Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 447 posts.
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…
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.
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 …
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…
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.
Free Wordpress themes coming with a price
There are so many free WordPress themes out there it can put your head in a spin. This post is the one-stop resource for info about free WordPress Themes
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.
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…
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...
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...
Google adds verbatim search mode for your exact search terms
Behind the simplicity of Google search is a complex set of algorithms that expands and improves the query you’ve typed to find the best resu...
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.
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 .
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.