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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,466 posts.
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Why are restaurant web sites so bad?
On Twitter, my friends Shani and Erie are engaged in a bit of time-honored kvetching about the legendary and general awfulness of restaurant Web sites. Who thinks it’s good idea to blast annoying music at people going to your site? Why do they so often rely on Flash, which doesn’t really add anything to the…
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Emotional Rescue
To discount the emotional appeal of Apple’s products is to ignore the entire point of Apple’s products.
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Vim plugin makes Ruby blocks into text objects
Ever since learning about Vim’s text-objects I have wished that there was a way of selecting blocks in ruby code. Well, now there is. Today I am releasing a plugin that creates a custom text object for selecting ruby blocks . Merry Christmas!
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Putin Orders Russian Move to GNU/Linux
This looks huge: Глава правительства Владимир Путин подписал план перехода властных структур и федеральных бюджетников на свободное ПО. Сог...
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BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries
Manufacturers take a conservative approach and specify the life of Li-ion in most consumer products as being between 300 and 500 discharge/charge cycles.…
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James Burke’s Connections: A BBC History of Innovation
Science historian James Burke’s entire iconic Connections series, tracing the origin of innovation, is now available for free online.
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Day in the life of a Googler (Matt Welsh)
I was thinking recently about how different my workdays are now that I'm at Google, compared to the faculty job at Harvard. The biggest diff...
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Windows-NT vs. CP/M
Microsoft has come out with a number of benchmarks and comparison papers championing the fact that Windows-NT is much better than Linux. I find such comparisons fascinating, but rather than rehash this argument, I've decided to create my own comparison. Not of Windows-NT vs. Linux, that's been done. But of Windows-NT…
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What is Traitorware?
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy...
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Common Mistakes as Python Web Developer
A short list of common mistakes in Python web applications in terms of security and architecture.
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Write code like you just learned how to program
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Google Engineer bails out student in jail
The whole experience of what happens pre-trial was a real eye-opener. One of the things which I learned was that if one uses a bail bondsman in the US they require a 10% payment which they keep even if you do show up for court. That makes getting out of jail phenomenally expensive.
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How a Vim user converts to Emacs
For many years I thought that the heretics of the Emacs clan [1] were clearly insane – the followers of Vim were obviously following the True Path. And then I was snared by the dark side. My …
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Who Writes Wikipedia?
Part 1: Wikimedia at the Crossroads Part 2: Who Writes Wikipedia? Part 3: Who Runs Wikipedia? Part 4: Making More Wikipedians Part 5: Making More Wikipedias Part 6: Code, and Other Laws
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Final post on Javascript crypto
The talk I gave last year on common crypto flaws still seems to generate comments. The majority of the discussion is by defenders of Javascript crypto. I made JS crypto a very minor part of the tal…
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A Censorship-Resistant Web
Imagine someone put a document up at http://pentagonpapers.com/volumes/1.html that a) some people want to read and b) some people want to keep you from reading.