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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. 327 posts.
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Git: fetch and merge, don’t pull
This is too long and rambling, but to steal a joke from Mark Twain Blaise Pascal I haven’t had time to make it shorter yet. There is some discussion of this post on the git mailing list , but much of it is tangential to the points I’m trying to make here.
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Understanding JavaScript function invocation and "this"
Over the years, I've seen a lot of confusion about JavaScript function invocation. In particular, a lot of people have complained that the semantics of this in function invocations is confusing. In my opinion, a lot of this confusion is cleared up by understanding the core function invocation primitive,
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Bored People Quit
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
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Startups Are Hard
Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, "I'm a founder!" Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it's just that the investors don't have as much leverage as they used to, but they still…
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If I Launched a Startup - Cheat Sheet
Startup lawyer tips for launching: incorporate smart, use mentors/advisors carefully, and raise seed capital with founder-friendly, low-drama terms.
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Programming With Nothing: FizzBuzz in the lambda calculus in Ruby
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
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Why you can't hire
There isn’t a shortage of developers and designers. There’s a surplus of founders. The cost of starting a company has collapsed. It’s now just (minimal) salaries. For entrepreneurs, desks are free, hosting is free, marketing is online, and company setup is cheap. Raising the first $25K for product development is easy…
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ORM is an anti-pattern
ORM looks great early in a project but breaks down as complexity grows, forcing you to learn SQL anyway. Relations aren't objects. Either use NoSQL for object-like data or write a model layer with real SQL. ORM's abstraction is leaky, its efficiency poor, and the alternatives are better.
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Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6
Feb 2015: 3½ years later, we’re in a better place. The new IE Spartan project has killed off document modes . (Technically, still possible in firewall environments, but… effectively dead for us.) These days, our IE support landscape is IE8 (still), IE11, and IE Mobile. 3 is definitely better than 72.
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Skype 5 for Mac
A while back, when Skype's group videochat feature was still free, a friend of mine sent me a Skype message, asking me whether it was possible to do videochat with more than one person in Skype. "Sure," I replied, "you can do that, but you need to install the new Skype 5 beta." I sent her the link. A few minutes…
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Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
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A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
(A play in 4 acts. Please feel free to exit along with the stage character that best represents you. Take intermissions as you see fit. Click on the stage if...
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Modern Web Applications are Here
Battlefield 3’s Battlelog system is an interesting web application that many of us missed. Here is why it’s amazing and worth a look at.
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Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate
If you want to be really evil, however, *.google.com is the wrong SSL certificate to forge. The right one? ssl.google-analytics.com .
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Why Developers Never Use State Machines
Why developers rarely use state machines, seeing them as overkill until it's too late to switch, and what the state_machine gem did for CrowdHired.
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