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My name is Dan Nguyen and I'm a journalist, programmer and photographer.
Follow me on Twitter: @dancow
Read my guide to programming: The Bastards Book of Ruby.
Category Archives: thoughts
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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Category thoughts
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
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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Category thoughts, visuals
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
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
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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Category thoughts
Woody Allen: Every step is part of the writing process
One of the best books I’ve picked up recently is Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking, which is basically a 400+ page interview, spanning decades, between the author and Allen. I’m a fair-weather fan… Continue reading
Google’s search has been dumbed down for the novices and solipsistic
In response to Google’s latest plan to combine all your usage data on all of its platforms (GMail, Youtube, etc.) into one tidy user-and-advertiser-friendly package, I’m mostly sitting on the fence. This is because I’ve always assumed everything I type… Continue reading
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Category thoughts