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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 637 posts.
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Why I am switching to promises
I'm switching my node code from callbacks to promises. The reasons aren't merely aesthetical, they're rather practical:
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How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now…
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How I Judge the Quality of Documentation
As a developer, you develop instincts for judging quality of code. One of my favorite interview questions is: When you look at a project’s code for the first time, what are the things you look for?...
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The Flying Nimbus – A high-power, self-balancing transportation contraption
What does a recycled (heavily used) go kart tire, an action-packed three-phase servo drive and a gyro/accelerometer have in common?
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Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]
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Fatal Dose – Radiation Deaths linked to AECL Computer Errors (1994)
How a series of simple computer errors sabotaged a state-of-the-art medical wonder.
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Sacrificial Architecture
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.
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Move Fast, Don't Break Your API
Amber on Rails
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Edit: A Relaxing Mix of Vi and Acme
Disclaimer: This software is not ready. I am using it and it is stable but I still have to make it feel great , if you have suggestions I would be glad to take them. I wrote a list of work that I will attempt in the future.
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Why Intel is adding instructions to speed up non-volatile memory
The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs . What's that about?
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A Day of Communication at GitHub
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Mozilla and Epic Preview Unreal Engine 4 Running in Firefox
Today, Epic Games and Mozilla are demonstrating how the Web is continuing to evolve as a powerful platform for gaming by providing a sneak peek of Epic’s
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The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
Whatsapp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired. Imgur scaled to over 40 billion monthly image views with just seven engineers. Instagram had 30 million users and just 13 engineers when it was acquired for $1 billion dollars. This is the new normal: fewer engineers and dollars to…
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GitHub Language Trends
A while ago, I wanted to get a little quick feedback on some data I was playing with, but the day was almost over and I wasn’t done working on it yet. I decided to tweet my rough draft of a graph of GitHub language trends anyway, followed later by a slight improvement. Much to my surprise,
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Hermitage: Testing the “I” in ACID
tl;dr: I have created a test suite for comparing the transaction isolation levels in different databases. I did this as background research for my book . This post explains why.
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Mozilla Releases the First Browser Built for Developers
Developers are critical to the continued success of the Web. The content and apps they create compel us to come back to the Web every day, whether on a computer ...
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Compiler Design in C
Compiler Design in C Download a copy! My book Compiler Design in C is now, unfortunately, out of print. You can download a complete copy, with the above button (pdf 19.1Mb OCR/Searchable—thanks to Marvin Hernández for adding the OCR). If you don’t want to print it out (the book is 984 pages long), you can…
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Roshi: a CRDT system for timestamped events
Let’s talk about the stream. The SoundCloud stream represents stuff that’s relevant to you primarily via your social graph, arranged in time order, newest-first. The atom of that data model, an event, is a simple enough thing. Timestamp User who did the thing Identifier of the thing that was done For example, At…
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Why I Left the .NET Framework
The .NET Framework was good. Really good. Until it wasn’t. Why did I leave .NET? In short, it constrained our ability to choose (which is a huge deal for