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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,470 posts.
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Htop Explained Visually
htop is a great tool but lacks good documentation. This article takes a visual and simple approach to explaining htop.
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Interesting data structures: the BK-tree
A BK-tree is a tree data structure specialized to index data in a metric space . A metric space is essentially a set of objects which we equip with a distance function $d(a, b)$ for every pair of elements $(a, b)$. This distance function must satisfy a set of axioms in order to ensure it’s well-behaved. The exact…
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The Sound of Silence
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was. There's too...
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MP3 for Image Compression (2006)
During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always…
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Working with time in Postgres
A massive amount of reporting queries, whether really intensive data analysis, or just basic insights into your business involving looking at data over a certain time period. Postgres has really rich support for dealing with time out of the box, something that’s often very underweighted when dealing with a database…
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Unlearning descriptive statistics
If you've ever used an arithmetic mean, a Pearson correlation or a standard deviation to describe a dataset, I'm writing this for you. Better numbers exist to summarize location, association and spread: numbers that are easier to interpret and that don't act up with wonky data and outliers.
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What's Functional Programming All About?
There are many descriptions floating around the internet, trying to explain functional programming in simple terms. Unfortunately, most discuss details only loosely related to functional programming, while others focus on topics that are completely irrelevant. So of course, I had to write my own!
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How to Write a Git Commit Message (2014)
Commit messages matter. Here's how to write them well.
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Twice as happy customers means half the marketing spend
Halving your cancel rate doubles the number of customers your business has. Even if you run a subscription business forever, you will not have infinite customers. Instead you reach a steady-state number.
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Hard-won lessons: Five years with Node.js
After five years working with Node.js, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve already shared a few stories, but this time I wanted to focus on the ones I learned the hard way. Bugs, challenges, surprises, and...
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The Reality of Developer Burnout
Burnout is, unfortunately, a very real phenomenon in software development — especially when creating and maintaining open source projects with large numbers...
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Equifax Breach Fallout: Your Salary History
In May, KrebsOnSecurity broke a story about lax security at a payroll division of big-three credit bureau Equifax that let identity thieves access personal and financial data on an unknown number of Americans. Incredibly, this same division makes it simple to access detailed salary and employment history on a large…
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Id Software Programming Principles
id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company inthis GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towar...
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APFS is not safe to use with names which have Unicode normalisation issues
APFS is not currently safe to use with names which might have Unicode normalisation issues – which means it is only safe with a limited ASCII character set.
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The AI Misinformation Epidemic
Interest in machine learning may be at an all-time high. Per Google Trends, people are searching for machine learning nearly five times as often as five years ago. And at the University of California San Diego (UCSD),
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Unicode is hard
In the last couple of months, I've been seeing the ú symbol on British receipts. Why? 1963 - ASCII In the beginning* was ASCII. A standard way for computers to exchange text. ASCII was originally designed with 7 bits - that means 128 possible symbols. That ought to be enough for everyone, right? Wrong! ASCII is the…
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Elixir in Depth – Reading and personal notes
Elixir is a hot and trendy topic nowadays. Of the newer languages that show up periodically on Hacker News, I found t...
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Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails
Most of the funding of research efforts I've been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies -- Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the…
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The end of the level playing field
I am old enough to remember the gogo days of cable TV when entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a new cable channel would go, hat in hand and cap table in tow, to the big cable companies and beg to get distribution on their networks. When the Internet came along in the early 90s, we […]
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Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want…
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The Art of Writing One-Sentence Product Descriptions
A look back at early interviews with Facebook and Uber CEOs illustrates an ingenious way to communicate hard-to-describe products.
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Learning from Scratch by Thinking Fast and Slow
Reinforcement Learning
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Going for the 5 hour workday
Update: it's been a month since my proposal was approved - details at the end. Before my month long vacation I was in a crisis. Now I'm back at work and regardless of the great team and awesome project - I'm feeling the crisis creeping back. It's not the job,
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Instead of containers, give me strong config and deploy primitives
A modest proposal