Meditation is Garbage Collection For Your Mind

Earlier tonight I gave a quick presentation on meditation at Hack Reactor. Here are the slides. Hope you enjoy!

How to criticize effectively

One of my favorite blogs, Brainpickings, posted an article “How to Criticize with Kindness: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on the Four Steps to Arguing Intelligently”. It featured an excerpt from Mr. Dannett that I want to remember, so I’ll share it here:

Bitcoin's Advantage for International Aid

Our century is the first in which it has been possible to speak of global responsibility and a global community. For most of human history we could affect the people in our village, or perhaps in a large city, but even a powerful king could not conquer far beyond the borders of his kingdom. When Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire, his realm covered most of the ‘known’ world, but today when I board a jet in London leaving what used to be one of the far-flung outposts of the Roman Empire, I pass over its opposite boundary before I am even halfway to Singapore, let alone to my home in Australia. Moreover no matter what the extent of the empire, the time required for communications and transport meant that there was simply no way in which people could make any difference to the victims of floods, wars, or massacres taking place on the other side of the globe. By the time anyone had heard of the events and responded, the victims were dead or had survived without assistance. ‘Charity begins at home’ made sense, because it was only ‘at home’ – or at least in your own town – that you could be confident that your charity would make any difference.
Instant communications and jet transport have changed all that. A television audience of two billion people can now watch hungry children beg for food in an area struck by famine, or they can see refugees streaming across the border in search of a safe place away from those they fear will kill them. Most of that huge audience also have the means to help people they are seeing on their screens. Each one of us can pull out a credit card and phone in a donation to an aid organization which can, in a few days, fly in people who can begin distributing food and medical supplies.

Butters' Very Own Blog Post

Ryan Lee and I made this game last week: http://butters.dsernst.com

N-Queens

Eric Schmidt and I were asked to write an algorithm to solve the N-Queens problem: how many different ways can n queens fit on an n x n chessboard, such that none of the queens could knock out another in a single move?

Heap's Permutation Algorithm in Javascript

Here’s a JavaScript implementation of Heap’s Permutation Algorithm, which finds all possible permutations of an array for you.

Profiling Object Instantiation

For Hack Reactor, we were asked to create Stack and Queue data-structures, and then to instantiate them in different ways: a functional style, a functional-shared style (where methods are shared in memory), a prototypal style, and a pseudoclassical style.

Day 1 of Hack Reactor

Yesterday was my first day of Hack Reactor. What an incredible day.

Another Day

Another day.

Notes on Alan Kay's 'The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental'

Notes from Alan Kay’s talk– Founder School Session: The Future Doesn’t Have to Be Incremental. Ideas here are Mr. Kay’s, not my own.