04 Nov 2014, 12:04 p.m.

.illusion()

Last night one of my Hacker School peers was practicing sleight-of-hand with a card deck, and another peer walked over and said, "Oh, I used to run a magic tricks website." I waited with bated …

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04 Nov 2014, 10:49 a.m.

Vestiges

I know some Russian, some French, and some Kannada, and every once in a while, my vocabulary fractures and I say a word from some other language. "Nodu" is Kannada for "look" (imperative second-person), and …

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31 Oct 2014, 16:59 p.m.

A Few Intermediate Git Tips

Today I led an intermediate Git workshop at Hacker School, with occasional help from more experienced Git users. We covered: cherry-picking versus merging a commit from one branch to another git blame [filename] to see …

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27 Oct 2014, 9:00 a.m.

Epithets for Basilisks

I saw a theatrical showing of an Indian movie the other day. I noticed that the filmmakers had censored a few words and phrases. Most confusingly, when one character (an Indian lawyer in 2012) hyperbolically …

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20 Oct 2014, 6:56 a.m.

Hacker School Miscellanea

Found in an email I sent a few years ago: "I'm freaking 30 now, so I have decided to be Mature, stop feeling bad that I don't learn stuff well on my own, and take …

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17 Oct 2014, 22:13 p.m.

The Thing You Garden

What are you making? And what are you metamaking? That is, what are you doing to, directly or indirectly, help other people create good things? I keep thinking about Growstuff, my friend Alex "Skud" Bayley's …

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13 Oct 2014, 8:56 a.m.

Lee Iacocca and Malcolm X

I read Malcolm X's autobiography at about twelve and Lee Iacocca's autobiography at around eight. (You know how it is with childhood; you read what's around you.) This past weekend I dipped back into the …

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11 Oct 2014, 10:58 a.m.

Recent Reading Responses

Data & Society (which I persist in thinking of as "that New York City think tank that danah boyd is in" in case you want a glimpse of the social graph inside my head) has …

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08 Oct 2014, 8:01 a.m.

How I made a tidepool: Implementing the Friendly Space Policy for Wikimedia Foundation technical events

Back when I worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, I used the Ada Initiative's anti-harassment policy as a template and turned it into the Friendly Space Policy covering tech events run by WMF. I offer you …

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07 Oct 2014, 14:00 p.m.

Some Tips On Domain Names And Hosting

Here are some things I recently learned or re-learned about setting up your own website. Domain names There are a ton of domain name registrars out there and a lot of them are subsidiaries of …

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