Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Slides and notes from my three hour Redis tutorial
These slides and notes were originally written to accompany a three hour Redis tutorial I gave at the NoSQL Europe conference on the 22nd of April 2010.
Contributing to Open Source projects
Prior to joining Google I always joked that Google was the black hole that swallowed up open source programmers. I'd see awesome, productive hackers join Google and then hear little to nothing from them afterwards. When I joined I decided I'd solve this mystery and post about it but it's been over…
Arbitrary code execution via ldd utility
The `ldd` utility is more vulnerable than you think. It's frequently used by programmers and system administrators to determine the dynamic library dependencies of executables. Sounds pretty innocent, right? Wrong! In this article I am going to show you how to create an executable that runs arbitrary code if it's...
Extreme Pair Programming - Guy Steele and Richard Stallman
"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me...
WebKit gets a new JavaScript profiler courtesy of 280 North (YC W08)
New Profiling and Debugging Tools in WebKit
Six Months of HackerNews Front Page Data
Back in September 2009 I launched a small web app called HNTrends.com, a tool for visualizing the movement of stories on HackerNews’s front page over time. I haven’t worked on the site …
The calculus of caffeine consumption
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Problems with TDD
If you have not yet read it, please read Maria Siniaalto's 15 page " Test-Driven Development: empirical body of evidence ." It summarizes the few empirical studies done to evaluate the effectiveness of TDD. In the conclusion you'll find:
Running Shells in Emacs: An Overview
One of Emacs's strongest capabilities is its ability to talk to external shells, like bash, or emulate an entire terminal. But this being Emacs, you have more than one choice to choose from − and which choice is right for you?
How a startup should leverage a personal assistant
People are shocked when they hear I've been able to pull off the use of virtual assistants in startups, and excited at the thought that they might be able to do the same. The conversation almost always turns to questions about where to find virtual assistants and how a startup can use one.
IronRuby Manager Leaves Microsoft
Though Frank Sinatra says it best , “I’m leaving today” isn’t exactly accurate; my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010. This post is almost two weeks delayed as Felicia and I have been on the road since the 26th, driving cross-country to the east coast; we also decided to leave Seattle in favor of New…
JQuery is a monad
It’s said that every Haskell programmer writes their own monad tutorial, and with good reason: once you finally understand the definition and capabilities of a monad, you’ll be eager to…
A Newbie’s Guide to Startup Compensation (or “Stock Options will Make Me Rich”)
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Mobile Multitasking
In the traditional model, the primary priority is keeping everything open. In this new model, the primary priority is that the system must always be responsive to the user.
Mockingbird, Cappuccino, and what really matters
What makes an app an app?
JWZ, on Garbage Collection
In a conversation at work about the architecture of a new product, someone made an assertion along the lines of, ``then we'd need to use a garbage collector, and that would hurt performance.''
Black and white
So I'm pretty well-known for not exactly being a huge fan of the FSF and Richard Stallman, despite the fact that I obviously love the GPLv2 ...
Eric Raymond on "Hiding the Decline, Part 1"
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
Did You Know: BeautifulSoup's bits are rotting
The parser in version 3.1.0 of Beautiful Soup did significantly worse on real-world HTML than version 3.0.8 did. The most common problems were the incorrect handling of <script> tags, "malformed start tag" errors, and "bad end tag" errors.