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Well, Actually
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 447 posts.
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Introducing Babel
Babel is about letting many different languages work together. Programming languages live in code blocks inside natural language Org documents. A piece of data might pass from an Org table to a Python code block, then maybe move on to an R code block, and finally end up embedded as a value in the middle of a paragraph…
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Quote Origin: The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent
Question for Quote Investigator: The gyrations of financial markets can be startling. You may have unassailable information indicating that a stock is overpriced or underpriced, but you can still lose money because the market price may not accurately reflect the underlying verities for years. Here is a pertinent adage:
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Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents.
Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents . Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn.
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Public key pinning coming in Chrome 13
Starting with Chrome 13, we'll have HTTPS pins for most Google properties. This means that certificate chains for, say, https://www.google.com , must include a whitelisted public key. It's a fatal error otherwise. Credit goes to my colleague, Chris Evans, for much of this.
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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
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The AI-Box Experiment
On the first occasion (in March 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and Nathan Russell simulated the gatekeeper. The AI’s handicap (the amount paid by the AI party to the gatekeeper party if not released) was set at $10. On the second occasion (in July 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and David…
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JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
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Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous
Update: I have written a fairly comprehensive article about steps to lower deaths per terawatt hour . Primary focus on pollution mitigation. Air pollution causes 3.1 million deaths per year
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TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement
I'm trying to combine WebKit and Node.js into a new kind of terminal, with an emphasis on rich display and web/network orientation.
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Dynamic languages are static languages
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
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Accounting for Computer Scientists
Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well…
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Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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(An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
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Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
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ZSFA -- Rails Is A Ghetto (2007-12-31)
I’ve more or less kept my mouth shut about some of the dumb and plain evil stuff that goes on in the Rails community. As things would happen though I’d take notes, collect logs, and started writing this little essay. As soon as I was stable and didn’t need Ruby on Rails to survive I told myself I’d revamp my blog and…
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
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Tarsnap critical security bug
There's a lot to say about this, and it's entirely possible that I'll miss covering some important points in this post; if I've missed something, please email me or post a comment below and I'll do my best to add the necessary information.
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History of the Open Source Initiative
Development based on the sharing and collaborative improvement of software source code has a history essentially as long as software development itself. In the late 1990s, interest and participatio…
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Explorable Explanations
An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's…