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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 426 posts.
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A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack
A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.
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Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home
If you have a Motorola Android device, there is a good chance it is silently sending a great deal of your personal information (including email addresses and passwords) to Motorola.
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Ten predictions (2004)
Ten Predictions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Update, September 2015: I saw the HN thread about Dan Luu's review of this post, and felt people were a little too generous with the scoring. So I'll offer my own scores and justifications here. 1) XML databases will surpass relational databases in
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"Nothing like this will be built again"
I've just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) -- and he showed me (and a couple of other friends) right…
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O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul
Several years ago I was courted by O’Reilly Media. After the success of my first book, Show Me the Numbers , the folks at O’Reilly were interested in publishing my second. I responded cautiously at first, because my prior self-publishing experience was extremely positive. Analytics Press, the publisher of Show Me the…
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Thoreau 2.0
This is a written version of a talk I gave on September 21, 2013 , at the XOXO conference in Portland.
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Improving the security of your SSH private key files
Update (July 2015): This post is now rather outdated, and the procedure for modifying your private key files is no longer recommended. A better solution is to use ssh-keygen -o .
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Why Mozilla Matters
[This is an extended essay on the news out of Norway yesterday. See the closing for encouragement toward Opera and its fans, whatever the open source projects they choose to join, from me on behalf of Mozilla. /be]
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Zombie Startups
My greatest fear as a startup founder isn’t to fail, it is to become a zombie startup.
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LG Smart TVs log USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers
Earlier this month I discovered that my new LG Smart TV was displaying ads on the Smart landing screen. After some investigation, I f...
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We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)
I think there’s something messed up about the startup culture in the USA. The belief is that you have to work 6-7 days a week and spend all your mental cycles on your company. Nothing but pledging your soul to your startup yields success, right?
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A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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Write More Classes
Furthermore I am of the oppinion that Python developers should write more classes.
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Investor Herd Dynamics
August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly…
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Switching from Gmail to FastMail
I switched from Gmail to FastMail a few months ago (in early 2013) and I’ve been meaning to write a post about how I did it.
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Computer Science in Vietnam
During my recent trip to Vietnam I took the opportunity to visit some schools and see how computer science was taught there. Officially, foreigners require permission from the department of education to enter schools. But it's much simpler (and the results are more representative) to simply show up unannounced. A…
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