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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,784 posts.
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Breaking the Reddit code
A few days ago an entry on Reddit asked for help breaking a code . Because I was laid up in bed yesterday with something chesty and nasty I...
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In a weird sneaker-net way we have implemented a human DNS
Joe Lieberman calls Amazon to say they should cut them off. Amazon cuts them off, then says the Lieberman call had nothing to do with it. We have no reason to doubt Amazon. It's consistent with their philosophy of not taking sides in political battles. Still I wish Amazon, who I'm a big fan of, had stood with them…
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Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
(Note: this post is `just for fun;’ no premeds, doctors, researchers, or nobel laureates were meant to be offended in the writing of this post.) The bane of many American physics grad student…
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Close the Washington Monument
Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for…
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I just need a programmer
I first became acquainted with Pat Conroy's work when, as a freshman in college, I watched The Great Santini as a requirement for one of my honors courses. This film struck me as both sad and hopeful. Since then, I have seen a couple of other movies adapted from his novels.
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Google AI Challenge Winner Post-Mortem
The lead in the last month or so was an indicator of having good chances, but there was a huge shuffling of ranks in the last week and some last minute casualties.
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Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit
Oh, Steve, you do make me laugh, always. And it's so long between posts these days I hardly believed it when Safari hinted that there was some action over at Steve's. Thank you.
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The Best Free and Open Source Data Mining Software
The process of extracting patterns from data is called data mining. It is recognized as an essential tool by modern business since it is ab...
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Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)
(en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We…
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Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
Over the years I have spent a lot of time brainstorming startup ideas with people who are (asymptotically) as nerdy as me. For some reasons, every time I brainstorm with a new set of people, the following ideas come up. This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems…
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Thank HN: Design for Hackers
Last week, I signed a contract to publish Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty with John Wiley & Sons. I still have plenty of work left to get this book onto shelves – and to exist at all – but I’m extremely excited about it, and wanted to share the news with everyone, especially visitors coming
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Notation And Thinking
Does notation shape our thinking? Kenneth Iverson was a mathematician who is most famous for designing APL. This was the name of his programming language, and it cleverly stood for “A Program…
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Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice
First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby