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Battleships: a ridiculous but awesome idea
The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the …
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,905 posts.
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5 ways to reboot a PC. None of them reliable.
You'd think it'd be easy to reboot a PC, wouldn't you? But then you'd also think that it'd be straightforward to convince people that at least making some effort to be nice to each other would be a mutually beneficial proposal, and look how well that's worked for us. Linux has a bunch of different…
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Bitcoin is not decentralized
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the primary client is developed by a bunch of folks at bitcoin.org . Do you care who these people are? In theory, you shouldn’t: all they do is develop an open source client for an open source protocol. Anyone else can develop their own client (and some people have) and no…
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Enough Is Enough
I believe that software patents should not exist. They are a tax on innovation. And software is closer to media than it is to hardware. Patenting software is like patenting music. The mess around the Lodsys patents should be a wake up call to everyone involved in the patent business (government bureaucrats…
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How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern distribution. I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, am counting lines of code (LOC) as the rough metric for size of a…
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How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
Detailed breakdown explaining questionable marketing techniques used by AirBnB. By David Gooden, marketing expert & MN luxury realtor.
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You don't get shit you don't ask for
When we were raising money for FlightCaster in Fall 2009, we met with dozens of investors, both VCs and Angels. Most of them turned us down. The investors that did put money into FlightCaster provided us a ton of value, both in terms of their capital and all the support/guidance/networking.
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What I Learned From Fixing my Laptop's Motherboard
A month ago I managed to break my laptop, by reversing the polarity of a universal power supply. The repair shop diagnosed the problem as a failed motherboard, and asked for €659 to replace it. I found the price preposterous and the notion of throwing away a motherboard for a single failed component ecologically…
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How to send and reply to email
Many of the tips below are already widely followed in academia, where debate and discussion over email have been taking place for decades.
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The brain's 5-million core, 9 Hz computer
Weekly essays on biology, philosophy and other topics.
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Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – The Startup Genome Project
In April 2010 I received an email that said, “I’m an incoming Stanford student in the fall and working on a project that a number of people suggested I get in touch with you about.̶…
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Why I’m Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin
These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had...
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Speeding up Rails startup time
In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative.
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How Javascript Prototypal Inheritance Really works
Everywhere on the web we read that Javascript has prototypal inheritance. However Javascript only provides by default a specific case of prototypal inheritance with the new operator. Therefore, most of the explanations are really confusing to read. This article aims to clarify what is prototypal inheritance and how to…
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How to handle 1000s of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
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It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.
This quote, which went viral 2 months ago and that Steinbeck probably never said, has stuck with me:
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Screw Hashbangs: Building the Ultimate Infinite Scroll
I’m just a student in a field unrelated to computer science , but I’ve been coding for years as a hobby. So, when I saw the current state of infinite scroll , I thought perhaps I could do something to improve it. I’d like to share what I came up with.
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Microsoft makes 5 times more income from Android than from Windows Phone
Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning. Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a p…