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The brain's 5-million core, 9 Hz computer
Weekly essays on biology, philosophy and other topics.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,717 posts.
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Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – The Startup Genome Project
In April 2010 I received an email that said, “I’m an incoming Stanford student in the fall and working on a project that a number of people suggested I get in touch with you about.̶…
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Why I’m Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin
These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had...
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Speeding up Rails startup time
In which I provide easy instructions to try a new patch that drastically improves the start up time of Ruby applications, in the hope that with wide support it will be merged into the upcoming 1.9.3 release. Skip to the bottom for instructions, or keep reading for the narrative.
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How Javascript Prototypal Inheritance Really works
Everywhere on the web we read that Javascript has prototypal inheritance. However Javascript only provides by default a specific case of prototypal inheritance with the new operator. Therefore, most of the explanations are really confusing to read. This article aims to clarify what is prototypal inheritance and how to…
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How to handle 1000s of concurrent users on a 360MB VPS
There has been some recent confusion about how much memory you need in a web server to handle a huge number of concurrent requests. I also made a performance claim on the STS list that got me an unusual number of private emails.
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Ideas Matter
The idea is the seed. It is the kernel that is the start of something new. Ideas are powerful because they invade the mind. Once you are introduced to an idea, you cannot get it out of your…
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It’s OK to make an extra $2k per month if you’re a programmer. Here’s how.
This quote, which went viral 2 months ago and that Steinbeck probably never said, has stuck with me:
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Screw Hashbangs: Building the Ultimate Infinite Scroll
I’m just a student in a field unrelated to computer science , but I’ve been coding for years as a hobby. So, when I saw the current state of infinite scroll , I thought perhaps I could do something to improve it. I’d like to share what I came up with.
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Why should anyone ever use a Google API again?
By Adam Feldman, APIs Product Manager UPDATE June 3: In the days since we announced the deprecation of the Translate API, we’ve seen the ...
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Microsoft makes 5 times more income from Android than from Windows Phone
Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning. Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a p…
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On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
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Going Paper-Free for $220
It's 2011. Personal computers have been around and popular for well over a decade now, and yet we still have to deal with a huge amount of physical paper.
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Coming soon: make your phone your wallet
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
1731
Wield Python's super() like a Jedi
If you aren’t wowed by Python’s super() builtin, chances are you don’t really know what it is capable of doing or how to use it effectively. Much has been written about super() and much of that wri…
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C'mon, stop writing Java for Android
Stop writing Java for your Android apps! There are a slew of ways to build...
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Don't give bullshit advice
I chatted with a young guy last night about his new startup idea. He’s got a vision for a social commerce app with a few cool spins on it. As I listened to him, I was thinking about how I had heard this exact pitch half a dozen times before. I also knew I had a lot to offer him in terms of help. I have a good friend…