The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 568 posts.
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your…
There's an old joke, so old that I don't even know for certain where it originated, that's often used to …
So I've spent much of the last couple of days remotely debugging this insane suspend failure (or to be exact, resume failure) that happens ...
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new…
Tipjoy is different in a few ways. - We don't mandate branding in the tweet. You can just use 'p'. - We don't take a cut per tip, unlike their $0.05. That's 20% overhead on a $0.25 payment, which is high. - We allow cash out. People receiving money in Twitpay currently can't cash out. We're hoping to enable this…
A perennial problem for my wife and I run into while bootstrapping our business is the lack of time. It seems like the daily grind of cooking, cleaning and shopping tends to eat up most of our available time that we have.
The official home of the Python Programming Language
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In this series I will detail what I found out empirically about how mochiweb performs with lots of open connections, and show how to build a comet application using mochiweb, where each mochiweb connection is registered with a router which dispatches messages to various users. We end up with a working application that…
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
Again and again we fall back on the folklore of the principles of good design. Sometimes I need a URI for them so this is started as collection of them. I have written about some in many places. Principles such as simplicity and modularity are the stuff of software engineering; decentralization and tolerance are the…
If you’re a college student applying for jobs or summer internships, you’re at something of a disadvantage when it comes to negotiation. That’s because the recruiter does these negotiations for a l…
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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…
Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here's the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computi
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don’t people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market’s transaction…
