New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,420 posts.
Faking votes on Hacker News
Hacker News is a site where users vote on links. When someone clicks on an up or down vote, their browser sends a GET request that looks like this: GET /vote?by= joesmith dir=upfor=8765309 A user can only vote if the by parameter matches their Hacker News login cookie. So for a third…
Six Lessons Learned from Domain Pigeon’s First Six Weeks
On January 29th I launched Domain Pigeon, a web site to help people find available domain names. The site lets visitors browse thousands of available .com domain names which they can register for t…
How .NET Regular Expressions Really Work
Remember when you first tried to parse text?
Cringely: Making 400k/yr profit on an eBook about parrots
Let’s face it, the economy is in trouble and so are the rest of us. Based on the dregs I find in my spam filter that makes this a hot season for folks selling plans for how to make big money on the Internet – plans that mostly aren’t worth what people pay for them.
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
Don't launch
Here's a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? My answer is almost always the same: do...
Training Rats as Traders
I crafted this skinner box exclusively for the rattraders' training; it is equipped with airconditioning and a music device. The picture above shows the special light signal that indicates the start of trading. (image by Nora Friedel)
Iostat -x
My favorite Linux tool in DB work is ‘iostat -x’ (and I really really want to see whenever I’m doing any kind of performance analysis), yet I had to learn its limitations and prop…
Datacenter Security: A Cautionary Tale from Last.fm
Last.fm has presence in three datacenters in the London area - this is currently more because of necessity than redundancy; datacenter space is at a real premium in the UK and we can’t fulfill our power growth needs at just one site. We operate our own 20 gigabit fibre ring between these, which means we can basically…
Did You Know: BeautifulSoup's bits are rotting
The parser in version 3.1.0 of Beautiful Soup did significantly worse on real-world HTML than version 3.0.8 did. The most common problems were the incorrect handling of <script> tags, "malformed start tag" errors, and "bad end tag" errors.
Erlang: A Generalized TCP Server
In my last few articles about Erlang we've covered the basics of network programming with gen_tcp and Erlang/OTP's gen_server, or generic server, module. Let's combine the two.
Erlang: An Introduction to Records
Internally Erlang has only two internal compound data types: lists and tuples. Neither of these data types support named access, so creating associative arrays a la PHP, Ruby, or Python is an impossibility without additional libraries.
Are short methods actually worse?
I ran across an interesting post on programming.reddit called Anecdote Driven Development, or Why I Don’t Do TDD . The article focused on testing, but what I found most interesting was the part about how long a method or function should be:
DHH: Fuck the Real World
Buy viagra - LOWEST PRICES ON THE WEB, We Accept Visa and Mastercard Credit Cards