Author Archives: Dan Nguyen

Louis C.K. releases new $5 DRM-free comedy recordings: Carnegie Hall (2010) and Shameless (previously on HBO)

I just got a mass-email from Louis C.K., apparently sent to everyone who bought his $5 Beacon Theater show. He’s offering audio-recordings of two previous shows with the popular $5-no-damn-DRM price. The email itself is hilarious as well. Here is… Continue reading

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A HTML GUI for training Tesseract on character sets

The Tesseract OCR Chopper, by data journalist Dino Beslagic. I’m making this short stub post because ever since I’ve used tesseract to convert scanned documents into text, I’ve wondered why the hell is it so hard to train tesseract (to… Continue reading

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Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant, brief career at Sports Illustrated: “He was not good at being an employee”

Slaughterhouse Five is one of my all-time favorite books. But I hadn’t known that Vonnegut was also one of the finest sportswriters to have graced equestrianism: From the introduction – written by his son, Mark: – to his posthumous work,… Continue reading

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Valve’s New Employees Handbook: “What is Valve *Not* Good At?”

A copy of gaming company Valve’s new employee guide made the rounds on Hacker News this morning (read the discussion here). Of all such company-manifestos, Valve’s ranks as one of the most well-design, brightly-written, and astonishingly honest. Google has its… Continue reading

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Dummy Data, Drugs, and Check-lists

Using dummy data — and forgetting to remove it — is a pretty common and unfortunate occurrence in software development…and in journalism (check out this headline). If you haven’t made yourself a pre-publish/produce checklist that covers even the most basic… Continue reading

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ProPublica at Netexplo

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of joining my colleagues Charlie Ornstein and Tracy Weber in Paris to receive a Netexplo award for our work with Dollars for Docs. Check out the presentation video they prepared for the… Continue reading

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Because of a typo, the government needs to keep your private data 10 times longer?

Yesterday the Obama administration approved new rules to greatly extend the time – from 180 days to 1,826 days (5 years) – that domestic intelligence services can retain American citizens’ private information. Citizens are eligible to be part of this… Continue reading

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Tools to get to the precipice of programming

I’m not a master programmer but it’s been so long since I’ve done my first “Hello World” that I don’t remember how people first grok the point of programming (for me, it was to get a good grade in programming… Continue reading

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Code, Don’t Tell: Programming as an Essential Journalism Skill

(tl;dr: this started out as a short post about how all of journalism can benefit from learning to code. It is now a massive rant that maybe I’ll split up later. It covers: A quote by Seymour Hersh Two of… Continue reading

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Photos from outside of NYFW 2012 (Fall/Winter)

Another Fashion Week come and gone. I didn’t have the time to go to any actual events but I did take part in a couple of related things: I did portraits and some scenery photos during Correll Correll’s casting call.… Continue reading

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