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The Website Obesity Crisis
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2015, at the Web Directions conference in Sydney. [ 53 minute video ].
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 466 posts.
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How to Write a Spelling Corrector
I figured they, and others, could benefit from an explanation. The full details of an industrial-strength spell corrector are quite complex (you can read a little about it here or here ). But I figured that in the course of a transcontinental plane ride I could write and explain a toy spelling corrector that achieves…
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Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
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Ideas for Startups (2005)
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
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Ripgrep – A new command line search tool
In this article I will introduce a new command line search tool, ripgrep , that combines the usability of The Silver Searcher (an ack clone) with the raw performance of GNU grep. ripgrep is fast, cross platform (with binaries available for Linux, Mac and Windows) and written in Rust .
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Stack Overflow: The Architecture – 2016 Edition
This is #1 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Welcome.Previous post (#0): Stack Overflow: A Technical DeconstructionNext post...
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Camels and Rubber Duckies
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
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Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
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Rethinking PID 1 (2010)
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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Parsing JSON is a Minefield
[2016-10-26] First version of the article [2016-10-28] Presentation at Soft-Shake Conference, Geneva ( slides ) [2016-11-01] Article and comments in The Register [2017-11-16] Presentation at Black Alps Security Conference, Yverdon ( slides ) [2018-03-09] Presentation at Toulouse Hacking Conference ( slides )…
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Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
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Your Life in Weeks
All the weeks in a human life shown on one chart.
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Reasons not to use (i.e., be used by) Facebook
I have never had a Facebook account, or an Instagram account. There is a Facebook account called "Richard Stallman", but it is an impostor.
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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor’s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called “ The Evolution of a Programmer ” in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment’s thought turned up the factorial…
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Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work
I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .
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Show HN: QBE – a new compiler back end
QBE is a compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code. QBE fosters language innovation by offering a compact user-friendly and performant backend. The size limit constrains QBE to focus on the essential and prevents embarking on a never-ending path…
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Developers’ side projects
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
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Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow
interviewer: Welcome, can I get you coffee or anything? Do you need a break? me: No, I've probably had too much coffee already! interviewer: Great, great. And are you OK with writing code on the...
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The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
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You Might Not Need Redux
People often choose Redux before they need it. “What if our app doesn’t scale without it?” Later, developers frown at the indirection Redux…
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What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?
What happens when you only invest at the peaks of the market by being the world's worst market timer.
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Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 29, 2016, at Web Camp Zagreb [ video ] (45 mins)
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Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’…
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Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging)
Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this:
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Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
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Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
Michael Isard, Derek Murray, and I recently sent in a HotOS submission (it’s not blind, so no harm talking about it, we think). The subject is hinted at from...