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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,420 posts.
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How to be a program manager
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t. Charles Simonyi, the brilliant p…
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Tarsnap reaches profitability
One of the most common questions I receive about tarsnap is this: What guarantee can I provide that the tarsnap service will continue to operate? This is a reasonable concern; after all, with services like Omnidrive and HP Upline shutting down, what guarantee is there that tarsnap won't also shut down? Until recently…
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Be Relentlessly Resourceful
March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays…
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A Week in Hacker News
I started posting to Hacker News recently. The rise and fall of submissions through the rankings is really hypnotic. I wrote a screen-scr...
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Scalable vs. Non-Scalable Careers
Professions where you are paid by the hour are not scalable. A prostitute who charges $100 an hour only has 24 hours in a day. At some point, she will hit a ceiling on her earnings. Similarly, dent…
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Basics of the Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
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Subdomains and subdirectories
Towards the tail end of PubCon, I noticed a spate of articles talking about subdomains and subdirectories in Google, and I wanted to talk more about this subject in case I was unclear. Historically…
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How to Be Jason Bourne: Multiple Passports, Swiss Banking, and Crossing Borders
Is it possible to become invisible without breaking the law? (Photo: gravitywave) LOS ANGELES, MID-JUNE 2008 Sitting on a plush couch in the neon-infused nightclub, I asked again: “What’s it about?” Neil Strauss glanced around and looked nervous, which I found strange. After all, we’d known each other for close to two…
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Verizon doesn't know Dollars from Cents
Click here for Audio (27 minutes - PutFile is reporting the time wrong) Here's the background: I have a Verizon unlimited data plan in the ...
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Imminent Death of the Net Predicted due to RCF3484
Warning: the following is excessively technical, and is intended more for the sake of the next poor sod who types "vista dns round robin resolution" into Google than it is for my actual friends list. (Except for a few of you. And you know who you are.) Also, since I want this to be searchable on…
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Poor Man's Email?
One of my favorite blogsports for the last couple of years is pondering what Twitter is. Here are some of the things I've come up with:
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I hate Lisp
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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Collaborative Map-Reduce in the browser
After immersing yourself into the field of distributed computing and large data sets you inevitably come to appreciate the elegance of Google's Map-Reduce framework . Both the generality and the simplicity of its map , emit , and reduce phases is what makes it such a powerful tool. However, while Google has made the…
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Dropped IE support for Instapaper
Update: This has been frontpaged on Hacker News and I’ve posted Instapaper’s browser usage stats .
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The Y Combinator in Arc and Java
I was recently reading The Little Schemer , a very intersting book about how to think in Scheme. The book uses a unique question-response ...
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IPhone’s Misplaced Decline Button?
Design, tech, writing, and other creative matters.
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JavaScript: The Good Parts
I found a really nice video lecture on JavaScript. I'm a JavaScript journeyman myself so I decided to review it to learn something new. I have written about JavaScript in the past -- the previous post on JavaScript was "Learning JavaScript through Video Lectures". This lecture is given by JavaScript guru Doug...
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