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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,905 posts.
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The Ballmer Days Are Over
Disclaimer: I own Microsoft stock. Yes, this is *not* pro-Microsoft but I feel the need to be very open about this. He’s employee number 30 and has been with Microsoft since mid-1980. In 2000…
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Google penalizes original content site because of scrapers
In a recent comment someone shared the fate of Patrick Jordan , owner of justanotheripadblog.com.
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This is What Irony Tastes Like: Capcom and the PSN Outage
So Capcom senior VP Christian “Sven” Svensson mentioned that Capcom is losing money because the Playstation Network is down . This is especially hard on Capcom, because the phone-home DRM Capcom uses has locked all of their Playstation customers out of their games.
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The Final Answer For What To Do To Prevent Piracy [of Indie Games]
(For some reason, Blogger deleted this post. I have recreated it. Sorry for any comments that were lost.) This article is my decisive sta...
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"The worst algorithm in the world?"
You know the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … Each number is the sum of the previous two. Let’s say the zeroth Fibonacci number is zero, so: $latex \begin{array}{r@{\…
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Why Donald Knuth Checks E-mail Only Once Every Three Months
E-mail Zero Redux Two weeks ago, I introduced E-mail Zero, the concept of living life with no e-mail. The motivation was to investigate innovative ways ... Read more
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Programming is…
Myth: Programmers get to write code all day. Truth: Most programmers spend a ton of time (in no particular order): Carefully composing e-mails to other programmers/mailing lists/non-technical folks…
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How to Email Busy People
I was just chatting with a friend that is a successful entrepreneur, advisor , and angel investor. He has 1700 unread emails in his inbox. 1700!
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Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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MySQL Text vs. Varchar Performance
Starting with MySQL 5.0.3, the maximum field length for VARCHAR fields was increased from 255 characters to 65,535 characters. This is good news, as VARCHAR fields, as opposed to TEXT fields, are stored in-row for the MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB has different characteristics). TEXT and BLOB fields are not stored…
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Every day I learn something new… and stupid.
Hey kids, did you know that JavaScript doesn't have integers? That's right! All JavaScript numbers (either primitive numbers, or the Number object, and don't even get me started on how stupid it is that there is even a distinction between the two) are actually double floats! Now, in any Lisp-derived language, you…
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Why you get ideas in the shower
[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity] When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things…
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Schneier: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society
Three months ago, I announced that I was writing a book on why security exists in human societies. This is basically the book’s thesis statement: All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective—and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives—as…
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Visualizing Time with the Infinity Hour Chart
This is another experiment in visualizing 24-hour cyclical data. My last post explored a method of linear representation (the Double Time Bar Chart). Linear representations have problems when it comes to showing the cyclical nature of time data (ie there is no start or end of a 24 hour cycle). Inspiration When trying…
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Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS
Last year I shared how Twitter was moving more and more towards a closed, less-standards oriented model of sharing content as they upgraded their design to bring more people to the Twitter.com website. At that time, they removed the prominent RSS icons and made it only possible to access an RSS feed for an individual…
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LastPass Disclosure Shows Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Response to the media's hysteria surrounding LastPass' responsible security warning.
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How To: Spend your investors’ money
I’ve invested in two startups and advise, officially and unofficially, a dozen or so other startups. Recently, a company that I’m involved with, attachments.me , raised $500,000 from Foundry Group . Since their raise, the two cofounders, Ben and Jesse, have been on a tear adding features, solidifying the…
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Leaving Google
After seven years at Google, I'm leaving. Cue the inevitable 'what's wrong with you?' Before I get to the gripes, though, there are a few popular narratives I want to push back on: that Google has gone evil, that the good engineers are all defecting to Facebook, that 20% time was always a myth. Part one of three. The…
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There's more to HTML escaping than &, <, >, and "
This was exaggeration for effect—there aren’t many cases where a simple XSS injection could actually empty a bank account—but I wanted to make a point.
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Understanding the code inside Tornado, the asynchronous web server
If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and working. Further configuration is required.
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