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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,905 posts.
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Carnegie Mellon CS Professor challenges Sony by mirroring Geohot's PS3 hacks
Request for materials: I would like to receive tutorial information on: Sony PS3 access protection mechanisms, the Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Algorithm ( ECDSA ), the structure of the PS3 hypervisor, METLDR, signing tools, and any other topics necessary for a person reasonably skilled in computer science to be…
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Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264
Why not drop H.264 support from Android and YouTube, too?
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L-Theanine: a 4,000 Year Old Mind-Hack
Monks have been drinking tea for thousands of years to maintain a state of “mindful alertness” during long periods of meditation. But only in the last few years have studies shed light on why tea has this effect on the mind. The two elements responsible for this are caffeine and L-theanine, and it is the combination…
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Scala == Effective Java?
I started reading Joshua Bloch's Effective Java last week. I'll have to admit that I haven't read it before, but only because I've been told...
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Simple Truths Smart People Forget
Some of the smartest people I know continuously struggle to get ahead because they forget to address a few simple truths that collectively govern our potential to make progress. So here’s a …
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Why Chinese Mothers are Not Superior (from a female Chinese engineer)
Jean Hsu - Fractional VP Engineering | Engineering Leadership for Startups
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MongoDB, Data Durability and Improvements coming in 1.8
Last weekend I tweeted two links to two tweets by a poor guy who apparently got his MongoDB database into an unrecoverable state during shutdown whilst upgrading to a newer version. That tweet quickly made the rounds, and the next morning I saw myself staring at replies stating that it was all his fault, because he…
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Inequality in Equalland
Every resident of Equalland has the same life story. From birth until age 18, they live with their parents, earning nothing and spending nothing — their parents cover all their needs. At age 18, they graduate from high school, become independent of their parents, and go to college. The government of Equalland funds…
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Steve's story - Google employee #13
I was born in 1972 to a poverty-level family in suburban Chicago. During the first few years of my life, I shared a 600 sq ft, 1 bedroom cot...
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A Healthy Diet For The Mind
I've been enjoying teaching Intelligent Systems again this semester. A big part of the fun is re-reading old papers. I had a lot of fun re-reading and thinking about the ideas in William Clancey 's classic paper, Heuristic Classification . Long-time readers may recall me mentioning this paper in a long-ago post about…
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A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
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Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design
The conservatives see non-standard custom UI elements as wrong. Liberals see an app built using nothing other than standard system UI elements as boring, old-fashioned, stodgy.
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CES2011: The end of the PC era
At this year’s CES two unthinkable things happened: The abandonment of Windows exclusivity by practically all of Microsoft’s OEM customers. The abandonment of Intel exclusivity by Micro…
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Google’s decreasingly useful, spam-filled web search
People whose opinions I respect have all been echoing the same sentiment — Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. The spammers, scrapers, and SEO’ed-to-the-hilt content farms are winning.
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Airlines using reverse auctions to determine true seat pricing
Of this (via MR): It’s an auction conducted at the airport terminal. In this auction you are a seller and you are bidding to sell your ticket back to the airline. Optimists look at this and …
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GameBoy Emulation in JavaScript: The CPU
In the first of this series of articles, I'll look at how a CPU can be emulated through JS, and start building an emulation core for the GameBoy console.
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