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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,400 posts.
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Goodbye Academia
I have enjoyed research and teaching for the last twelve years. Yet, I have resigned from my postdoctoral position at MIT a week ago, givin...
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Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa
I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or...
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Downloading Software Safely Is Nearly Impossible
Let’s say you have a brand-new Windows laptop and you’re just oh, so happy. You’re pretty sure the NSA did not interdict it during shipment , and thus that it comes only with the flaky goatware Microsoft, Lenovo, and any number of Lenovo’s business partners intended for it to have. Now all you need is an SSH client so…
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Dear Google, am I pregnant?
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
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The programming error that cost Mt. Gox 2609 Bitcoins
In October 2011, Mt Gox lost over 2609 bitcoins by accidentally creating transactions that can never be redeemed. (At the time, 2609 bitcoin...
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The myth of the fall
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
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New partition function record: p(10^20) computed
The partition function p ( n ) counts the number of partitions of n , i.e. the number of ways n can be written as a sum of positive integers when disregarding the order of the terms. For example, 4 has the five distinct partitions 4, 3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+1+1+1, so p (4) = 5. This week, I set a new record by computing…
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Laying Out iOS UIs in Code
Software Engineer in New York specializing in Apple platforms
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Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface
Right now, people are burying Windows 8. Even people you'd normally expect to be on Microsoft's side are unhappy with it. Me, though? I kind of like it.
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Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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Creating a New Business Model for Cartoonists
TL;DR - I spent five years earning a side income by drawing and selling cartoons to magazines, mostly of various animals in business suits. I found the cartooning industry to be old-fashioned and inefficient. So I’m building a product to disrupt the industry and help cartoonists make more
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Why Can’t Programmers... Program?
I was incredulous when I read this observation from Reginald Braithwaite: Like me, the author is having trouble with the fact that 199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can’t write code at all. I repeat: they can’t write any code whatsoever. The author he’s
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Ten Years of Coding Horror
In 2007, I was offered $120,000 to buy this blog outright. I was sorely tempted, because that’s a lot of money. I had to think about it for a week. Ultimately I decided that my blog was an integral part of who I was, and who I eventually
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