Viewing profile — mattlanger

For Dr. Everitt, who joined the Gravity Probe experiment in 1962 as a young postdoctoral fellow and has worked on nothing else since, the announcement on Wednesday capped a career-…

You're selling yourself short though--at the lowest it's actually free, just like, you know, every other freemium model on the web.

Agreed, I was just trying to jocularly comment on the Things That Don't Exactly Belong On Hacker News aspect of it by pointing out that those conversations always end up in the sam…

Godwin's Law, HackerNews edition: as a non-tech policy discussion grows longer, the probability of a comment thread devolving into an argument between competing ideas of libertaria…

As Merlin Mann so brilliantly put it, "Yelp.com: Explore Where Local Illiterates Have Recently Stopped Eating.™" http://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/1453581139

Amazing! I run a coworking space for entrepreneurs in Brooklyn, which means every month I'm running around gathering up a dozen or so checks from tenants--so this the most exciting…

TL;DR: http://blog.mattlanger.com/post/1516687187

The website is still intermittent, but as of now command line access seems to be fully operational.

You're right, Paul, there's no evidence of any of this at all. There's no evidence of pharma companies lobbying for more lax FDA regulations. There's no evidence of the automative …

Regarding your first point: since you already stated you're sometimes in favor of publicly subsidizing things like vaccinations and criminal incarcerations, your opposition to publ…

Consider as a counterpoint Aristotle's Politics, Vii.2: "It is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily."

His project reminds me of this great passage from Colson Whitehead's Colossus of New York : "No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, Tha…

Memory and recall are not matters of direct lookup; our brains are not key-value stores. We usually don't request a memory by timestamp, but rather, memories more often than not ma…

If the supposed billion dollars Facebook is allegedly pulling in this year was happening at anywhere a decent margin, they wouldn’t have needed a series E round of $120 million fro…

In what way was this a tutorial? Seemed more like a parable meant to drive home the line about how "When they have questions, they ask the mailing list or read the faq again." Each…

I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production : http://ww…

Preamble: I'm not being negative! I always appreciate any effort to elucidate complicating matters--especially those on matters I happen to have a vested interest in--but seeing as…

Tagging! If only! That's one of the features I've long wanted, a one-to-many relationship between feeds and categories, as opposed to the inverse we get with folders. What if I wan…

Got definite plans for this in the pipeline, in addition to filtering out dupes.

What I've been realizing more and more lately is how much I would appreciate a reader without any concept of an unread item count. I assume this feature made its way into the genre…

Heads next to the Ninth Circuit, which will doubtlessly uphold the ruling. Then it'll be on to the SCOTUS, which is a very different court from the '03 bench that ruled on Lawrence…