The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,417 posts.
Is it possible to become invisible without breaking the law? (Photo: gravitywave) LOS ANGELES, MID-JUNE 2008 Sitting on a plush couch in the neon-infused nightclub, I asked again: “What’s it about?” Neil Strauss glanced around and looked nervous, which I found strange. After all, we’d known each other for close to two…
Web standards that have been outlined and classified have totally transformed the internet in just the last 10 years or so, creating an online experience that is more cohesive, more predictable, and a lot more robust.
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
Lately I’ve been acting as the unofficial Git consultant for Skribit , usually in response to @Stammy saying something on Twitter along the lines of “Hey, git just did something totally nonintuitive and now I can’t figure out what to do next.” I’ve been using Git long enough to know the answer, usually, or at least to…
Everyone that works at Last.fm is typically connected to our IRC server. We have different channels per team, as well as a company-wide channel, and a few channels dedicated to automated monitoring.
So currently there's a bit of a to-do involving Debian's Ruby packaging team and the Ruby "gem" system. [This document](http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html) …
So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:- 7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard. 1 x Ethernet cable: […]
Hi all. I am starting a new article series called Vim Plugins You Should Know About. As the title suggests, this series is going to be about Vim plugins that you should know about and be using. The first article in this series will be about one of my favorite plugins called surround.vim. So what is surround.vim plugin?
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Feedback Army is an incredibly useful little website where you pay $7 for feedback to a given website of yours, and then get back 10 comments. Feedback Army uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the background. You enter the domain in question, say “example.com”, and then ask a bunch of question. Questions could be, “What…
I’ve earlier performed a little test , comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change…
It has almost been a year since I wrote about the future of computing and how I thought that it was all about Solid State Drives (this was before I became infatuated with the cloud). Well I finally got my hands on one. It's Intel's new X25-M 80GB SSD and it is among the fastest consumer-aimed SSDs o
"Not-to-do" lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
In a previous post I discuss how I outsourced my cooking for $60 a week . In this article, I discuss my experiences with a virtual assistant.
T hat’s right – for just $60 a week, I’ve bought myself some time to chase after some dreams: working out, playing guitar, and of course writing.
I just finished my first big project using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. I'm in love. I had a list of over 6000 business names, addresses and url's of dubious quality that I needed to make sure was accurate. For a brief moment, I thought about checking them myself. But after doing several dozen by hand, I realized…
Here is something neat that I hacked together – a `top' like Python program called Hacker Top that allows you to follow Hacker News from a UNIX terminal! Hacker News has become the 2nd source for news after programming.reddit for me. I have a couple of ideas for a startup myself and the tips I get from Hacker News...
First off, I'm calling for a moratorium on Simpsons references until the writers over there are Done, and gets things funny . Secondly, is it possible to cluster DGTSers? Can they recognize each others' brilliance and form into a sort of hive mind, or do they end up abrading one another with slight differences?…
