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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 644 posts.
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Do Things that Don't Scale
July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they…
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Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns (2006)
This rant is utterly idiotic. The great investment in literary allure is there in order to mask its hollow emptiness. Why should one class of words be put on a pedestal above another? Gee, I don't know, could it just be because natural languages ALL DO THE SAME? All natural languages have something called a WORD…
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Xerox scanners and photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents
Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents Please see the “condensed time line” section (the next one) for a time line of how the Xerox saga unfolded. It for example depicts that I did not push the thing to the public right away, but gave Xerox a lot of time before I did so. <iframe…
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Less is exponentially more (2012)
Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012. This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go...
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The Simple Math Behind Early Retirement
This is the blog post that shows you how to be wealthy enough to retire in ten years. Here at Mr. Money Mustache, we talk about all sorts of fancy stuff like investment fundamentals, lifestyle chan…
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The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me…
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Orbital Speed
What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?
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Save your eyes, start using f.lux
Software to warm up your computer display at night, to match your indoor lighting.
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Nicotine as a useful stimulant
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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Boundaries
This talk is about using simple values (as opposed to complex objects) not just for holding data, but also as the boundaries between components and subsystems. It moves through many topics: functional programming; mutability's relationship to OO; isolated unit testing with and without test doubles; and concurrency, to…
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How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties
The basic formula for Hacker News ranking has been known for years , but questions remained. Does the published code give the real algorithm...
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Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal
You surely know this: You're looking at some website with some useful shell commands. However, those commands are long as hell and you know you're probably not gonna need them for a few years or so (so there's no need to memorize them). So, what do you do? You copy-paste them. Here's an example:
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Federal Spending: Where Does the Money Go
In fiscal year 2014, the federal government will spend around $3.8 trillion. These trillions of dollars make up a considerable chunk - around 22 percent - of the US. economy, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That means that federal government spending makes up a sizable share of all money spent in the…
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Stripe launches German beta
Once Stripe is supported in your country, you’ll be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world.
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Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.
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FedEx Bandwidth
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
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Linux on an 8-bit micro
Dmitry.GR: A successful experiment in running real Linux on an 8-bit AVR.
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Git koans
A Python programmer handed her ~/.gitconfig to Master Git. Among the many lines were the following:
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On Hacking
In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
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On Hacking MicroSD Cards
Today at the Chaos Computer Congress ( 30C3 ), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution — on the memory card itself. On the dark side, code execution on the memory card enables a class of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, where the card seems to be…
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Kids can't use computers, and why it should worry you
TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with its head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. "nom nom" . This blog post is not for you.
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Melatonin
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable