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Cannot Measure Productivity
It is impossible to measure the effectiveness of tools and techniques in software development because we have no way of measuring our output, and thus our productivity.
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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George W. Bush is smarter than you
The new George W. Bush Presidential Center is being dedicated this week. This seems like a good time to bust a longstanding myth about our former President, my former boss. I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events…
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Jepsen: Redis
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
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Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 2 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook, also mirrors a 2022 article in Nature Physics . . ]
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Typography in ten minutes
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
The Mortal Passage Trilogy: An Epic in Four Stories is now available. That link leads to Amazon, but you can find it on iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and elsewhere too.
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Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go
I have always wanted to write an emulator. I made a half-hearted attempt in college but it never made it to a demo-able state. I also didn't want to write Yet Another Emulator. It should at least bring something new to the table. When I discovered LLVM , I felt like I finally had worthwhile idea for a project.
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Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer
I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…
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The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
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Predicting Google Product Shutdowns
Analyzing predictors of Google abandoning products; predicting future shutdowns
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Don’t drown in email: How to use Gmail more efficiently
I usually I blog about Angellist but I have shown this “lifehack” to so many people that I thought it’s worth it’s own blogpost...
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The Locust Economy
Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here's how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon.…
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MindBEMding – getting your head ’round BEM syntax
A primer on the oft-confusing BEM notation for CSS
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Comcast caught hijacking web traffic
On November 20th, 2012 Comcast hijacked my HTTP traffic and re-routed it through their own servers, injecting a “notice” on the page before completing the request. What this means is instead of my web request being routed to the website I wanted to visit, Comcast took it upon themselves to hijack my web…
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Survivorship Bias
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful. The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisib…
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bliki: Test Pyramid
Write most of your tests at a low level (unit tests) with a few broad-stack tests, eg via UI. UI tests tend to be fragile and slow.
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jQuery file size
Note: The gzipped and Zopflinated file sizes refer to the total byte size of the file after compressing it using gzip or Zopfli with the default settings . For gzip, this boils down to gzip -6 file.js — the default compression level is 6 on a scale from 1 (fastest, but less compression) to 9 (slowest, but best…
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The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection (2009)
Convinced from spending hours reading rave reviews, Bob eagerly clicked “Proceed to Checkout” for his gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk and…
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The StarCraft path-finding hack
StarCraft pathfinding looked impossible to fix until one ugly hack changed everything. Here's the trick that shipped.
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Distributed systems for fun and profit
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
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The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
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