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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,098 posts.
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A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Persistent patterns in long-lived online groups.
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The Cloud Is Not for You
Shop a wide selection of domains at HugeDomains.com. Find the right domain name today.
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Why three prongs?
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
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A Boggling Return to C
My first real programming class, back in high school, was taught in C. I found it difficult and I remember spending the whole year thinking that I really had no aptitude for programming. I think I got an OK grade in the end, but I felt like I was really struggling compared to the other students in the class. It wasn’t…
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Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API
Studying the technology, business, and politics of APIs since 2010.
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Map Simplification with Visvalingam's Algorithm
An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
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Nookd
Today's post departs from my stated mission to provide a glimpse into daily island life...except so far as it reflects my reaction to someth...
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Feynman's Clock
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…
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The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote
2008 blast from the past: me, Mike Wallin, and Derek Sivers, the subject of this post. (Photo: A3maven) [Total read time: 3-5 minutes.] Derek Sivers is one of my favorite people. He is a programmer who lost his stage fright by doing more than 1,000 gigs as a circus ring leader (!!!). He’s also a […]
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Why I Left Google
*If you’re the owner of this website and have questions, reach out to Bluehost. We’re happy to help.
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The girl with the ANSI tattoo
I enjoyed the David Fincher remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo more than I thought I would. Rather than a shallow and cynical Holly...
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The exercise habit
This morning, my alarm sounded at precisely 5:50am. Within a few minutes, I was up and had my running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt on. Minutes later at 6am, I opened my MacBook Air, switched to the desktop with TextMate open and got coding. I worked for just under one hour on some important new functionality for Buffer…
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Boolean Blindness
I hate Booleans! But isn’t everything “just bits”? Aren’t computers built from gates? And aren’t gates just the logical connectives? How can a Computer Scientist p…
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20 lines of code that beat A/B testing every time
<img src="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/bandits/MAB-2.jpg"/> A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger…
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Why I Use Perl: Reliability
Perl 5 is a great language for new development because it and its ecosystem are amazingly reliable. Here's my case study.
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Hunting Down My Son's Killer
To find it, a team of scientists at Duke University used whole-exome sequencing (a protein-focused variant of whole-genome sequencing) on me, my wife and my son.
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