New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,466 posts.
The Best Free and Open Source Data Mining Software
The process of extracting patterns from data is called data mining. It is recognized as an essential tool by modern business since it is ab...
Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)
(en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We…
Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
Over the years I have spent a lot of time brainstorming startup ideas with people who are (asymptotically) as nerdy as me. For some reasons, every time I brainstorm with a new set of people, the following ideas come up. This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems…
Thank HN: Design for Hackers
Last week, I signed a contract to publish Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty with John Wiley & Sons. I still have plenty of work left to get this book onto shelves – and to exist at all – but I’m extremely excited about it, and wanted to share the news with everyone, especially visitors coming
Notation And Thinking
Does notation shape our thinking? Kenneth Iverson was a mathematician who is most famous for designing APL. This was the name of his programming language, and it cleverly stood for “A Program…
Ruby 2.0 Refinements in Practice
First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby
Systems Programmers Relax - Most Programming Advice Isn't For You
I'm an incredibly slow programmer (in the hobby projects I do for the love of it, that is). My ratio of thinking to typing must be around 10...
How to Draw An Owl
One interpretation of the image and caption is that it reinforces how some folks perceive the progression from novice to expert: Stage 1: You suck. Stage 2: You're an expert. In fact, masterin…
How Obama Raised $60 Million by Running a Simple Experiment
Fundraising dinners are a great way to raise money. But how can you raise money if no one has heard of you and all you have is a website?
Introducing Google Earth 6—the next generation of realism
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap.
Once again, there’s been another story about how Google is having trouble retaining talent. Despite all Eric Schmidt’s attempts to tell folks that Google’s regretted attrition rate has not changed in seven years, this story just doesn’t want to seem to die. (And those stories about Google paying $3.5 million and $7…
Lisp compiler in 89 lines of Python
Tim Lopez published an elegant and tiny LISP interpreter for Python on his blog. Inspired by Norvig’s Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. I developed an interpreter as well as a…
Lisp interpreter in 90 lines of C++
I've enjoyed reading Peter Norvig's recent articles on Lisp. He implements a Scheme interpreter in 90 lines of Python in the first , and dev...