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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,400 posts.
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Cheap Beer and the Psychology of PlayStation Now Pricing
Sony just launched its PlayStation Now service that lets you rent access to streaming games. The pricing seems a bit odd to some, but it actually uses some well established psychological tricks to …
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Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA
Recent news headlines have made a big deal of Apple encrypting more of the storage on their handsets, and claiming to not have a key. Depend...
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How the Z80's registers are implemented
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
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On the Computational Complexity of MapReduce
I recently wrapped up a fun paper with my coauthors Ben Fish, Adam Lelkes, Lev Reyzin, and Gyorgy Turan in which we analyzed the computational complexity of a model of the popular MapReduce framework. Check out the preprint on the arXiv. Update: this paper is now published in the proceedings of DISC2015. As usual I’ll…
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Naive Bayes and Text Classification I – Introduction and Theory
Naive Bayes classifiers, a family of classifiers that are based on the popular Bayes’ probability theorem, are known for creating simple yet well performing…
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Some ideas for native Bitcoin apps
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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Why can't Apple decrypt your iPhone?
Last week I wrote about Apple’s new default encryption policy for iOS 8. Since that piece was intended for general audiences I mostly avoided technical detail. But since some folks (and appar…
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Haskell, Monads and Purity
I believe the notion that Haskell uses “monads” to enforce purity is rather misleading. It has certainly caused quite a bit of confusion! It’s very much like saying we use “rings to do arithmetic”. We don’t! We use numbers, which just happen to form a ring with arithmetic operations. The important idea is the number …
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Accidental release of 45L of polio virus solution into the environment – Belgium
See the latest news and media contact details
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The Man Who Smuggles Trader Joe’s into Canada
Michael "Pirate Joe" Hallatt and his unmarked white van are Canada's number-one supplier of Trader Joe's items. And, so far, Trader Joe's hasn't been able to stop him.
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Refactoring Ruby with Monads
Hello! I’m going to tell you about monads, and how we can uncover them by refactoring our Ruby code.
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The Magic CmdLine and how I got it back
What am I running inside my bash?
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Aboard Amtrak
For some months, Amtrak was my home. It began simply somewhat unintentionally. A friend was getting married in Spokane, Washington, I was in New York, and the 45 day Amtrak pass was cheaper than rent.
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Reading the Silk Road configuration
Many of us believe it wasn't the FBI who discovered the hidden Silk Road server, but the NSA (or other intelligence organization). We believ...
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We Got Accepted into Techstars and Turned Them Down
Yes, we were accepted into one of the nation’s most prestigious accelerator programs and turned them down. So are we crazy? Let us know in the comments.
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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac
Co-managed IT supplements an overextended internal team with specialized expertise, enterprise-grade tools, and overflow capacity without the massive overhead of hiring additional full-time personnel. Mid-market
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Three months at Y Combinator: what it’s like and how to get in
Take a look into Front’s Journey to get into Y Combinator.
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HFT in my backyard – III
INTRO Last Friday evening, I received a tip via telephone, “You should go to the Houtem tower tomorrow morning. Jump may work on the network.” Unfortunately I couldn’t make it back to Houtem. But i…
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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Re: MemSQL the “world's fastest database”? (2012)
On 6/25/12 10:23 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote: > Craig James <cjames@emolecules.com> wrote: > >> It claims to be "the world's …
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