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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,784 posts.
Why your Android app doesn't need an exit button
A couple of weeks ago I published my first Android App Surgery , a technical review of MySettings from JQSoft. One of my UX suggestions wa...
Operational Transformation (algorithm behind Wave, Google Docs)
Almost exactly a year ago, Google made one of the most remarkable press releases in the Web 2.0 era. Of course, by "press release", I actually mean keynote at their own conference, and by "remarkable" I mean potentially-transformative and groundbreaking. I am referring of course to the announcement of Google Wave , a…
No One Wins In Business Plan Competitions
Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution t…
Gave up a day job. Now what? - Income report #2
I know that many of my blog readers have subscribed my RSS Feed only for my monthly income reports. And as I want to make you happy here is my report from last month. April have ended over two week…
Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997)
S o Steve Jobs just shot the cloners in the head, indirectly doing the same to the growing percentage of Mac users who prefered cloned Mac systems to Apple's own. So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.
PyPy is the Future of Python
Currently the most common implementation of Python is known as CPython, and it’s the version of Python you get at python.org , probably 99.9% of Python developers are using it. However, I think over the next couple of years we’re going to see a move away from this towards PyPy, Python written in Python. This is going…
Common Misconceptions About Publishing
A while back I did a series of postings on the topic of Common Misconceptions About Publishing.
Worst-Case Thinking
At a security conference recently, the moderator asked the panel of distinguished cybersecurity leaders what their nightmare scenario was. The answers were the predictable array of large-scale attacks: against our communications infrastructure, against the power grid, against the financial system, in combination with…
My Common Git Workflow
A recent post [http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/still-hatin-on-git-now-with-added-actual-reasons/] that was highly ranked on Hacker News complained about common git workflows causing him serious pain. While I won't get into the merit of his user experience complaints, I do
Jef Raskin on "Intuitive Interfaces"
One of the most common terms of praise for an interface is to say that it is "intuitive" (the word should have been "intuitable" but we will bow to convention). Yet the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature rarely mentions the word, and for good reason. This note attempts to clarify the meaning of "intuitive"…
A Guide to Branching in Mercurial / Steve Losh
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
Code as photo-op
There's an article in today's NY Times about a group of four NYU comp sci students who are embarking on a great adventure to create a decentralized version of Facebook, where the data is under the user's control.
Still hatin' on git: now with added Actual Reasons
Monday’s little diatribe on git seemed to stir up quite a bit of strong opinion, both agreeing with me and disagreeing. As is often the case, they two camps seem to be split about 50-50, whi…
C: The Complete Nonsense
Back in 1996, having heard horror stories about Herbert Schildt's C: The Complete Reference , I decided to check it out. I flipped the book open; I found glaring errors. I paged through it. I found more glaring errors. In short, the book had lived up to the hype; it was awful. Being a pedantic sort, and having just…
Life is Beautiful
I haven’t slept. For much of last night, my daughter Ava cried out in her sleep with nightmares. Eventually her cries would wake us both. Instead of going back to sleep, Ava would chat with me about her day. I wish I could remember all the amazing things she told me at 2:00 AM.
Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas
I spent a few weekends trying to scratch an itch. While looking for online tools to create and render music notation, I was mildly disappoin...