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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 568 posts.
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Unwritten Google Webmaster Guideline: Don't End URLs in .0
Many of you saw this post from seoco.co.uk this morning (or its Sphinn thread) about our Web 2.0 Awards being removed from Google's index. We noticed the same thing late last night and spent some time this morning going through what could have happened. We ...
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Programmer Insecurity
pickin', grinnin', and pushin' bits
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Yahoo loses key mysql developer
It seems that word has started to leak out, so I might as well remove any speculation or ambiguity. In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo! as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge. After 8.5 years of service and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time…
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It Doesn't Have To Be All Or Nothing With A Startup
Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk …
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Top Ten Things that Math Probability Says about the Real World
Talk given at Cornell University, April 14 2008. Like most scientists, I habitually just write slides and extemporize the actual spoken words. For this one talk I wrote the following script, though (being hard to break the habits of 30 years) I didn't stick closely to the script. Each link is one slide.
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Nassim Taleb's Top 10 Life Tips
Here are Nassim Taleb’s top 10 life tips, all worthwhile, from this profile: 1. Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be im…
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How I hacked Digg
Two weeks ago I filed a bug report on Digg.com , explaining several XSS vulnerabilities and bugs I found. Some of these were (and some still are!) very critical. A day later, I got an automated response to my report:
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JQuery 1.2.6: Events 100% faster
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library
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Why we skip Photoshop
When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup. Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop: You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Pap…
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Rees Re: OO
(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.
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1,000 True Fans
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
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Python + Hadoop = Dumbo
As a research intern here at Last.fm, dealing with huge datasets has become my daily bread. Having a herd of yellow elephants at my disposal makes this a lot easier, but the conventional way of writing Hadoop programs can be rather cumbersome. It generally involves lots of typing, compiling, building, and moving files…
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Twitter refuses to uphold Terms of Service
Update 3 : Please see my follow-up post about Twitter's response. I started using Twitter in March 2007, just before their SXSW explosion. Not surprisingly, I instantly became addicted and since then have used the service for everything from personal to professional. Overall, Twitter is a g