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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,506 posts.
The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
About to launch a new website? Make sure that you have covered all bases with this comprehensive checklist you can't be without.
The most effective debt collecting email I ever wrote
Web standards that have been outlined and classified have totally transformed the internet in just the last 10 years or so, creating an online experience that is more cohesive, more predictable, and a lot more robust.
A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer
Hi all! I'm starting a new article series here. This one is going to be about Unix utilities that you should know about. The articles will discuss one Unix program at a time. I'll try to write a good introduction to the tool and give as many examples as I can think of. The first post in this series is going to be…
How we reduced chargebacks by 30% (as a percentage of sales)
We’ve never had a lot of chargebacks (a chargeback is when a customer calls their credit card company to dispute a charge they don’t recognize), but last year we made a simple change that reduced our chargebacks by 30% as a percentage of sales. I can’t be certain the reduction …
My Git Workflow
Lately I’ve been acting as the unofficial Git consultant for Skribit , usually in response to @Stammy saying something on Twitter along the lines of “Hey, git just did something totally nonintuitive and now I can’t figure out what to do next.” I’ve been using Git long enough to know the answer, usually, or at least to…
Lazy Linux: essential tricks for admins
The open source operating system that runs the world.
How we use IRC at Last.fm
Everyone that works at Last.fm is typically connected to our IRC server. We have different channels per team, as well as a company-wide channel, and a few channels dedicated to automated monitoring.
On Python packaging
So currently there's a bit of a to-do involving Debian's Ruby packaging team and the Ruby "gem" system. [This document](http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html) …
Official Gmail Blog: Fast PDF viewing right in your browser
Posted by Marc Miller, Software Engineer When I get sent a PDF, sometimes I just want to view it -- I don't always need to download and sav...
Stephen Fry on the iPhone, Bold, Storm, and G1
So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:- 7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard. 1 x Ethernet cable: […]
Vim Plugins You Should Know About, Part I: surround.vim
Hi all. I am starting a new article series called Vim Plugins You Should Know About. As the title suggests, this series is going to be about Vim plugins that you should know about and be using. The first article in this series will be about one of my favorite plugins called surround.vim. So what is surround.vim plugin?
6 Credit Card Processing Facts Nobody Tells You
Well, we’ve solved our latest credit card validation problem and it seems like a good time to give a quick recap of the lessons we’ve learned during this whole sordid process. Things that nobody bothers to tell you, not even the people you’re paying to do just that. This is 2008, but credit card processing is a…
Announcing my free book on Vim
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Feedback Army: website feedback for $7, inspired by HN post
Feedback Army is an incredibly useful little website where you pay $7 for feedback to a given website of yours, and then get back 10 comments. Feedback Army uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the background. You enter the domain in question, say “example.com”, and then ask a bunch of question. Questions could be, “What…
LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer
I’ve earlier performed a little test , comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change…
Review of Intel's New X25M SSD (same one Torvalds has) in a new MacBook Pro
It has almost been a year since I wrote about the future of computing and how I thought that it was all about Solid State Drives (this was before I became infatuated with the cloud). Well I finally got my hands on one. It's Intel's new X25-M 80GB SSD and it is among the fastest consumer-aimed SSDs o
The not to do list: 9 habits to stop now
"Not-to-do" lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.
Elastic Tab Stops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code