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The Error Model in Midori
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 466 posts.
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Beware The Man Of One Study
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…
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Feature Toggles
Feature Flags can be categorized into several buckets; manage each appropriately. Smart implementation can help constrain complexity.
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The Intellectual Yet Idiot
(Chapter in Skin in the game )
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HN comments are underrated
HN comments are terrible . On any topic I’m informed about , the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong . Most of the time, there are zero comments from people who know anything about the topic and the top comment is reasonable sounding but totally incorrect. Additionally, many comments are gratuitously…
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Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
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Spaced repetition
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
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How Hacker News ranking algorithm works
In this post I’ll try to explain how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works and how you can reuse it in your own applications. It’s a very…
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Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person
“Universal love,” said the cactus person. “Transcendent joy,” said the big green bat. “Right,” I said. “I’m absolutely in favor of both those things.…
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You Are Still Crying Wolf
Go away, pro-Trump bots [Update 5/30: I originally took this post down because it got picked up by some pro-Trump accounts that I think were bots which would post it several times a day to various …
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How Plex is doing HTTPS for all its users
This week Plex , a self-hosted media server, announced that they now offer TLS to secure all connections, including those to the user’s servers. This is actually pretty interesting.
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What’s the matter with PGP?
Last Thursday, Yahoo announced their plans to support end-to-end encryption using a fork of Google’s end-to-end email extension. This is a Big Deal. With providers like Google and Yahoo onboa…
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Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems
I love regular expressions. No, I’m not sure you understand: I really love regular expressions. You may find it a little odd that a hack who grew up using a language with the ain’t keyword would fall so head over heels in love with something as obtuse and
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Welcome to Rands Leadership Slack
For a role as crucial as leadership, there is a shocking lack of required training on the topic. Combined with a tremendous collection of impenetrable literatur
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Data is a Toxic Asset
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or…
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Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel (2004)
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
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Aggregation Theory
The disruption caused by the Internet in industry after industry has a common theoretical basis described by Aggregation Theory.
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Show HN: Web Design in 4 minutes
Learn the basics of web design in 4 minutes with this interactive tutorial.
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Stack Overflow: The Hardware – 2016 Edition
This is #2 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture.Previous post (#1): Stack Overflow: The Architecture - 2016 EditionNext post (#3...
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cgo is not Go
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
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A Protocol for Dying
Kind people already sent donations that will make my childrens' lives easier, when I'm not there any more. Thank you enormously! :-)
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How to do distributed locking
As part of the research for my book , I came across an algorithm called Redlock on the Redis website. The algorithm claims to implement fault-tolerant distributed locks (or rather, leases [1]) on top of Redis, and the page asks for feedback from people who are into distributed systems. The algorithm instinctively set…
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Ranto (JBR Anti‐Zamenhofism)
Esperanto: espèce de conlang
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