Paul Graham once suggested that startups pose their mission statement as a question. Google's question might have been "Will the PageRank algorithm deliver results that are so good that they lure users away from Altavista?"

via 2010/09/concept.md at master from raganwald's homoiconic - GitHub.

My great lesson from …

There's a pretty good comet visible near the easy-to-find constellation Cassiopeia (the big "M" or "W" in the Northern sky). It's brightness is listed as magnitude 5.7, which ought to be visible with binoculars if you aren't too close to bright lights. (If you have really dark skies and …

Yavin IV: Exploring space on the cheap with an iPhone, Droid, and Flip.

Apparently, even on a very windy day, you can send a weather balloon up 100,000' and when it bursts and you parachute the payload down, you've still only covered about 75 miles. Hmm....

WordPress › WordPress 3.0 "Thelonious".

This is a major update, but it looks like to take advantage of several of the components, you have to switch to the default "2010" theme.

Calculated Risk: Q2 Flow of Funds: Household Net Worth off \$12.3 Trillion from Peak.

Not that lost equity has to be paid off (although I knew too many people who used their homes as ATMs during the early 00s), but just in terms of morale, the loss of \$12 …

It sounds like someone designed a programming language with the express intention of intriguing me:

FunLoft is an experimental language for concurrent programming, designed with the following objectives:

• make concurrent programming simpler by providing a framework with a clear and sound semantics.
• provide a safe language, in which, for example …

The cult of busy « Scott Berkun.

This rings absolutely true to me.

::: {#_mcePaste} A altogether inebriated people was stumbling down the passage with equal foot on the repress and an individual foot in the gutter. A cop pulled up and said, “I’ve got to take you in, pal. You’re doubtlessly drunk.” :::

::: {#_mcePaste} Our wasted friend asked, “Office-bearer, are ya absolutely …

Part of the interviewing process for a software development job is "coding on the whiteboard." Some simple-enough-to-understand problem (such as "FizzBuzz") that shows whether you grok coding or whether you're wasting everyone's time.

The first threshold is understanding that it's foolish to memorize specific "interview code problems," which is, pitifully …