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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,905 posts.
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"Another World" (game) Code Review
I spent two weeks reading and reverse engineering further the source code of Another World ("Out Of This World" in North America). I based my work on Gregory Montoir's "binary to C++" initial reverse engineering from the DOS executable. I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting…
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The unfortunate math behind consulting companies
Hiring even one person creates a lot less profit than you'd think, and launching a product rarely works out. Here are some tips for consulting companies.
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I Want To Unsubscribe, Not "Manage My Preferences"
The best 25 books I’ve read since the last time I did one of these book roundups way back in 2024.
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Neil Gaiman: Why defend freedom of icky speech?
This is a bit long. Apologies. I'd meant to talk about other things, but I started writing a reply this morning to the letter that follows...
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Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
I first heard about The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python at PyCodeConf a few months ago. It's a fantastic idea: open source, community-driven documentation on how to do Python right: everything from how to learn Python, to how to write idiomatic code, to how to distribute your projects, to surveys of best-of-breed open…
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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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Krugman on BitCoin
Digital, but still a barbarous relic.
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Iran forged the wrong SSL certificate
If you want to be really evil, however, *.google.com is the wrong SSL certificate to forge. The right one? ssl.google-analytics.com .
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Cringley: Japan may have just permanently lost 20% of its electricity supply
There’s a 40 year-old nuclear reactor cooling-down right now in Japan following the big earthquake in that country. Actually there are 11 such reactors cooling-down, automatically brought offline by the 8.9 temblor, but one of those reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi generating plant is not going gracefully and 3000…
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Angry Bird’s “overnight success” only took 8 years.
by Paul Hontz
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Siri meets Eliza
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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Writing Vim Plugins
A while ago I wrote a post about switching back to Vim . Since then I've written two plugins for Vim, one of which has been officially "released".
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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser
Longtime Readers of this blog will be aware that I have been a fan of Mozilla for a long time. There’s nearly ten years of Mozilla advocacy tucked away in the JWM archives. I’ve been on the Mozilla fanboy train since before Firefox even existed — all the way back to the original Mozilla Suite’s Milestone 17 release…
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Redis: Zero to Master in 30 minutes
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
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Goodbye Basecamp, This Is The End
I am not angry, this is just the end of a love story, and i want to say goodbye.
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Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive
Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “ dickbar ” and often abandoning the…
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I Can Crack Your App With Just A Shell (And How To Stop Me)
Hi, I'm Kenneth. I’m a Swiss transplant in San Francisco. I’m an angel investor, and an engineer at AngelList & CSC. Previously, I was co-founder of FreshPay and the architect behind Chartboost. When I'm not working, you can find me either photographing some remote corner of the world, or hacking away on an…
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What's In A GIF
We sill start off by walking though the different parts of a GIF file. (The information on this page is primarily drawn from the W3C GIF89a specification .) A GIF file is made up of a bunch of different "blocks" of data. The following diagram shows all of the different types of blocks and where they belong in the…
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How can C Programs be so Reliable?
C is, today, a unique programming language. Surprisingly few people can really program in C and yet many of us have quite strong opinions about it. Buffer overflows, stack smashing, integer overflows — C has many well publicised flaws, and these terms are often bandied about confidently, even by those unfamiliar with…
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How to replace 30 laptops (and $10,000) with 150 sheets of paper
There’s a provincial general election here in Prince Edward Island on October 3 this fall, and over the past month here at Reinvented we’ve been ramping up the technology side of the Elections PEI operation as planning and preparation for the election is now in full swing.
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GoDaddy's New "Selective DNS Blackouts" Policy
Now that GoDaddy is a near monopoly (larger than the next 8 closest registrar competitors combined 1 ), and just got bought out on July 1, 2011 2 , they have decided they can defy the sacred. Customers be damned.