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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,784 posts.
Is it hard to become an Android developer?
My last post (Android Developer Income Report) caused a lot of questions about how to jump into Android apps development. It is very surprising for me as earnings I have presented are not even clos…
Why Facebook badly needs Steve Jobs
Facebook could have easily become a player in the email battle, if they had just kept it simple. All they needed to do was the following: ...
Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)
The word is out that I have decided to resign my tenured faculty job at Harvard to remain at Google. Obviously this will be a big change in ...
Why I feel like a fraud
Most high-performing people experience Impostor Syndrome. I did too. When you understand the cause, you can defeat it.
18' Canoe from One Sheet of Plywood
The prospect of building a one sheet kayak, as presented in the original Prism section , has aroused some interest. The original "maximum volume" kayak Prism would not be suitable for a kayaking beginner, however, unless he or she was equipped with excellent balancing abilitites. This design is an attempt to overcome…
The Incredible Power of the Amazon EC2 Cluster GPU Instances
Today Amazon Web Services takes another step on the continuous innovation path by announcing a new Amazon EC2 instance type: The Cluster GPU Instance. Based on the Cluster Compute instance type, the Cluster GPU instance adds two NVIDIA Telsa M2050 GPUs offering GPU-based computational power of over one TeraFLOPS per…
Peter Martin: Google does something really good.
Rarely has one single decision done so much good. From now on when you type in the word "suicide" you get this: That's right. The Lif...
TSA encounter at SAN
[These events took place roughly between 5:30 and 6:30 AM, November 13th in Terminal 2 of the San Diego International Airport. I'm writing t...
The Two Things about Computer Programming
In The Two Things about the Two Things, it's noted that people are unlikely to agree what the two things are, especially when it comes to computing. So I'm going to cheat.
The one true REST explanation
Leonard Richardson's model for understanding a RESTful architecture as steps in a maturity model. Levels are (1) resources, (2) HTTP verbs and return codes, and (3) hypertext controls.
A VC: Storm Clouds
We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. In this sector of startupland, company creation is up, investment is up, there are plenty of success stories, and not all of them are based on quick flips and takeouts. There is real revenue flowing […]
The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions
A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it concerns an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term for my Java IAQ , but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Python…
Modern Perl, the book, is Available.
After countless commits, the generosity of dozens of proofreaders, and far too long proofreading the index, Modern Perl: the book is available! You can buy a lovely print version from any well-stocked online vendor (and you're more than welcome to...
The Instapaper Default.png dilemma
iOS apps display a prerendered, static image when they launch called Default.png . Developers can set it to anything they like. This is Instapaper ’s:
The day Steve Jobs dissed me hard
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Evaluating Extraordinary Claims
To demonstrate the problem, I did a simulation where I generated 480 random numbers per subject, representing the 480 time slices in the experiment. I repeated this generation of random numbers 20 times. I compared the send and no-send intervals of random numbers using a T-test; none of the 20 trials found a…