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What's Our Problem? A Self-Help Book For Societies
Available today
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 809 posts.
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The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
On Medium, Nassim explains how once an intransigent minority reaches a tiny percentage of the total population, the majority of the population will
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Renewable Energy
Renewable energy sources are growing quickly and will play a vital role in tackling climate change.
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Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database
Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good-enough alone. They routinely re-evaluate every internal system to make sure that it is as scalable, efficient, performant, and secure as possible. When they find an avenue for improvement, they will use…
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How to Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
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We Can Do Better Than SQL
The questions we often hear are "Why create a new query language?" and "What's wrong with SQL?". This blog post contains answers to both.
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Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story
Update (September 23, 2020) – Over the last year, we’ve heard feedback from many customers who have asked us to extend the deprecation date. Based on this feedback we have decided to delay the deprecation of path-style URLs to ensure that customers have the time that they need to transition to virtual hosted-style…
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Winding down my Debian involvement
This post is hard to write, both in the emotional sense but also in the “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time” sense. Hence, please assume the best of intentions when reading it—it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad about their contributions, but rather to provide some insight…
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React as a UI Runtime
An in-depth description of the React programming model.
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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Why American Construction Costs Are So High
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
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Sealed Rust: A plan to bring Rust to safety critical software domains
Part 1 - The Pitch
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Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist
I was first introduced to Austrian economics during my senior year in high school, when I first read and enjoyed the writings of Mises and Rothbard. The summer before I began my undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, I was able to attend the 1989 Mises Institute summer seminar at Stanford, where I met Murray Rothbard and…
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On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
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Keeping Open Source Open – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
中文版 – At AWS, we focus on solving problems for customers. Over the years, customer usage and dependencies on open source technologies have been steadily increasing; this is why we’ve long been committed to open source, and our pace of contributions to open source projects – both our own and others’ – continues to…
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Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity (2007)
An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog
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“What the Hardware Does” Is Not What Your Program Does: Uninitialized Memory
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
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Defender of the Favicon (2008)
The brilliant arcade game Defender now playable inside the favicon of your browser! The idea was to push the concept of generated favicons far and beyond and pack a thrilling retro shooter in 16×16 pixels.
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Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier (2017)
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
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What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?
It acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer.
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Urbanization
Around 80% of the world’s population lives in cities, towns, and suburbs rather than rural settlements. How has this changed, and what does urbanization look like across the world today?
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The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations
The US is so economically exceptional that the poorest 20 percent of Americans are richer than many of the world’s most affluent nations.
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BSI-001: The Perfect Wall
The perfect wall is an environmental separator—it has to keep the outside out and the inside in. In order to do this the wall assembly has to control rain, air, vapor and heat. In the old days we had one material to do this: rocks. We would pile a bunch or rocks up and have the rocks do it all. But over time rocks…
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Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
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A Behind the Scenes Take on Lithium-ion Battery Prices
Automakers and policy makers are increasingly voicing their belief that the passenger vehicle of the future will be powered (partially or fully) by electricity. There remains, however, a lack of consensus on the timing and speed of the transition, in large part due to differing opinions on current and future…
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