a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• politicians are ridiculously dishonest when they justify invasion of privacy by the world being more dangerous, terrorism has become the modern version of what communism was in the 1950s, comic books in the 1940s, and jazz music in the 1930s. it's a scare that can motivate any measure, no matter how ridiculous, and more importantly, no matter how eroding to civil liberties
• the next big thing will start out looking like a toy
• the problem with ios, this article is not about apple, iphone or the app store at all, but rather the fulfilment of human expression and what we have come to accept. closed platforms foster monocultural thinking, which inevitably leads to the stagnation and demise of innovation; an observable function of any fallen industry
• don't fall in love with your technology, what i was trying to get across is that if you romanticize unix, if you view it as a thing of perfection, then you lose your ability to imagine better alternatives and become blind to potentially dramatic shifts in thinking
• why [programming language x] is unambiguously better than [programming language y], hilarious
• on flow-based programming, we can't bring technologies to people, neither can we bring people to technology. we can create, however, a new space that provides the tools for people to pick up and decide how much they want to engage with technology
• the mathematical hacker, mathematics, in the end, does not help you understand computer programming. rather, mathematics is a tool for understanding phenomena in the world. it is the hacker's job to figure out how to encode the insight into a piece of code that will be used over and over
• the lisp curse, lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in lisp
• become a hustler, what we should tell our kids is this: "you can do anything - if you're willing to pay the price"
• a 30-second story to remember when you feel inadequate, your strength isn't held by you alone, but also by the people who march alongside you
• the ultimate cheat sheet for selling anything
• reverse shell cheat sheet
• screen shots of computer code, images of the computer code appearing in tv and films and what they really are
• the pace of modern life
• ian knot, the world's fastest shoelace knot