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Prof. Sussman's Reading List
Professor Sussman's reading recommendations
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 646 posts.
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Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”
My translation of DIE ZEIT’s interview with Thomas Piketty is now hosted by TheWire.in. Read it here.
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Test drive of a petrol car
In other languages: Swedish , Norwegian , Russian , German , Dutch , Portugese , Turkish , French , Danish , Chinese , Finnish , Latvian
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Automakers Say You Don’t Really Own Your Car
EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work. At the moment, the anti-circumvention prohibition in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act arguably restricts vehicle...
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Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock
With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian. Ian started the Debian project in August of 1993, releasing the first versions of Debian later...
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YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin
This is HUGE.
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Replacing Middle Management with APIs
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services…
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Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns
Computers are learning to recognize objects with near-human ability. But Cornell researchers have found that computers, like humans, can be fooled by optical illusions, which raises security concerns.
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Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Sendwithus helps teams manage transactional emails outside of source code — leading to streamlined workflows and always on-brand emails. Learn more here!
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Biggest image in the smallest space
What’s the biggest pixel size of a PNG image in the smallest number of bytes? I wanted to try to create an image that could be downloaded but whose pixel buffer would be too big to store in the RAM of a PC. Here is a PNG image of 6,132,534 bytes (5.8 MB) and 225,000 × 225,000 pixels (50.625 gigapixels), which, if…
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HealthCare.gov Sends Personal Data to Dozens of Tracking Websites
The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one's zip code,...
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Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Graphics Study
2015/03/12: Back online after Reddit and Slashdot killed my bandwidth with 30,000 visits in the last hours. Followed by HN. 2015/03/11: Update with …
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Neon: Node plus Rust
If you’re a JavaScript programmer who’s been intrigued by Rust’s hack without fear theme—making systems programming safe and fun—but you’ve been waiting for inspiration, I may have something for you! I’ve been working on Neon, a set of APIs and tools for making it super easy to write native Node modules in Rust.
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Abandon your DVCS and return to sanity
I’ve pretty much always been a DVCS apologist. I know quite a few people who’ve been using DVCSes since Mercurial and Git, and a few who go back to BitKeeper , but I can totally out-hipster you. I was there for Monotone . I actually remember struggling to grok tla , and being happy that someone took the time to write…
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We Tried Slack and Regretted It
Back in April, all was well with our community of busy adults learning to code. We were communicating using Gitter.im, a GitHub based chatroom system. And yet every day, someone would ask me “Why aren’t your campers using Slack?” I’d considered Slack...
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The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom
Why do teachers quit? As I make the tough decision to leave the classroom, I highlight some of the issues that force quality teachers to leave public education.
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A guide to implementing 2D platformers
Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
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What's New in CPUs Since the 80s and How Does It Affect Programmers?
My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and storing things in memory. I'm vaguely aware of various newer developments like vector instructions (SIMD) and the idea that newer CPUs have support for virtualization (though I have no…