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Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,419 posts.
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When the business model is the privacy violation
Sometimes, when we worry about data privacy, we’re worried that data might fall into the wrong hands or be misused for unintended purposes. If I’m considering participating in a medical study, I’d want to know if insurance companies will obtain the data and use it against me. In these scenarios, we should look for…
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The high modernism of social media companies
A Revealing Memo A couple weeks ago, BuzzFeed leaked a memo written by Facebook VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth in the summer of 2016. It contained ... Read more
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A Gentle Introduction to Rust
Introduction to the Rust language, standard library and ecosystem
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Doubling Mono’s Float Speed
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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Proposed NYC legislation would give employees right to ignore after-work email
Meet the experts. Explore the digital magazine where innovators share tech strategies, executive insights, and advancements in AI and IT transformation.
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Progress on longstanding open problems
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
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The Facebook Current
The Senate hearing about Facebook was a bigger deal than it might have seemed, both because it happened and because of what was said.
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Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio
WebAssembly.Studio is an online IDE (integrated development environment) that helps you learn and teach others. It’s also a Swiss Army knife that comes in handy whenever working with WebAssembly (WASM). ...
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Dapps
A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?” I answered “Dapps.” If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting […]
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EU copyright proposal could undermine the use of Creative Commons licenses
Over the last few years the European Union has been working on revising its rules on copyright. But the latest proposal from the head of the copyright committee would deny creators the right to refuse remuneration — the right to share a work without getting paid — which could undermine the use of CC licenses…
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A Taxonomy of Technical Debt
Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL . I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I…
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Problems with CSVs (2016)
Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
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AV1 beats x264 and libvpx-vp9 in practical use case
Improved video compression is important for delivering digital video files more quickly and with higher quality, while using less bandwidth and storage. Everything from 4K movie streaming to smartp…
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Why SQLite Does Not Use Git
SQLite does not use the Git version control system. SQLite uses Fossil instead, which is a version control system that was specifically designed and written to support SQLite.
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Form a California LLC in 10 minutes for $70
Own this domain today. We make your shopping experience easy. Friendly and quick customer service.
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Avoiding the Distributed Monolith
If you’re considering a microservices implementation, and you enjoy this post, you might also enjoy my more recent post Gasp! You Might Not Need Microservices. I recently read a post called The False Dichotomy of Monoliths and Microservices by Jimmy Bogard, which I absolutely loved. While reading through it I noticed…
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YouTube Face is clickbait, attaining human form
On YouTube, there’s a long tail of content that pretty much guarantees the inclusion of every potential human interest. There are skate videos, makeup tutorials, and backyard surgical removals of blackheads. And yet the presentation of a lot of this content — especially when it’s trying to attract a large audience …
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Why Does “=” Mean Assignment?
Take the following code: a = 1 a = a + 1 print(a) A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and…
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Productivity
I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets...
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Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology
This week, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) announced that it has achieved the necessary sensitivity to “hear” the telltale signs of dark matter axions.
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Setting Emacs theme based on ambient light
I sit next to a window at work. On sunny days it’s easier to see a light editor theme, and when the sky is dark, a dark theme is easier on my eyes. So I decided to try to have my MacBook automatically switch the Emacs theme based on readings from the ambient light sensor.
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A new JPEG format
The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), an international committee headed by an EPFL professor, has just unveiled JPEG XS. With this new format, the image-compression process uses less energy, and higher-quality images can be sent with low latency over broadband networks like 5G. JPEG XS will have applications in…