24 May 2016

Firstest

Len Shustek explains why writing the history of computing is harder than it looks. He discusses the recent book by Thomas Haigh et al., ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer.

22 May 2016

Read a book

J. Bradford Hipps answers a rather parochial and oft-cited post by Vinod Khosla:
[I]f anything can be treated as a plug-in, it’s learning how to code. It took me 18 months to become proficient as a developer. This isn’t to pretend software development is easy — those were long months, and I never touched the heights of my truly gifted peers. But in my experience, programming lends itself to concentrated self-study in a way that, say, To the Lighthouse or Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction do not. To learn how to write code, you need a few good books. To enter the mind of an artist, you need a human guide.

19 May 2016

Block that button!

David Sleight provides some inside-baseball info about ProPublica's revamped mobile apps, including the yogic contortions required of this non-profit to satisfy Apple.