As a young student of the culinary arts, there were a handful of “commandments”—central tenets of good cooking—that each of my mentors persistently reinforced (read: screamed). One such precept, which has been indelibly seared into my cortex, is that heat equals flavor. Heat browns meat, caramelizes…

The story of how data scientists became sexy is mostly the story of the coupling of the mature discipline of statistics with a very young one–computer science. The term “Data Science” has emerged only recently to specifically designate a new profession that is expected to make sense of the vast…

At O’Reilly’s “Making Data Work” seminar earlier this summer, I teamed up with a few other folks (data diva Hilary Mason, R extraordinaire Joe Adler, and visualization guru Ben Fry) to talk about data. What follows is a blog-ified and amended version of that talk, originally entitled “Secrets of…

For anyone who’s ever been curious about what it would take to switch to a vegan diet and not hate it, Serious Eats’ J. Kenji López-Alt is going vegan for all of February. Last year, I decided to go vegan for an entire month, chronicling my thoughts, challenges, health, and weight the entire time.…

Maps are data made into a product. (source: New York Public Library ). We’ve all heard it: according to Hal Varian, statistics is the next sexy job . Five years ago, in What is Web 2.0 , Tim O’Reilly said that “data is the next Intel Inside.” But what does that statement mean? Why do we suddenly…

On Monday I—humbly—joined a group of NYC's most sophisticated thinkers on all things data for a half-day unconference to help O'Reily organize their upcoming Strata conference . The break out sessions were fantastic, and the number of people in each allowed for outstanding, expert driven,…

Using standard utilities Brad Yoes Published on March 14, 2012 A basic tenets of UNIX philosophy is to create programs (or processes) that do one thing, and do that one thing well. It is a philosophy demanding careful thought about interfaces and ways of joining these smaller (hopefully more simple)…

In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the…

Mark Seal pieces together an oral history of the making of Pulp Fiction through interviews with Tarantino, Thurman, Jackson, Travolta, Harvey Weinstein, and many others. When Pulp Fiction thundered into theaters a year later, Stanley Crouch in the Los Angeles Times called it “a high point in a low…

Frampton had been very lonely since his divorce three years earlier; now it seemed those days were over. Milani told him she was longing to change her life. She was tired, she said, of being a “glamour model,” of posing in her bikini on the beach while men ogled her. She wanted to settle down, have…

Illustration: Tim Burgard November 4, 1979, began like any other day at the US embassy in Tehran. The staff filtered in under gray skies, the marines manned their posts, and the daily crush of anti-American protestors massed outside the gate chanting, “Allahu akbar! Marg bar Amrika!” Mark and Cora…

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both…

Few consumers know his name, but Eddy Cue, Apple's iTunes chief, was instrumental in keeping those iPods, iPhones, and iPads loaded with movies, music and books -- and that helped turned Apple into a $560 billion company. Cue, left, is pictured with News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch Sarah Tew In…

The Apple Haters’ 7 Stages of Grief I wish I could take credit for this but I can’t. Got this from an arstechnica.com forum posting from way back in June of 2010. The forum poster’s moniker is The Real Blastdoor . Please join me in thanking him for this, because it is absolutely pure gold.…

I recently had the chance to catch up with Chris Hartjes, or, as some of you may know him, " "The Grumpy Programmer. " Because he recently released a new ebook on test-driven development in PHP, I wanted to pick his brain a bit! Q You're widely known as "The Grumpy Programmer." How'd this title come…

This article will dive into the principles of algorithm design. If you haven't a clue what I'm referring to, read on! When you hear the word "algorithm," you probably respond in one of three ways: You immediately know and understand what we're talking about because you studied computer science. You…

I picked up a book recently called The $100 Start-Up . The name alone was enough to hook me — it sounded perfect for someone interested in the startup scene, and the title implied that it was flying in the face of the VC-funded status quo. Unfortunately, after just a few pages, it became clear that…

August 19, 2012 Sent From My iPad A couple weeks ago, I wrote a quick note signaling my intent to predominantly use my iPad as my main computer when I travel going forward. What started as a successful two-day experiment led to a long weekend away last week. That went well enough that I’m confident…

It's becoming hard to remember life before digital news. We now take for granted instantaneous availability of news and information on devices ranging from desktop PCs to tablets to smartphones, We now break news, add commentary and interact with audiences on social networks like Twitter and…

I’ve been analyzing the response I get to opinions that I post on this site, and what’s interesting to me is that most opinions are polarized towards emphatic disagreement, or slow-clap-inducing agreement. I wondered why that was, so I started paying attention to my own writing a bit to see what…

Marc Andreessen famously coined the phrase “ software is eating the world .” It’s an apt observation. If you look back on the history of computing you’re likely to measure computers sold or devices sold or users harvested or productivity gained. These things are measured because they can be…

And the flip side: Being explicit about our boundaries also requires us to respect and adhere to the boundaries others have communicated to us. If a client requests that you be available at certain hours, or that work be delivered by a certain date and time, and you agree to those expectations, you…

How we keep GitHub fast https://t.co/Jr4dmlpk

How Algorithms Rule the World: http://t.co/uHzQybov

With the recent announcement and release of the Retina Macbook Pro, Apple has brought double-density screens to all of the product categories in its current lineup, significantly paving the way for the next wave of display standards. While the fourth-generation iPhone gave us a taste of the…

A complex legacy The post- Cablevision cases are almost comically formalistic about technical details. Instead of looking at the front-end user experience, they focus on the back-end hardware and software. Sooner or later, someone is going to argue to a court that it makes a difference for copyright…

Great Startup Engineers http://t.co/wOMlZr1p by @derrickko

August 28, 2012 The Importance of Silence There is little that I love to do more than listen to my own voice. (And, yes, I am a pathological narcissist . Diagnosed and everything. And, yes, I am watching many of you nod your heads and say “that makes so much sense,” right now.) I enjoy discourse and…

Let's not race to the bottom. We know that industrialists seek to squeeze every penny out of every market. We know that competitors want to drive their costs to zero so that they will be the obvious commodity choice. And we know that many that seek to unearth natural resources want all of it, fast…