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Get your loved ones off Facebook
I originally wrote this for my friends and family in 2015, to explain why the latest Facebook privacy policy is really harmful. It’s since been read b
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 405 posts.
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Prof. Sussman's Reading List
Professor Sussman's reading recommendations
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Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”
My translation of DIE ZEIT’s interview with Thomas Piketty is now hosted by TheWire.in. Read it here.
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YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin
This is HUGE.
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Replacing Middle Management with APIs
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services…
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Biggest image in the smallest space
What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…
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Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Graphics Study
2015/03/12: Back online after Reddit and Slashdot killed my bandwidth with 30,000 visits in the last hours. Followed by HN. 2015/03/11: Update with …
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Neon: Node plus Rust
If you’re a JavaScript programmer who’s been intrigued by Rust’s hack without fear theme—making systems programming safe and fun—but you’ve been waiting for inspiration, I may have something for you! I’ve been working on Neon, a set of APIs and tools for making it super easy to write native Node modules in Rust.
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Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity
I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper , but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone . I actually remember struggling to grok tla , and being happy that someone took the time to write…
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The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom
Why do teachers quit? As I make the tough decision to leave the classroom, I highlight some of the issues that force quality teachers to leave public education.
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A guide to implementing 2D platformers
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
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What's New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers?
My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no…
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Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
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How a little bit of TCP knowledge is essential
Why you should understand (a little) about TCP
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1Password Leaks Your Data
Seriously.
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Tired of Safari
Yesterday, in reaction to pointer events becoming a W3C recommendation, Tim Kadlec published an important piece about Apple’s huge influence on the mobile web.
350
CSS Modules
If you wanted to identify an inflection point in the recent development of CSS thinking, you’d probably pick Christopher Chedeau’s “CSS in JS” talk from NationJS in November, 2014. It was a watershed moment that set a bunch of different minds spiralling off in their own directions like particles after a high-energy…
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Parallel Sequential Scan is Committed to PostgreSQL 9.6
I previously suggested that we might be able to get parallel sequential scan committed to PostgreSQL 9.5. That did not happen. However, I...
352
How bad are things?
One “advantage” of working in psychiatry is getting a window into an otherwise invisible world of really miserable people. I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ra…
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Google seems to have broken email forwarding
Basically: I'm finding it impossible to reliably convince Google that email from my employees, to my employees, is not spam. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail…
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My Top 100 Programming, Computer and Science Books: Part One
I was recently interviewed by Fog Creek and one of the questions was about my favorite programming, coding and development books. I got very excited by this question as I'm a huge book nerd. I love books about computers, programming, and science. Every few months I spend a day or two researching the latest…
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Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
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A Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism: The Details
Update 2017-01-09: Laci claims to have found a workaround to the previously posted error, and the claim is again quasipolynoimal time! Updated arXiv paper to follow. Update 2017-01-04: Laci has posted an update on his paper. The short version is that one small step of his analysis was not quite correct, and the result…