joshuago’s Bookmarks

Excellent backgrounder on the U.S. financial reform bill of 2009-2010.

Significant AI breakthroughs come from identifying or creating new sources of data, not inventing new algorithms.

In programming as in the rest of life, attitude trumps intelligence. It is in the crucible of practical problems that great new ideas can form.

For men the holy grail is within reach – you just need to get fit, and then you'll be fine; then you can think about something else. But the messages aimed at women are much more complex and confusing.

The strange phenomenon that's destroying Latin America.

If you want to dramatically increase your programming skills you need to be reading other people’s code.

In the public sector, the "consumer" often has little choice... so-called "market discipline" is a lot more diffuse when you have a former-schoolteacher-or-real-estate-broker-turned city councilman whose job it is to disburse a multi-million-dollar street-paving contract. And neither the schoolteacher nor the real-estate broker has any clue how to write or evaluate a road-paving contract.

A good survey of good, non-mainstream but powerful programming languages. Gives overview of Haskell, Scala, Standard ML, OCaml, and Scheme.

Progress is inexorable, cumulative, and collective if human beings exchange and specialize. Globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century.

An interesting case study and example of businesses that shrink markets through newfound efficiencies. First Round Capital wants to invest in companies that take five dollars of revenue from a competitor for every dollar earned.