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Prediction Markets
My prediction/betting strategies and track record, reflections on rationality, prediction judgments
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,129 posts.
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Mobile web design: The reign of morons, indeed
If you are Esquire's web designer, please find another career. Stop. Stop hurting the internet. I am still constantly amazed at the level user-hostility -- actually outright contempt -- in mobile web design. Remember in the 90s when those oh-so-clever web sites would pop up little Javascript dialogs trying to better…
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HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla
Today Shumway landed in the Firefox codebase. Shumway is a way to support playing Flash (SWF files) without the Adobe Flash Player. The Adobe Flash Player has been plagued with bugs so being to play Flash without the normal player is a big step forward for security. Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that…
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How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard
My Sidekiq project isn’t just about building the best background processing framework for Ruby, it’s also a venue for me to experiment with ways to make open source software financially sustainable for the developers who work on it hundreds of hours each year (e.g. me). Let’s review.
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Competing with a Mac
Publicly, Mr. Lazaridis and Mr. Balsillie belittled the iPhone and its shortcomings, including its short battery life, weaker security and initial lack of e-mail. […] Internally, he had a very diff…
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Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
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The Six Stages of Debugging (2012)
[ This is not mine. I posted it in the interest of personal archival because the oldest mention I could track down on the web appeared on a now-defunct weblog . In the meantime, Mike W. Cremer (who bills himself The Newton™ Scapegoat ☺ ) has claimed credit for coining it after a particularly frustrating DMA debugging…
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How traffic actually works
Every so often this article makes the rounds and it annoys me. That isn’t how traffic works and the proposed solutions won’t fix anything. Maybe you can eliminate the annoying stop-and-go, but no one gets home any faster. In fact you can prove that you and everyone behind you get home strictly later than if you had…
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Computational Synesthesia: Audio Analysis with Image Processing Algorithms
The blog post was written in an IPython Notebook. You can download the notebook here .
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Monitor your Website’s Uptime with Google Docs
Would you like to receive instant email alerts as soon as your website goes down or is inaccessible to users?
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bliki: Test Pyramid
Write most of your tests at a low level (unit tests) with a few broad-stack tests, eg via UI. UI tests tend to be fragile and slow.
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Dual N-Back Meta-analysis
Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.
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Clojure's core.typed vs Haskell
I compare code between typed clojure and Haskell implementations of project euler solutions to examine the differences and similarities.
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Procrastination should be solved by lighting fires, not filling buckets
2019 update: Wow, people are still reading this! I wrote this 6 years ago. I’m going to leave it unedited + add some new thoughts. With the benefit of hindsight, I think… thinking about productivity apps is a sort of proxy approach to thinking about productivity itself. I never did…
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Bitcoin is Worse is Better
2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.
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Replacing Python: candidates
This post evaluates the programming languages ATS, C#, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Python and Rust to try to decide which would be the best language in which …
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Replacing Python
In the first post, I took a brief look at the programming languages ATS, C#, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Python and Rust to try to decide which would be the …
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Underscore Price Dynamics
Every iOS developer needs to listen to _DavidSmith’s most recent podcast episode, Real World Price Dynamics with Lauren Smith (it’s just 22 minutes).
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Spaced repetition for study and learning
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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Senator Feinstein Admits the NSA Taps the Internet Backbone
We know from the Snowden documents (and other sources) that the NSA taps the Internet backbone through secret agreements with major US telcos., but the US government still hasn’t admitted it. In late August, the Obama administration declassified a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Footnote 3…