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Do Not Start A Startup: Or, What I Learned At Startup School 2011
Home page for Andy Brett
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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Goliath: Non-blocking, Ruby 1.9 Web Server
There are easily half a dozen of factors you need to consider when picking an app server: the choice of the VM, implementation model, performance and memory usage, driver and library availability, community support, and so forth. In other words, it is a complex set of requirements, and no one solution is likely to…
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Apple actually lost in Dutch court, not the opposite
OK. So here the short form of what happened in the dutch court today. Apple has LOST all claims wrt design and copyright.
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Pdf.js: Rendering PDF with HTML5 and JavaScript
Update: I updated the links again. pdf.js has moved to a new location on github. Why? While traveling to the Firefox 4 launch parties in Seoul and Taipei all the way from California, we killed a lo…
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Simple Questions for Google Regarding Chrome’s Dropping of H.264
Why not drop H.264 support from Android and YouTube, too?
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Why Windows 8 Is Fundamentally Flawed as a Response to the iPad
You can’t make something conceptually lightweight if it’s carrying 25 years of Windows baggage.
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Is there a new geek anti-intellectualism?
This essay can be read in my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Perhaps ironically, it is no longer free. UPDATE: I've posted a very long set of replies. UPDATE 2: I've decided to reply below as well--very belatedly...
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The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped
In an essay titled "The Capacitive Button Cult Must Be Stopped" , Jon Bell writes:
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Designing command-line interfaces
There are few articles on the design of command-line interfaces (CLIs), even if plenty of articles on designing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) exist. This article is an attempt at presenting some of the most important guidelines for CLI design.
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How The FCC Plans To Destroy GPS – A Simple Explanation
Exploring the world of free tools for GIS, GPS, Google Earth, neogeography, and more.
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Matrix multiplication in O(n^2.373)
For twenty years, the fastest known algorithm to multiply two n-by-n matrices, due to Coppersmith and Winograd, took a leisurely O(n2.376) steps. Last year, though, in his PhD thesis, Andrew Stot…
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Git can't be made consistent
This post complains about Git lacking eventual consistency. I have a little secret for you: Git can't be made to have eventual consistency. Everybody seems to think the problem is a technical one, of complexity vs. simplicity of implementation. They're wrong. The problem is semantics. Git follows…
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How to Become a Must-Have
Most real startups don’t grow like this: Instead, most successful startups grow like this: Those initial loops are unsuccessful attempts to create a product people want to use. The problem is those…
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"A JVM Does What?"
Cliff Click gave a very good talk at Google last week. For your viewing enjoyment: The slides are available here . (For those who watched i...
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Getting Steve Jobs Wrong
On Malcolm Gladwell’s argument that Jobs was a “tweaker” and not a “large-scale innovator”.
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Why I Sold My Startup to Google
Shortly after the sale closed, John Cook interviewed me about the experience. He did a great job of transcribing all of my verbal gems, like “Maybe that is an economic way of looking at it, or something that I am unfamiliar with.” I’m not even sure what that means. It was the best I could muster in the middle of a…
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Repairing Corrupted ZIP Files by Brute Force Scanning in C
My brother is a wonderful photographer , and took 14 gigabytes of photos at my recent graduation from Columbia, some of which I hope to post on PhotoFloat -- my web 2.0 photo gallery done right via static JSON & dynamic javascript .
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Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine
This paper appeared in Communications of the ACM in April 1960. It is the original paper on Lisp.
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How Apple Works
Who takes over for Steve Jobs? 1 John Gruber recently posted his argument for thinking it will be COO Tim Cook. The biggest point in Cook’s favor is simple: “He’s already run the company while Jobs has been on leave.” That’s true, but it’s less meaningful than it sounds. But to understand why, you need to understand…
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None of Us Knows What We're Doing
Feross Aboukhadijeh is a computer security researcher, teacher, web developer, designer, long distance runner, gamer, music lover, and builder of websites that (sometimes) go viral.