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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,838 posts.
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Airmash – a game that refused to die
The game Airmash was announced on Dec 10 2017 on Hacker News by a user named fivesigma. The game became very succesful in the year to come. But it would have a very rocky history.
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Garbage Collection
We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.
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Thermal Testing Raspberry Pi 4
Raspberry Pi 4 just got a lot cooler! The last four months of firmware updates have taken over half a watt out of idle power and nearly a watt out of fully loaded power
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Yes, And – How to be effective in the theatre of work
How to be effective in the theatre of work
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Adventures in Netflix
I’ve been watching a buttload of 40s movies over the past few months, and I was thinking about watching something really modern next. And then it occurred to me: How about if I watch all R…
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GitHub Trip Report
I, the founder of Fossil, was invited and attended the first meeting of the GitHub Open Source Advisory Board in San Francisco on 2019-11-12. This post is a report of my adventures.
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Jacob Collier’s four magical chords
Jacob Collier is the internet’s favorite musical virtuoso. Here’s his mostly acapella arrangement of a Christmas carol called “In The Bleak Midwinter.” The most remarkable p…
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Google AdWords charged me for clicks in Istanbul while location-targeting the US
Three months ago, I quit my job at Google to start my own company. This past week, I decided that I wanted to get a feel for how much it…
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Who eats who in open source
TL;DR: If the cloud didn’t eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects? Marc Andresseesssen’s “software is eating the world” has given rise to an entire technolog…
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The plot thickens for a hypothetical “X17” particle
This content is currently in the process of being archived and integrated into the CERN Library collections.
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Syntax Highlighting Is Backwards (2018)
Most code editors color different pieces of your program in different ways. For instance, they’ll make keywords like if bold and bright so that you notice when you’ve misspelled them. They’ll make non-executable parts like comments and documentation fainter so that you know that the computer isn’t seeing that part of…
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The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019404 points166 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
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What is energy, actually? (2011)
That’s an easy go: energy is the amount of (on) my electricity bill, or maybe of (on) my natural gas bill. If I am very concentrated, I might add that it is also the money I spend at the gasoline pump, and if I am even more concentrated I will suggest that it might have something to do with the filling up of my…
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The Information Apocalypse (2018)
My friend Aviv was recently the subject of a popular Buzzfeed article about the possibility of an impending “information apocalypse”. tl;dr: Aviv extrapolates from the fake news crisis that started in 2016 to a world in which anyone can create AI-assisted misinformation campaigns indistinguishable from reality to the…
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The first non-bullshit book about culture I've read
I’ve always been frustrated that people often talk about culture without giving actionable or realistic advice, and was previously prompted by this tweet to write about what I did when put in charge of a broken team:
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TLA+ model checking made symbolic
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA’19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorith…
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Making Git and Jupyter Notebooks play nice
Summary: jq rocks for speedy JSON mangling. Use it to make powerful git clean filters, e.g. when stripping out unwanted cached-data from Jupyter notebooks. You can find the documentation of git 'clean' and 'smudge' filters buried in the page on git-attributes , or see my example setup below.
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Mental Mountains
I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better. He begins: UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is dr…
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Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors
focusing after dark • corn cob bulbs • before + after photos • saving ½–2h/day • my setup • why don’t more people do this?! • FAQs
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An Overview of Cryptography
Free, evolving crypto tutorial since 1999!
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Discovering less-known Postgres v12 features
Get to know and learn how to use some less-known features of Version 12 of PostgreSQL. You'll surely discover something new for yourself.
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Real hardware breakthroughs, and focusing on rustc
The Redox official website
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How Y Combinator Started (2012)
On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC…