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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 462 posts.
The Slow Web Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980). (Source: https://www.youtube.com/) The slow web started as a vague idea framed as a joke. When we put our site out into the world on January 2, 2011, we only proces
Never Stop Hacking
A short note to myself: what makes programming fun isn't finishing tasks, it's the problems themselves and the process of learning. Never stop hacking.
How I created and launched a website from the Internet café in Zimbabwe
After my last interview with a big mining firm,I got fed up.I had gone to many interviews with big companies , and the result was always the same.With unemployment at a staggering 80% , one can ima…
On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
Coding is priority number five
Let’s set the scene. It’s the summer of 2010. Kiln had been launched into the wild for all of six months, after a grueling year-long, no-revenue sprint to turn my dinky prototype that ran only on my personal laptop into a shipping application that worked both in Fog Creek’s hosted environment and in a gazillion…
Let's ride this bull
The signs are all here: There’s now an incubator on every corner, even your uncle is donning angel wings, and IPO expectations for Facebook are exceeding the hype for a new Twilight movie. But that’s all circumstantial evidence. What we needed was some public testimony to really put eve…
“She doesn’t deserve to be alive”
What is success? When do you reach it? Is life different? Are you happy? And if it's not the shining golden star that it ought to be, is it still worth it?
Github is making me feel stupid(er)
I’m approaching my fourth anniversary of using github. I should hardly have to state that it’s a wonderful service, and especially so for being kept freely available to the open source community. At the same time, I’ve noticed over the past year or so that in many ways I feel less efficient using it now than I used…
Experiment: Living Without A Home Internet Connection
I moved into a new apartment at the start of April, and decided to try an experiment: not having an internet connection. When I tell people that I don’t have internet, they assume that it’s because I…
Pragmatic Unicode
Unicode can be confusing. Here’s a “just the facts I need” presentation about how to handle it correctly.
This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
In praise of... text files and protocols
The other night I had to debug a problem where CMYK colors specified in an OmniGraffle file weren't making it into an exported PDF (or at...