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Relational shell programming
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 526 posts.
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The KindleBerry Pi
Curious, how’s the refresh rate? Does the e-ink display refresh fast enough to make typing bearable?
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The Moore's Law free lunch is over. Now welcome to the hardware jungle.
Or, A Heterogeneous Supercomputer in Every Pocket In the twilight of Moore’s Law, the transitions to multicore processors, GPU computing, and HaaS cloud computing are not separate trends, bu…
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
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Why Reddit switched to Python (2005)
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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The Caves of Clojure
Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.
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OrmHate
Object-Relational Mappers get a lot of hate from people who misjudge the complexities of the task.
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Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool
It’s tough being a journalist, especially if you’re covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you’re stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What’s worse is that all these people who are getting rich don’t seem to be any…
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20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time
<img src="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bandits/MAB-2.jpg"/> A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger…
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Everything's broken and nobody's upset
Software doesn't work. I'm shocked at how often we put up with it. Here's just ...
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Why three prongs?
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
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Jessica Livingston: What Goes Wrong
This is my talk from 2012 Startup School, pretty much exactly as delivered. It's been more than 7 years since we started YC. In that time, we've funded 467 startups so I've seen a lot of patterns....
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No I won't sign your NDA, here's why.
The other day I got to chatting with a lovely woman who reached out after reading my blog. She was interested in talking about an idea she had, how she might get it off the ground, and if I might …
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An Investment Manager's View on the Top 1%
The following article, and the two addenda that follow, were written by an investment manager who works with very wealthy clients. I knew him from decades ago, but in 2011 he e-mailed me with some concerns he had about what was happening with the economy. What he had to say was informative enough that I asked if he…
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Farming hard drives: how Backblaze weathered the Thailand drive crisis
Get all of the latest cloud storage news and insights from Backblaze - the leading independent cloud storage provider.
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CSS px is an Angular Measurement
The “px” unit in CSS doesn't really have anything to do with screen pixels, despite the poorly chosen name. It's actually an non-linear angular measurement. The formulæ to convert between radians and px are as follows:
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What Amazon's ebook strategy really means
It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.
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Amazon Data Center: 450,000 Estimated EC2 Servers
(Edit 3/16/2012: I am surprised that this post is picked up by a lot of media outlets. Given the strong interest, I want to emphasize what is measured and what is derived. The # of server racks in …
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Scroogled (2007)
Cory Doctorow wrote this Creative Commons-licensed fiction story for Radar Online magazine .
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I've finally implemented the command I keep typing all day: gti
I've finally implemented the command I keep typing all day: gti. It's a program that displays a badly made ASCII-art animation to punish you for your typing error - and after that magically launches the command you meant to launch. The code is available under an MIT-like license on github - though of course anybody…
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How we gave colors names
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter in…