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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
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
A Million Pageviews, Thousands of Dollars Poorer, and Still Countlessly Richer.
Update: This post rambled longer than I intended it to and I forgot that I had meant to include some observations on what I’ve noticed about Flickr’s traffic pattern. I’ve added some grafs to the bottom of this post. My… Continue reading
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Category thoughts, visuals, works
SOPA Opera now on ProPublica
Moved my SOPAopera.org site over to my employer’s home, ProPublica: http://projects.propublica.org/sopa It’s the same data, just with a facelift and respectable color scheme:
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The SOPA Debate and How It’s Affected by Congress’s Understanding of Child Porn
Update (1/22/2012): SOPA was indefinitely postponed by Rep. Lamar Smith on Friday (PIPA is likewise stalled). Rep. Smith also has another Internet rights bill on deck though: the The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, which mandates that… Continue reading
The Irrationality of Price Anchoring
tl;dr summary – people will unconsciously anchor their judgment on a random number given to them, even if that number was fabricated in front of their own eyes. If you’ve never heard the term “price anchor“, you’ve undoubtedly experienced it… Continue reading
Louis C.K. thanks his fans for buying his $5 Beacon Theater Show
Louis C.K. at the Bell House, Brooklyn, 9/30/2011, originally uploaded by Dan Nguyen @ New York City. Possibly the best $10 show ever. Even the scalped tickets would’ve been worth it Louis C.K. just sent an email to everyone who… Continue reading
To find insights: ask the cage cleaners, not the veterinarians
Sometimes the great insights about how things really work can come from the people who are thought to be too far down the ladder to possibly understand the big picture. Robert M. Sapolsky, an author and professor of neurology at… Continue reading
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Category thoughts
My 3,000th photo on Flickr: Watching the sunset, Battery Park
My 3,000th photo on Flickr: Watching the sunset, Battery Park, originally uploaded by Dan Nguyen @ New York City. I started using Flickr back in 2008 but joined the Pro version (which allows you to upload unlimited photos) late in… Continue reading
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Paul Newman, Scrappy Startup Entrepreneur
After watching Paul Newman in “The Hustler” on Netflix this weekend – and then reading the spectacular details of his life (according to Wikipedia) – I decided to buy his book that tells the origins of his “Newman’s Own” food… Continue reading