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Opendoor, a startup worth emulating
OpenDoor has a unique yet high-risk approach to residential real estate; that’s a great thing, both for its prospects and for society.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
3212
Easy Scalable Text Rendering on the GPU
This post describes the text rendering algorithm I used on thetamath.com, a GPU-powered 2D equation renderer I wrote for fun last December…
3213
Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
3214
Making Your Writing Work Harder For You
Using teaching -- via writing, speaking, and the like -- to sell more software.
3215
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
3216
A High-Level Technical Overview of Homomorphic Encryption
About two years ago, I switched teams at Google to focus on fully homomorphic encryption (abbreviated FHE, or sometimes HE). Since then I’ve got to work on a lot of interesting projects, learning along the way about post-quantum cryptography, compiler design, and the ins and outs of fully homomorphic encryption. If…
3217
Robin Hood Hashing should be the default hash table implementation (2013)
There’s a neat variation on open-addressing based hash tables called Robin Hood hashing . This technique isn’t very well-known, but it makes a huge practical difference because it both improves performance and space utilization compared to other “standard” hash tables (e.g. chaining ). It also eliminates the major…
3218
World map of the difference between solar and clock time
A better map of the difference between solar and standard time, and some trivia
3219
Use Haskell for shell scripting
turtle 1.0 announcement post
3220
3221
My url isn't your url
When I started the precursor to the curl project, httpget, back in 1996, I wrote my first URL parser. Back then, the universal address was still called URL: Uniform Resource Locators. That spec was published by the IETF in 1994. The term "URL" was then used as source for inspiration when naming the tool and … Continue…
3222
Why aren't you using git-flow?
git-flow is a library of git subcommands that helps automate your branching and release workflow workflow, using Vincent Driessen's successful branching model.
3223
Do call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
This is a (very late) reply to Patrick McKenzie's " Don't Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice ". I find much of his advice very sensible, and it might be very helpful to someone in the beginning of their career – assuming they can act upon it (and I really don't know whether my 20-year-old self could…
3224
The State of Agile Software in 2018
Agile Software Development may be mainstream, but much of what's done is faux-agile, and we need to push back.
3225
Why Intel Added Cache Partitioning
Typical server utilization is between 10% and 50%. Google has demonstrated 90% utilization without impacting latency SLAs . Xkcd estimated that Google owns 2 million machines . If you estimate an amortized total cost of $4k per machine per year , that's $8 billion per year. With numbers like that, even small…
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3228
Experiments in Constraint-Based Graphic Design
Basalt is system for graphic design that allows a designer to think in terms of relationships between objects, and it makes it easy to build and reuse abstractions.
3229
Startup Competitive Advantages that Work
It's not a question of if someone copies your business idea, it's when.
3230
Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 Vaccines
Sections of this post were co-authored by Cornelia Scheitz. Noah Leidinger created a German translation. Piotr Kwapin created a Polish translation. Last updated on February 7, 2021. Bert Hubert’s excellent and widely shared article about Reverse Engineering the source code of the Pfizer-BioNTech SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine is…
3231
Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
3232
Quadratic Voting (2014)
Glen Weyl has uploaded a new version of his paper, Quadratic Voting (written with Steven Lalley), to SSRN, which now includes the completed proofs. Quadratic voting is the most important idea for l…
3233
When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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Speed Without Wizardry
Vyacheslav Egorov, who goes by mraleph on the Web, wrote a responseto my article “Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly”titled “Maybe you don’t nee...
3236
Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable
Let’s make software even better.
3237
3238
Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics
There’s an agenda there, and it’s a bad one.
3239
How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010)
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
3240
Duke Nukem 3D Code Review
Since I left my job at Amazon I have spent a lot of time reading great source code. Having exhausted the insanely good idSoftware pool , the next thing to read was one of the greatest game of all time : Duke Nukem 3D and the engine powering it named " Build ". It turned out to be a difficult experience: The engine…