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Lazy Expert Syndrome
We all eventually suffer from "lazy expert syndrome." The best way to snap out of it and grow is to mentor someone new to your field.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,981 posts.
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The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it
Progress in the software industry has been crushed under the weight of technical debt accumulated over the last 40 years. The tools, languages, libraries, and platforms we all rely on suffer from massive incidental complexities responsible for billions of dollars in wasted productivity. Anyone who spends any amount of…
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Yik Yak Hack
Yik Yak is an anonymous, controversial social media application that allows people to make posts that are visible to other users within ~2 miles. Often landing a top 10 spot in the iOS App Store, this app has become increasingly popular with high school and college students. Due to the anonymous nature of the app…
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Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society
A playable post on how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
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Interface Upgrades in Go
Much has been written about Go’s interfaces . They’re one of the language features I like best, providing a very pragmatic trade-off between the complexity of more powerful type systems and the anarchy of duck typing. If you’re not already familiar with Go or Go’s interfaces, I’d encourage you to read an introduction…
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A cautionary tale about subscription services and how not to shut down a startup
As you think about holiday gifts this season, I’d like to warn you about the subscription service Whimseybox. This is also a cautionary…
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You can't dig upwards
When I first learned to drive a car, shortly after turning 15, my mother insisted that I learn on my father’s Mazda Miata: a silver, two-door convertible with a soft-top roof.
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Reimplementing “git clone” in Haskell from the bottom up (2013)
In order to give some structure to my ongoing investigation of git’s data structures, protocols and implementation I decided to re-implement git clone without using any of git’s plumbing commands or any of the existing git libraries. Along the way I tried to keep some implementation notes that should help to…
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ImageMagick, four point perspective distortion in a video
Step 1) Download the video from Youtube using JDownloader . The best one was the original Japanese upload, The Game Awards 2014 å‡ºå±•æ˜ åƒ ã‚¼ãƒ«ãƒ€ã®ä¼èª¬ 最新作 , which is 720p. I saved this file as zelda_720p.mp4.
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Icdiff: side-by-side command line diffs
Your terminal can display color, but most diff tools don't make good use of it. By highlighting changes, icdiff can show you the differences between similar files without getting in the way. This is especially helpful for identifying and understanding small changes within existing lines.
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Ignoring pull requests discourages open-source contributions
What's the first thing you do when you find a bug or see a missing feature in an open source project? Check out the project page and submit a patch!
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New Paypal gateway UI susceptible to spoofing
Hey. I decided to get a paid plan on Github and Paypal looked like a good payment option to me. Click the blue button here : This looks ...
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Zusie – My Relay Computer
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
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Make your program slower with threads
Years ago, while taking a numerical methods course, I wrote some code to calculate the expected number of shared birthdays in a group. The code is very simple: each attempt constructs a vector of N birthdays, then counts the duplicates. The outer loop runs millions of attempts, and calculates the mean number of shared…
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Clean OS reinstalls with propellor
You have a machine someplace, probably in The Cloud, and it has Linux installed, but not to your liking. You want to do a clean reinstall, maybe switching the distribution, or getting rid of the cruft. But this requires running an installer, and it's too difficult to run d-i on remote machines.
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Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
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A quick tutorial on implementing C memory management functions
This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial by Marwan Burelle and then sitting down and trying to write my own implementation, so the steps are going to be fairly similar. The main implementation differences are that my version is simpler and more vulnerable to memory…
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A Formula for the Number of Days in Each Month
Recently, after being awake for longer than I should have, I started thinking about methods of remembering the number of days in each month of the year. There is a rhyme for it, and a way to count on your knuckles, but these didn’t satisfy me. I wondered if there was a mathematical formula for the problem, and upon…
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Why I like XSLT
I first fell in love with XSL in 1999, when Microsoft rolled an XSLT processor into MSXML. I got my hands on the works of Shakespeare marked up in XML
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A farewell note to a programming language
Do you remember how we first met, back in 2012? I thought your functional approach was fresh, and different. For a while I believed we were made for each other. A first project was a success; on my own I was comfortable with the good parts of you. But as soon as I started working in teams writing Scala, your immense…