Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 228 posts.
Phil Schiller Responds to App Store Dictionary Censoring
On Wednesday afternoon I received a thoughtful email from Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller regarding Ninjawords and the App Store, and I think it bodes well.
Self-Enforcing Protocols
There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain (to the police, a judge, or his parents) if he doesn’t think it’s…
Awesome Visualisations of Choose Your Own Adventure books
An infographical analysis of the structure of the Choose Your Own Adventure books series
Everyone must have a CD, even if free
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Tokyo Cabinet DB: Beyond Key-Value Store
It took Ruby some time to go from an infant research project by Matz to a language we've all come to know so well. Now, another Japanese developer ( Mikio Hirabayashi ) has all the potential to repeat this cycle with his new database project: Tokyo Cabinet . Developed and sponsored by Mixi Inc . (Japanese Facebook)…
Anatomy of a Program in Memory
Memory management is the heart of operating systems; it is crucial for both programming and system administration. In the next few posts I'll cover memory with an eye towards practical aspects, but wi
Dear Mozilla community: I screwed up. Big time.
I screwed up. Big time. Not just with Adblock Plus users but with the Mozilla community at large.
4chan hacker discusses the manipulation of the Time poll
There’s a scene toward the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the protagonist Ellie Arroway finds a Message embedded deep in the digits of PI. The Message is perhaps an artifact of …
Reversing Tooth Decay with Good Diet
In the last post, I discussed the research of Drs. Edward and May Mellanby on the nutritional factors affecting tooth formation. Dr. Mellan...
All we want are the facts, ma'am.
I've never been involved in a detective interview, but occasionally I'm interviewed by a journalist. Some publications use a quaint procedure known as fact checking ; for example, the New Yorker had a wonderful piece by John McPhee in their Feb. 9th issue on their fact-checking process. (My favorite part was about…
The Two-Hour Rule
This all-content, junk-free website's biggest source of support is when you use those or any of these links to approved sources when you get anything, regardless of the country in which you live. Thanks for helping me help you! Ken.
Tips for Startup Companies (2006)
Having rich parents is great. In fact, it is the best and surest way to get rich in these United States. Unfortunately, having a low cost of capital is no guarantee of success because, as formerly poor countries have become ridiculously rich, capital has become very cheap. Your competitors can probably get a home…
Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails
Possibly you’ve never heard of it. But if you know anyone who knits or crochets, ask him or (more likely) her about Ravelry and chances are you’re talking to an active member. It’s big. This is an interview with Casey Forbes , who constitutes the whole engineering staff.
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...
WebKit gets a new JavaScript profiler courtesy of 280 North (YC W08)
New Profiling and Debugging Tools in WebKit
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:
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…
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.''