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Why Concatenative Programming Matters
Introduction There doesn’t seem to be a good tutorial out there for concatenative programming, so I figured I’d write one, inspired by t...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 390 posts.
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Animated GIFs the Hard Way
When doing the new website for the Sublime Text 2.0 launch, instead of just screenshots, I wanted to have animations to demonstrate some of its features. One of the criteria was that the animations should work everywhere, from IE6 to an iPad. This ruled out two common video options, Flash and the <video> element…
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VC Insanity, Explained
…or, why VCs do what they do (Note: this post also appeared as a guest post on Techflash) VC behavior sometimes looks insane, but generally it’s just sound economics. It’s crazy but true: if you know how a VC gets paid, you can pretty much read their mind. Here’s a few examples: VCs don’t actually seem to want to take…
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How you eat corn on the cob predicts whether you're an analyst or algebraist
I like learning about odd connections between disparate things. This probably is the oddest example that I know. Broadly speaking, mathemat...
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Fields medalist Tim Gowers: Elsevier — my part in its downfall
The Dutch publisher Elsevier publishes many of the world’s best known mathematics journals, including Advances in Mathematics, Comptes Rendus, Discrete Mathematics, The European Journal of Co…
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Whose bug is this anyway?
Some bugs look so impossible you start blaming the OS, the tools, or the compiler. This post digs into three of them.
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Brendan Eich: The infernal semicolon
Most of the comments in this semicolons in JS exchange make me sad. The code in question:
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Using the HTML5 Fullscreen API for Phishing Attacks
Feross Aboukhadijeh is a computer security researcher, teacher, web developer, designer, long distance runner, gamer, music lover, and builder of websites that (sometimes) go viral.
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Refining Ruby
What does the following code do? If you answered
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Relational shell programming
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.
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The KindleBerry Pi
Curious, how’s the refresh rate? Does the e-ink display refresh fast enough to make typing bearable?
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The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
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The Caves of Clojure
Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.
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OrmHate
Object-Relational Mappers get a lot of hate from people who misjudge the complexities of the task.
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Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool
It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any…
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20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time
<img src="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bandits/MAB-2.jpg"/> A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger…
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Everything's broken and nobody's upset
Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just ...
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Why three prongs?
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
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Jessica Livingston: What Goes Wrong
This is my talk from 2012 Startup School, pretty much exactly as delivered. It's been more than 7 years since we started YC. In that time, we've funded 467 startups so I've seen a lot of patterns....
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No I won't sign your NDA, here's why.
The other day I got to chatting with a lovely woman who reached out after reading my blog. She was interested in talking about an idea she had, how she might get it off the ground, and if I might …
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An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
The following article, and the two addenda that follow, were written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but in 2011 he e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he…
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