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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,905 posts.
How to forcibly eject a CD/DVD from a MacBook Air USB SuperDrive
So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button ...
John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
( 33:45-35:53 from John Gruber's keynote speech at The Çingleton Symposium, a conference which took place in Montréal on October 14th and 1...
A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history
Every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards, it's probably a unique order, never before seen in human history.
"Build something people want" is not enough
Most people take “Build something people want” to mean “Pick a problem to solve and solve it well.” This is not sufficient to build a world changing company. “Why now?…
How I Made $19,000 on the App Store While Learning to Code
The past year and a half has been quite a journey. I’ve gone from starting to learn iPhone design, to quitting my full time job and focusing on an application full-time. All while teaching myself to program in Objective-C with no prior programming experience. OneVoice is a iPhone/iPad application that gives a voice to…
The plumber programmer
I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn't realize that "plumber programmer" is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team. As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people…
My ICT teacher can’t mark my homework
Three years ago in August 2009 we ran the first ever Young Rewired State – a hack weekend aimed at the young developer community. I was determined to try to engage them with the exciting (sic…
Fail Upwards
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Saving a Life is Easy, But I Didn't
I was reading Hacker News a few weeks ago and I stumbled on a story: Amit Gupta needs you. It turns out that Amit is the thoroughly likeable founder of Photojojo. Amit had the double misfortune to: a) have acute leukemia, and b) be South Asian. The problem with the first one is obvious. The problem with the second one…
Modern Web Applications are Here
Battlefield 3’s Battlelog system is an interesting web application that many of us missed. Here is why it’s amazing and worth a look at.
How to read Haskell like Python
Have you ever been in the situation where you need to quickly understand what a piece of code in some unfamiliar language does? If the language looks a lot like what you’re comfortable with, you can usually guess what large amounts of the code does; even if you may not be completely familiar how all the language…
Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts
One of Lisp's great features is its condition system. It serves a similar purpose to the exception handling systems in Java, Python, and C++ but is more flexible. In fact, its flexibility extends beyond error handling--conditions are more general than exceptions in that a condition can represent any occurrence during…
How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords
How cold calling succeeded where AdWords failed, producing a 100% conversion rate and all the information needed to create a scalable business.
Portrait of a N00b
Well, the typing issue is a thorny one. I think as a general rule, the reddit types are too eager to denounce it immediately and tell us all that Ruby is the answer, or whatever it is this week, and the Java purists and academics make the opposite argument. Coming from someone from a dynamic background, I didn't use a…
Flash is dead. Long live the internet.
When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward…
In defense of the Google chef
I'm on the road with very limited internet connectivity so I can't do the homework I normally would before posting this, so it's possible th...