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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 428 posts.
Stephen Fry on the iPhone, Bold, Storm, and G1
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: […]
Java is Dead; Long Live Python
Version 3.0 of Python has been released . Notably Python has again done something Java has long resisted: it has broken backwards compatibility with Python 2.x. Notable fixes include a much saner string processing model based on Unicode. I am told by my Pythonista colleagues that a lot of other weirdnesses such as the…
Amnesia
Mysteriously, about a week ago, Dan, the program manager designing most of the new features in FogBugz 7, came to ask me what features I thought should go in the timesheet reporting plug-in. The ti…
Diary of a Failed Startup: Aftermath
It's now been 5 months since Diffle folded, so I figured I'd write one last post to wrap up this blog. There seems to be a lot of curiosity...
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part I: surround.vim
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?
Not My Gorilla
Link to: http://groups.google.com/group/capistrano/msg/f5213577eaeadc47?pli=1
I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your…
Let's talk about Python 3.0
There's an old joke, so old that I don't even know for certain where it originated, that's often used to …
Linus Torvalds: Debugging hell
So I've spent much of the last couple of days remotely debugging this insane suspend failure (or to be exact, resume failure) that happens ...
The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
Soon it will be time to start over, again
A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new…
Hacking your food supply
A perennial problem for my wife and I run into while bootstrapping our business is the lack of time. It seems like the daily grind of cooking, cleaning and shopping tends to eat up most of our available time that we have.
Real Advice Hurts
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A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1
In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
Raw Thought: Aaron Swartz's Weblog
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
Joel on Software: Exploding Offer Season
If you’re a college student applying for jobs or summer internships, you’re at something of a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation. That’s because the recruiter does these negotiations for a l…