joshuago’s Bookmarks

Journalism is not a particularly esteemed profession, but its capacity to bear witness remains one of its more redeeming attributes. In the field during a natural disaster of this scale, you do feel at times ghoulish and intrusive upon both the grief of survivors and in relation to the more directly useful efforts of rescuers and humanitarian relief workers. And yet all of those classes of participants in the crisis will recognize, most of the time, that journalism helpfully amplifies their own condition or potential.

A proposal for a better way to learn, as explained through the analogy of learning to draw. Don't learn by tracing: find (or invent) those pencil structures. Seeing the pencil lines makes the idea become your own: you can modify it, combine it with others, or just appreciate it at a deeper level. And that's the joy of learning.

America may one day be lucky enough to experience its very own national fiscal crisis. Let us hope it is not wasted.

Duntemann starts at the beginning -- the real beginning -- and explains what computers are and what they do. Assembly language must take the hardware into account (at least as far as memory addressing is concerned) so he talks at length about the Intel/AMD x86 hardware architecture. When he finally gets down to teaching assembly language itself, the emphasis is on memory addressing. If you know where your operands are, you're three quarters of the way to anywhere else you might want to go.

How to get inheritable class attributes working properly with parent classes and subclasses. A pretty involved process necessary for getting around the obvious approach, which does not work.

The money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

If you’re planning a web app, it’s always worth reminding yourself what the base need is that you’re satisfying, and how much value it is likely to have with the user: a successful business/service should neither over nor under-value itself.

As more documents are scanned and go online, many works of historical scholarship will be exposed as flimsy and haphazard. The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research.

Key variable in education is quality of teacher, not quality of school. Teach For America has been tracking what makes some teachers great. Basic quality seems to be "relentlessness."

By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.