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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Removing the PowerShell curl alias?
PowerShell is a spiced up command line shell made by Microsoft. According to some people, it is a really useful and good shell alternative. Already a long time ago, we got bug reports from confused users who couldn't use curl from their PowerShell prompts and it didn't take long until we figured out that Microsoft ……
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Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines
Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “ There is more Unix-nature in one line of shell script than there is in ten thousand lines of C. ”
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Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test
In September 2005 the kids and I took several very accurate cesium atomic clocks from home and parked 5400 feet up Mt Rainier (the volcano near Seattle) for a full two days. The goal was to see if the clocks actually gained time, even if billionths of a second, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity…
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The Rule of Three
Every programmer ever born thinks whatever idea just popped out of their head into their editor is the most generalized, most flexible, most one-size-fits all solution that has ever been conceived. We think we’ve built software that is a general purpose solution to some set of problems,
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Basecamp's new etiquette regarding societal politics at work
Jason announced a raft of changes we've made to Basecamp earlier today. By far the most controversial is a new etiquette around societal politics at work, and the stances we'll take as a company. So to expand on that, here's a segment from what I wrote internally on that topic, as part of the announcement to employees…
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The IQ Halo effect
On desirable correlates of intelligence
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Hyphens and dashes
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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Pragmatic Unicode
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
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How the new Gmail image proxy works and what this means for you
Google recently announced that images in emails will be displayed automatically by default to Gmail users, thanks to an anonymizing proxy operated by them.
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User Interface Design For Programmers
Chapter 1: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintess…
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NPM & left-pad: Have We Forgotten How To Program?
Intro Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is rather astounding: A simple NPM package called left-pad that was a dependency of their code. left-pad, at the time of writing…
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Top Ten Fasting Myths Debunked
Or “Top Ten Diet Myths Debunked“. That would have fit almost as well. Ok, so in retrospect, I think I screwed up on the title. Many myths just happened to be connected to intermittent fasting (meal frequency, breakfast skipping, etc.). Well, live and learn. November 4th Addendum Section added at the end of the…
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Underlining | Butterick’s Practical Typography
Butterick’s Practical Typography
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Component · Decoupling Patterns
Allow a single entity to span multiple domains without coupling the domains to each other.
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The Practical Test Pyramid
Find out what kinds of automated tests you should implement for your application and learn by examples what these tests could look like.
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DWIM
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.
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The “Why your anti-spam idea won’t work” checklist
This comes up regularly on Slashdot and I find it hilarious each time, but can never find it when I go looking for it. So, here it is:
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When you browse Instagram and find Tony Abbott's passport number
Do not get arrested challenge 2020
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Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”
Last year, I posted a series of articles about a purported “breach” at Ubiquiti. My sole source for that reporting was the person who has since been indicted by federal prosecutors for his alleged wrongdoing – which includes providing false information to the press.
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I tried creating a web browser, and Google blocked me
After 4 months of waiting, that is the response I got from Widevine, Google’s DRM for web browsers, regarding a license agreement. For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source…
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Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
What is slack doing? The process was in the background when this happened. I wasn't even interacting with it - I was in a meeting. I only noticed because my laptop fans were whurring when I got back. Restarting slack seemed to fix it for now. But that's not abnormal
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Can't you just right click?
In 2012, Apple added Gatekeeper to Mac OS X (now macOS). When you try to run Mac software downloaded from the internet, Gatekeeper checks whether the software was signed with a valid Developer ID certificate. If not, then Gatekeeper refuses to run the software. Over the years, Gatekeeper has become more strict…
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Timeline of the xz open source attack
Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also…
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The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles
I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October …