211
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 228 posts.
212
Eric Raymond on "Hiding the Decline, Part 1"
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
213
Did You Know: BeautifulSoup's bits are rotting
The parser in version 3.1.0 of Beautiful Soup did significantly worse on real-world HTML than version 3.0.8 did. The most common problems were the incorrect handling of <script> tags, "malformed start tag" errors, and "bad end tag" errors.
214
215
216
Understanding Engineers
Indexing the entire World Wide Web and providing relevant search results in millisecond response times is a Very Hard problem. Breaking commercial-grade encryption within practical hardware and time limitations is a Very Hard problem. Peace in the Middle East is a Very Hard problem.
217
What is Erlang-Style Concurrency?
Finishing up a whirlwind tour of the US West coast (QCon SF, Erlang Factory Lite LA, and a Cognitive Modeling workshop in Scottsdale), I am now waiting for a delayed BA flight at the Phoenix airport. Although I’ve spent as many days flying as I have on US soil, it’s been a great trip.
218
219
Setting Pricing for a Startup - The Rule of 80%
In just the last week, two different people have come to me to get feedback on their pricing. One was a startup selling a very sophisticated product to corporate enterprises. The other was selling...
220
How to Create a Self-Referential Tweet
Yesterday Mark Reid posted on Twitter a challenge : create a self-referential tweet (one that links to itself). He later clarified that the tweet should contain in its text its own identifier (the number after " /status/" bit should be its own URL). I decided to take up the challenge ("in order to learn a bit about…
221
Japanese addresses: No street names. Block numbers.
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.
222
Why is programming fun?
Why is programming fun? An extract from Fred Brooks' (Frederick P. Brooks Jr.) book, The Mythical Man-Month. Fred Brooks coined the term "no silver bullet" that is famous in the field of computers.
223
224
225
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition
In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number…
226
227
Embedding a Web Browser in Emacs
My musings on Emacs, economics, technology, and spiders.
228
How to Back Up Gmail In Linux
I really like Gmail, but I also like having backups of my data just in case. Here’s how to use a simple program called getmail on Unix to backup your Gmail or Google Apps email. We’ll b…