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The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 415 posts.
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ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
ASCII delimited text solves the problems exporting and importing structured text files and is part of the design of the character set. Unfortunately a lot of people and systems use CSV and other pr…
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Why Go Is Not Good
I like Go. I use it for a number of things (including this blog, at the time of writing). Go is useful. With that said, Go is not a good language. It's not bad; it's just not good.
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How I Pranked My Roommate with Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads
Ghost Influence by Brian Swichkow2014343 points46 commentscited by 8Tech Industry & Business details
This is the chronicle of the most epic retaliation and how I pranked my roommate with targeted Facebook Ads to the point of complete paranoia and delusion.
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Queues Don't Fix Overload
People misuse queues all the time. The most egregious case being to fix issues with slow apps, and consequently, with overload. But to say why, I'll need to take bits of talks and texts I have around the place, and content that I have written in more details about in Erlang in Anger .
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The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)
There are several reasons why one should prefer L A T E X to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them (not to mention that L A T E X is free ). There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you…
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How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors
By now it is difficult to imagine that once there was a time when the utility, and even the possibility, of recursion in programming was in doubt. Yet that was true of the programming community aro…
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How Apple Pay works and why it matters for developers
A blog for third-party developers on the Clover POS platform.
190
Will It Optimize? (2010)
See how well you know (or can anticipate) gcc's optimizer. For each question, the left box contains some code, while the right box contains code that purports to do the same thing, but that illustrates a particular optimization. Will gcc apply that optimization? Put another way, will the code on the left be as fast as…
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Ads work by cultural imprinting, not emotional inception
There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.
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How to compile with continuations
In terms of unreasonable effectiveness, the transformation to continuation-passing style (CPS) ranks with the Y combinator .
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Inside the Mirrortocracy
There's a problem with Silicon Valley and the subcultures that imitate it. It's a design bug woven into people's identities and sense of self-worth. Fixing it will be painful. Influential and otherwise very smart people will deny till their last breath that it even exists. But I believe it should be fixed before it…
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Don't run 'strings' on untrusted files
Many shell users, and certainly most of the people working in computer forensics or other fields of information security, have a habit of ru...
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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
At CMU yesterday, I heard a story about how Yahoo Trip Planner has pretty much zero adoption. It has never taken off, though it remains online even today. Yahoo keeps it around because it's...
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8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
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How To Scroll
Scroll-based interaction is incredibly popular for interactive storytelling . There are many compelling reasons for this, yet scrolling is surprisingly nuanced and easy to break. So here are five rules for employing scrolling effectively.
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Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol
All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the netwo...
200
The Lava Layer Anti-Pattern
TL:DR Successive, well intentioned, changes to architecture and technology throughout the lifetime of an application can lead to a fragmente...
201
An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did. Here in America, we use elements like lithium and silicon and bismuth. We have figured out l…
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Microservices and the First Law of Distributed Objects
In P of EAA I said "don't distribute your objects". Does this advice contradict my interest in Microservices?
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Terry Tao on how to compute non-converging infinite sums (2010)
The Riemann zeta function $latex {\zeta(s)}&fg=000000$ is defined in the region $latex {\hbox{Re}(s)>1}&fg=000000$ by the absolutely convergent series $latex \displaystyle \zeta(s) = \su…
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The Sad State of Mobile XMPP in 2014
blog about networking, cameras, old gear, and xmpp
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Principles of Rich Web Applications
7 actionable principles for websites that want to make use of JavaScript to control their UI and deliver the best performance
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