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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49,191 posts.
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Why do so many brands change their logos and look like everyone else?
Tech and fashion logos are becoming increasingly similar, all of them using sans serif fonts. Why do they do that? And why it doesn't make sense.
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Purposeful animations
Why you are animating more often than you should.
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Write Your Own Virtual Machine
In this tutorial, I will teach you how to write your own virtual machine (VM) that can run assembly language programs, such as my friend’s 2048 or my Roguelike . If you know how to program, but would like to gain a deeper understanding of what is going on inside a computer and better understand how programming…
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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
Best case: we're in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they're doing.
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Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code
Despite what I said in April , I'm still using coding assistants on my personal projects.
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Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data
Reading a book on a Kindle sends Amazon a lot of data about reading habits. How fast pages are turned, font sizes and views, and device details.
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Goodbye, Twilio
As of this week and after almost four years, I'm not a Twilio employee anymore. I'm writing this while I work through a range of conflicting emotions, and try to adapt to new daily routines without…
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AI didn't delete your database, you did
Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent deleted his company's production database. We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent:
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Handling cookies is a minefield
Discrepancies in how browsers and libraries handle HTTP cookies, and the problems caused by such things.
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Career Development: What It Means to Be a Manager, Director, or VP (2015)
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of big-company HR practices. I’m more of the First Break all the Rules type. Despite my general skepticism of many standard practices, we still do annual performance reviews at my company, though I’m thinking seriously of dropping
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Windows 7 patch for Meltdown enabled arbitrary reads and writes in kernel memory
Did you think Meltdown was bad? Unprivileged applications being able to read kernel memory at speeds possibly as high as megabytes per seco...
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Can't you just turn up the volume?
When Alex and I were pitching SoundFocus as an app that helped people with hearing loss, this was often…
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An Unreasonable Amount of Time
A method for magic.
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On incels, dead bedrooms and the hard problems of loneliness
My father’s father was by all accounts a really bitter-hearted sort of person.
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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
The global memory crunch and the great repricing of consumer electronics
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How I write software with LLMs
Lately I’ve gotten heavily back into making stuff, and it’s mostly because of LLMs. I thought that I liked programming, but it turned out that what I like was making things, and programming was just one way to do that. Since LLMs have become good at programming, I’ve been using them to make stuff nonstop, and it’s…
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Reasons not to use Uber
Uber donated a million dollars to the corrupter's inaugural celebration. This is the moral equivalent of a bribe.
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Encrypted email is still a pain
Today I sent an email to somebody who specified that he "prefers GPG mail". I didn't have any GPG set up, so I just sent a normal email, which worked perfectly well. But it made me look in to GPG, and this is what I learnt...
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A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago
I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me. If you (or your team) are shooting…
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