The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,717 posts.
Getting a startup off the ground takes time, talent, and money. Time can be stolen from various parts of your life with some determination and prioritization. Talent can be eventually learned or acquired with cofounders. Money’s different. You can do a lot of things to reduce the need for money, but it usually takes…
As many of you already know I am publishing my monthly income reports each month. Here is another one that will sum up the August 2011. As I have discovered some new methods to make your applicatio…
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]
Development based on the sharing and collaborative improvement of software source code has a history essentially as long as software development itself. In the late 1990s, interest and participatio…
In the 14 years since we started Netflix, we’ve gained more than 25 million customers worldwide by providing the best DVD by mail service anywhere. Along the
I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language…
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
I have found that the two biggest causes of having to fire an employee at an early stage startup are a lack of culture fit, and the inability to Get Shit Done. I don't care how smart someone is - if they are unable to work hard and crank out a large amount of high quality work, they will weigh down your startup.
For those of you that know me well, you know that I have terrible, horrible insomnia. In high school, I would go to sleep around 3am and then struggle to get up at 6:30 am. I would drink a dozen Mountain Dews everyday just to stay awake. In college, my schedule shifted further so that I was falling asleep around 6am…
I canceled the OnStar subscription on my new GMC vehicle today after receiving an email from the company about their new terms and conditions. While most people, I imagine, would hit the delete button when receiving something as exciting as new terms and conditions, being the nerd sort, I decided to have a personal…
One year, 5 months and four days = 2,000 hours (strange math, but it adds up) of deliberate practice. 2,000 hours spent literally over a ball working on something in my swing/putt and learning how to play golf. 2,000 hours of aha moments, setbacks, mini-triumphs and determination to get better. 2,000 hours of…
Several months ago I decided to bring my startup from Ottawa, Canada and exhibit in Startup Ally at TechCrunch Disrupt. What better place than Disrupt to absorb insight, meet visionaries and explor…
A crit-bit tree can be used as a high-speed associative array. For example, an array mapping 54 to 1, 19 to 2, 99 to 3, 85 to 4, and 88 to 5 can be stored as a crit-bit tree containing 54=1, 19=2, 99=3, 85=4, and 88=5. The smallest string in the crit-bit tree larger than 85= is 85=4.
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Make a boatload of money. Pay your taxes. Lots of taxes. Hire people. Train people. Pay people. Spend money on rent, equipment, services. Pay more taxes.
