Paul Graham just posted his thoughts on the 2-year anniversary of HackerNews. It’s interesting for a number of reasons. One thing that stands out is the implicit understanding that many mainstream communities of a similar nature have suffered what Paul refers to as “dilution”. The ...

Disclaimer: I am going to write a disclaimer at the end, but I’m going to write it at the end so I don’t completely ruin the story. So when you get to the end, you should read the disclaimer. But not now, don’t read it now, because it will ruin the story. You don’t want to ru...

It’s been awhile since I posted anything of this sort, but I thought this was pretty intense. Full disclosure; I’m a Christian. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t write about that much on this blog, though I’ve stated in the past that I would (or could, or maybe should), I really ha...

I hold strong opinions about the placement of curly braces. I don’t care where K & R put them, I’ll put them wherever I want to put them. And don’t even start with the CSS files with the closing curly brace indented inline with the rules. Where did that come from? It appears th...

Thanks to a friend of mine from way back who invited me to play correspondence chess over at http://redhotpawn.com, I’m deep into a re-immersion in the game of Chess. I know. I’m supposed to be learning and playing ‘Go‘, or something. It sounds fascinating, and I hope to begi...

Gmail: Is the alert dialog asking “Are you sure?” really necessary when I decide to delete everything in the spam folder? Regardless that it’s full of messages from people who only seem to want to talk about my penis, difficult as it may be to believe, yes I am really sure....

Dave Winer recently wrote: Twitter is the new OS. For the moment. It’s like the Apple /// in the days before the IBM PC. Remember the Apple ///? (Not many do.) I think that’s a good insight, and I like the comparison to the early days of the PC (really the pre-PC). But I don’t thin...

I’m signing up for a “sneak preview” of Google’s Friend Connect, and it’s looking an awful lot like the Openbook I just described in a recent post. So what would this mean? Hopefully I’ll get to look at it pretty soon. I’m not stuck on the idea of building s...

All Known Metal Bands seems to be… just that, and that only. A list of (wait for it… ) All Known Metal Bands. No more, no less. It is either an incredibly retarded or an incredibly awesome idea for a book. I’m still undecided which one I think it is. Possibly both. Also, apparently...