently 68) developing security and privacy software systems, and consulting to corporations and governments in containment and national security. One of my more successful creations was The McAfee…
Something irks me about the phrase “semantic HTML”. The intent is clear enough — using HTML in ways that are readable, using plain language to describe things. But that’s not what “semantic” means . We might as well be saying “well written” or “copy edited”. They’d be closer fits. What we describe…
This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American…
Someone had an idea about how the Harry Potter books should have ended and it's fantastic . And when I say fantastic I mean this is truly, objectively what Harry Potter's final fate should have been in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and J.K. Rowling screwed it up. Call your editor, J,K. You…
Josh Clark's "Seven Deadly Mobile Myths" talk ( video! and slides! ) makes a resounding argument that the web should not be fragmented into alternative experiences like the "mobile web", "tablet web" or "desktop web", but that the challenge should be to shape one web , and progressively enhance when…
It’s my belief that, when discussing rap (which here refers to something completely different from hip-hop), we can move the discussion beyond the “Drake sucks, Eminem rules” kind, based on nothing besides who you like more and fanboy-dom. We can look at rappers and, by describing their musical and…
TGN_CH_BO_BGChapterMenuHolder | 1 Languages PDF Download Reflecting on the first two decades of our foundation When we started our foundation 20 years ago, the world was, in many ways, very different from the one we live in now. It was before 9/11, before the Great Recession, and before the rise of…
In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming , Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing…
It’s the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice. KANYE WEST What’s there left to say about Kanye West? Certainly, West himself would have plenty to say. After all, he’s the guy who, during an NBC telethon to…
In broad strokes, here is my view of Microsoft’s history. In the beginning, Bill Gates stated the company’s goal: “A computer on every desk and in every home.” That was crazy. The PC revolution was well underway, but the grand total of PCs sold when Gates stated that mantra was, by today’s standar
No articles.