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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,784 posts.
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Staying the hell out of insert mode (vi)
Back in the day, the first thing I learnt about vi was how to get into insert mode. It was really quite essential, because without knowing how, you couldn’t actually type anything.
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Steve Yegge's predictions from 2004
Ten Predictions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Update, September 2015: I saw the HN thread about Dan Luu's review of this post, and felt people were a little too generous with the scoring. So I'll offer my own scores and justifications here. 1) XML databases will surpass relational databases in
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The Python GIL Visualized
In preparation for my upcoming PyCON'2010 talk on "Understanding the Python GIL", I've been working on a variety of new material--including some graphical visualization of the GIL behavior described in my earlier talk . I'm still experimenting, but check it out.
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How To Pitch A Product
I’ve said a bunch of times on this blog that the perfect pitch is a very short intro to provide context followed immediately by a demo. Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, John Britton of our portfolio company Twilio showed how it is done. If you do a lot of pitches, spend the six […]
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Write your passwords down
Here's my advice on password security based on the collected opinions of others: 1. Write them down and keep them in your wallet because you...
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19 days later, Apple still hasn't approved the Opera Mini app
The latest news about Opera web browsers, tech trends, internet tips.
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10% unemployment yet every startup in NYC struggling to hire
Managing Director in Lazard's Media, Entertainment & Sports Group. Former CEO of Future Plc, founder of Cheddar News, and President & COO of BuzzFeed.
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Tim Bray doesn't know operator precedence rules
I was watching engineers argue, someone was bitching about a code reviewer asking him to put more parentheses in a conditional: “As if I don’t know the precedence rules!” I don’t know them, as a matter of principle.
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Criminal Overengineering
A vast proportion of software at work today is horribly over-engineered for its task. And I’m not talking about the interfaces, about having too many controls or options for the users. These …
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Now that you have turned 22 can I please give you some advice...
I come across a lot of advice daily, but there was one piece of advice that stuck out to me recently. This is what not to do in life.
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Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS
Have you ever wanted to get more out of your home network, like adding a NAS, without ponying up for expensive hard drives with Ethernet built-in, Time Capsules, Drobos or the like? While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard drive or printer on the network, they are c
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Threads (in Ruby): Enough Already
For a while now, the Ruby community has become enamored in the latest new hotness, evented programming and Node.js. It's gone so far that I've heard a number of prominent Rubyists saying that JavaScript and Node.js are the only sane way to handle a number of
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A HTTP Proxy Server in 20 Lines of node.js Code
This is just amazing. In 20 lines of node.js code and 10 minutes of time I was able to write a HTTP proxy. Take a look: var http = require('http'); http.createServer(function(request, response) { var proxy = http.createClient(80, request.headers['host']) var proxy_request =...
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Sun's path June to December (Photo)
Last June I placed some photographic film into a tin cannister with a small hole punched into its side. The tin cannister was then attached to a clothes pole in my backgarden and left.
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Rotating Quine
My Quines are sometimes specialized for Japanese. But to attend RubyConf, I should write "global" Quines. v=0000;eval$s=%q~d=%!^Lcf<LK8, ...
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Tab Candy: Mozilla Labs is making Firefox tabs sweet
If you're using a modern web browser, chances are you've got a few tabs open at the same time. Most certainly, there are too many of them. Is fine because
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Why I don't write about programming and why it's not really worthwhile to do so
In a recent Stack Overflow podcast episode , Joel Spolsky mentioned that he’s probably going to formally end his popular Joel on Software blog next month.
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Traffic Experiments -- How to clear traffic jams
Once upon a time, years ago, I was driving through a number of stop/go traffic waves on SR 520 at rush hour in Seattle. I decided to try something. On a day when I immediately started hitting the usual "waves" of stopped cars, I decided to drive smoothly. Rather than repeatedly rushing ahead with everyone else, only…
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Apple forces users to pay full price to redownload already bought ebooks
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Mensch -- A coding font
The latest MacOS release (10.6, or “Snow Leopard”) comes with a new monospace font. It’s called “Menlo” and it’s a slightly modified form of the standard Linux font (with appropriately weightly Linux name) “DejaVu Sans Serif Mono”, which is itself an updated form of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Apple’s modifications are…