joshuago’s Bookmarks

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.

Scaling from $5 to $50 million is not the toughest part of a new venture - it's getting your users to pay you anything at all. The biggest gap in any venture is that between a service that is free and one that costs a penny.

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.