Random

  • My favorites from 2017

    Books I started this year with a goal of reading 50 books. Then in May my life changed and all of my goals changed. But I still made it through 23 books. Here’s my list if you’re interested. My favorites: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – A fantastic, if long book written by…More

  • Moving to Tahoe

    Friends, In case you hadn’t heard, I’ll be moving out of my place in San Francisco in January and into a place in South Lake Tahoe for the next year or so. It’s a fork in the road for me; I arrived in SF in June 2010 living out of my backpack. I depart SF…More

  • How I set up my bitcoin miner

    As Bitcoin continues to gain popularity, I decided to put together a short how-to guide for anyone who would like to set up their own mining operation. Much of this information was gathered from various places around the web, in an ad-hoc fashion. Most of the miner activity I discovered exists in forums and random…More

  • Video conferencing box

    Video conferencing box: contains a super sensitive, omni-directional condenser microphone and a loud speaker, you can select them in google hangouts plug it in and solve your video conferencing problems NEED A GOOD NAME Mic -> compressor -> usb interface -> hub speaker -> usb interface -> hubMore

  • A collection of Alan Kay quotes

    Art is the reminder that our brain is so limited that we can hardly deal with getting from one moment to the next, art forces us to acknowledge there is more there. Jokes and discoveries are very much related (taking you into a different path and reveal that you’re in a  different context. If you…More

  • One way to gauge ROI on design

    Robustness of user interface inversely proportional with investment into training users to use the software. So, design gets ROI as you scale (and not before). Or, in places where the software must “train” customers at a very low cost (like freemium saas products). Great design lowers CAC by boosting conversion rates due to difficult software.More

  • “If you manage your top line (quality of your people, quality of your products, quality of your strategy), the bottom line will follow.” -Mentor of Steve JobsMore

  • RVM, OpenSSL, Keystore, and you

    Are you are encountering this error while attempting to install JRuby using RVM? And tearing your hair out? OpenSSL::X509::StoreError: setting default path failed: Invalid keystore format Here’s how to resolve it. Add this to your .zshrc: export SSL_CERT_FILE=/Library/Java/Home/lib/security/cacerts Then, you might need to also do the following: $ wget http://curl.haxx.se/ca/cacert.pem $ sudo keytool -importcert -file cacert.pem…More

  • Notes from Mindstorms

    Having words for things like “nested loop” or for different kinds of bugs or conditions can be hugely helpful for clarity of thinking Children can learn computing best when they program the computer, not when it’s used to attempt to program them It’s too bad excel isn’t more extensible, it could be a fantastic platform…More

  • Notes from Turn the Ship Around

    Idea: Figure out what code review is intended to solve and solve them in other ways. Eliminate code review as a centralized point of decision making are the junior developers actually learning from code reviews? Are we actually preventing bugs via code review? Are we spreading institutional knowledge via code reviews? Great leadership of his…More

  • A better kind of app store

    A Better kind of app store The browser is a distribution channel. Writing apps in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is like being told by your distributor that you can only build your products in a certain way. That’s ridiculous! Build a better distribution mechanism that allows you to build apps the right way: either binaries…More

  • Excel dataflow

    Github / package manager for excel. think zapier, plugging services together intelligently, except your spreadsheet in excel / google docs becomes a hub rather than the data being 100% decentralized. write a package manager in VBA that allows one-click installs of third-party services like a CRM or charting tool. inbound data as well – for…More

  • Daily book chapters

    A way to receive chapters in a book in a chunked way, daily or weekly or whatever. by email or RSS.More

  • Code samples

    We spend a ton of time reading while we learn to write. We should do the same with code. A website that just contains curated code samples with explanations of how they work, and why that approach was chosen would be really cool.More

  • Bitcoin-backed DRM

    Since BTC cannot be copied, can we embed a bitcoin into media / software to prevent copying?More

  • Search everything you’ve ever seen

    Search everything you’ve ever seen on the web Watch the Safari History File Every time a new entry is added, mirror that page (as well as a PDF version) Upload to S3 Keep an elastic search instance indexing these web pages in S3More

  • In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe”, Sussman replied. “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any…More

  • The Future Log

    Sometime in mid-2013, my cofounder Roshan Choxi went on a well-deserved week-long vacation. At the time, Bloc had perhaps 8 total employees. The Monday he departed, everything he had been handling was suddenly redirected to me, on top of everything I normally handled. In essence, my workload doubled overnight. And it was intense. If I…More

  • We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is…More

  • Heart rate connections

    Connect heart rate monitors so that people you interact with are connected. When i argue with someone, I can feel their heart rate increase. When we are having fun, we both feel relaxed.More

  • A different approach to computing

    I recently unearthed an old project of mine, and could hardly remember writing it. I’m publishing it here for posterity. Motivation This is an outline of an interface that will allow computer users to be much more productive than current technology offers. It will be easy to user for newcomers and power users alike, with…More

  • Various hypotheses

    Software cannot present quality until it can also encompass and know a persons a priori experiences Debugging object oriented programs means that you’re in the realm of classes. But instances are always different from their classes, and these differences are the source of any weird behavior. Data is different, and potentially even behavior. Thinking in…More

  • What skills should every software engineer have?

    One part of my job at Bloc has become: make sure everyone on our engineering team is improving their skills. We like T-Shaped people (succinctly: generalists with one deep area of expertise), and part of growing that kind of culture means understanding what makes great software engineers. I have friends at many different companies, of…More

  • Our generation is the first one to digitize their lives. Photos, family, friends, growing up from 16 up – through college, beginning of career, relationships, hardships, and so much more that a life contains / affects. We’ll always be a  part of that leading edge of increasing the pattern. And it will leave a lasting…More

  • The abolition of grades and degrees

    Much has been written about the devaluation of degrees and the evils of grading in higher education. As a society, we’re clearly reeling from the consequences (44% of college graduates are underemployed). I was about to write a lengthy blog post on the subject, and explain how I have personally been impacted. Instead, I’ll let…More