Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 426 posts.
Learning JavaScript - my experience and advice
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.
WebKit for Developers
Feb 2015: A lot’s happened since I wrote this post two years ago. Chrome forked WebKit and started Blink, Opera adopted Chromium, and node-webkit became nw.js. This post describes a complexity of defining WebKit that doesn’t exist much anymore; with Chrome’s departure the WebKit world is more simple and clear.
The Importance of Excel
By James Kwak I spent the past two days at a financial regulation conference in Washington (where I saw more BlackBerries than I have seen in years—can’t lawyers and lobbyists afford decent p…
Mercury Colonization
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
Basics of Neural Networks with example codes and illustrations
I began with inanimate objects living in a world of forces, and I gave them desires, autonomy, and the ability to take action according to a system of
Useful Unix commands for data science
The command line tools that ship with any Unix-like system are extremely handy for many data tasks. Here are some of the ones that I've found most useful.
Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
The 1% fallacy
Here is how to make a fortune writing software: Pick a large and established software market e.g. back-up, anti-virus or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Write a new product for tha…
Hacking strength: Gaining muscle with least resistance
Then, after realizing I was too weak to lift my son and his wheelchair in and out of the car, I spent just over a year gaining strength and muscle.
Parallelism and concurrency need different tools
In this piece, I disagree with Joe Armstrong and Rob Pike, basing my argument on the differences between vending machines and gift boxes (illustrated with drawings carefully prepared in Microsoft Paint).
Trampolines in JavaScript
A trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk -returning functions ( continuation-passing style ). A single trampoline is sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampolining…
What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)
Is it reasonable to expect mere mortals to have mastery over every facet of the development stack? Probably not, but Facebook can ask for it. I was told at OSCON by a Facebook employee that they only hire 'Full Stack' developers. Well, what does that mean? To me, a Full Stack Developer is someone with
Mail from the (Velvet) Cybercrime Underground
Over the past six months, “fans” of this Web site and its author have shown their affection in some curious ways. One called in a phony hostage situation that resulted in a dozen heavily armed police surrounding my home . Another opened a $20,000 new line of credit in my name. Others sent more than $1,000 in bogus…
An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"
The talk I released today is called " Media for Thinking the Unthinkable ". It's the most personal talk I've given, in that it was driven by my own motivations as opposed to someone else's.
The Z-80 has a 4-bit ALU. Here's how it works.
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)
[ This is not mine. I posted it in the interest of personal archival because the oldest mention I could track down on the web appeared on a now-defunct weblog . In the meantime, Mike W. Cremer (who bills himself The Newton™ Scapegoat ☺ ) has claimed credit for coining it after a particularly frustrating DMA debugging…
Y Combinator is funding the future of spam in Windows
Many people in the technology startup community have very high regards for Paul Graham and Y Combinator, the exclusive seed accelerator program in Silicon Valley which has under its belt acclaimed …
Ultimate Tic Tac Toe
Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe.
The One-Person Product
In 2006, I moved to New York and started working for David Karp doing web development for various media companies . That fall, in a brief gap before starting a new client , David said that we were going to make a prototype of an idea he’d had for a while. He had already bought the domain: tumblr.com , because it was…
New NSA Leak Shows MITM Attacks Against Major Internet Services
The Brazilian television show “Fantastico” exposed an NSA training presentation that discusses how the agency runs man-in-the-middle attacks on the Internet. The point of the story was that the NSA engages in economic espionage against Petrobras, the Brazilian giant oil company, but I’m more interested in the tactical…