At the HackNY Hackathon last weekend, we talked to Akiva Bamberger, a master’s student at Columbia, about the relative connotations of all the different words that are used to describe people who write code.
Here’s the breakdown Mr. Bamberger offered:
“‘Developer’ is good. ‘Programmer’ is bad. ‘Engineer’ is bad. ‘Engineer’ and ‘programmer’ both say, Read More
When he’s in front of people, Ian Jennings Jablonowski, the 20-year-old hacker from New Brunswick, stands over his laptop like a DJ at a club, feet planted far apart and further out than they need to be, back hunched, arms stretched out. He talks fast and has piercings in both ears and in his lip. Read More
Aaron Sorkin has written an “explanation/apology“ intended for anyone who was offended by his depiction of women in The Social Network. The note came in the form of a comment Sorkin posted on TV writer Ken Levine’s blog, after one of Levine’s readers wrote a post about how Sorkin had “failed women” with the movie because Read More
When The Observer talked to Chris Dixon earlier this week about technophobes and what the tech industry can do to allay their fears about the future, the Hunch co-founder emphasized his belief that every tool can be used negatively and positively. He brought up targeted online advertising as an example: sure, he said, the Read More
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network as a maladjusted misanthrope who talks like a robot and is better at communicating with his computer than he is with other humans. He is awkward, uncomfortable and helplessly off-putting when forced to deal with anyone who is not like Read More
On the uptown A train this morning The Observer spotted a fellow in khaki slacks and a black polo shirt holding a peculiar paperback edition of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. We wondered: was this an advanced reader’s copy? Had this man received it from Farrar, Straus and Giroux before the book’s publication and was just now Read More
When The Observer profiled him last year, Massimiliano Gioni was described by others in the art world as an extremely ambitious, socially gifted curator who at just 35 years old had risen to prominence in his profession with impressive speed.
The New Museum announced last night that Massimiliano Gioni, who has worked there since Read More
HackNY, the organization founded earlier this year to encourage gifted math and computer science students to join tech start-ups instead of taking boring banking jobs, will announce their second batch of fellows at an all-night hackathon taking place at N.Y.U. on October 9th.
HackNY, which is run by N.Y.U. professor Evan Korth, Columbia professor Read More
During his Web 2.0 Expo keynote yesterday, Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley spent a few minutes talking about the significance of third party developers, and how creating an ecosystem of applications that make use of Foursquare’s check-in data is a priority for the Cooper Square geosocial start-up. We wrote recently that becoming Read More
Dennis Crowley wants Foursquare to “change and drive” the behavior of its users. The Foursquare founder and CEO just delivered his keynote address at the UBM TechWeb / O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at the Sheraton Hotel, and that’s what he kept saying. He reiterated his long-held belief that Foursquare’s game mechanics can and do incentivize people Read More
