a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• media for thinking the unthinkable, we must get away from pencil-and-paper thinking. even when working on the computer, we still think in representations that were invented for the medium of paper, highly recommended
• the problem is civil obedience by howard zinn, highly recommended
• do things that don't scale, highly recommended
• structured programming with go to statements, programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered (pdf)
• what you really need is a market, not an idea, playing idea roulette is a habit even if you don't realize it. it feels good and feels like your making progress. but we know it doesn't actually lead to anywhere nice
• ignore posterity; build features, condemning any startup as "unimportant" is incredibly short-sighted. the big changes are unpredictable. if everyone is running around trying to "change the world", then we're micro-optimizing for the present
• what to ask yourself when creating a startup, look closely, and you'll see that the most successful products and startups today are not original ideas, but iterations on previous ideas
• how to hire, it turns out it's both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it's probably the most important thing a founder does
• how to name your company
• dna seen through the eyes of a coder, the source code of our dna is here. this not a joke. we can wonder about the license though
• make grep 50x faster, please note that this trick only works when you know that the involved files and search patterns are ascii only
• using computer modern fonts on the web
• on the typography of flight-deck documentation (pdf)
• just delete me, a directory of direct links to delete your account from web services
• cardboard box office, photography project by leon mackie and lilly lang