Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,905 posts.
Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
How to forcibly eject a CD/DVD from a MacBook Air USB SuperDrive
So you've got a DVD stuck in the external USB SuperDrive that connects to the MacBook Air? And you've tried hitting the magic Eject button ...
Jonathan's Card shut down
Get a coffee, give a coffee - Jonathan's Card
Bitcoin is not decentralized
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the primary client is developed by a bunch of folks at bitcoin.org . Do you care who these people are? In theory, you shouldn’t: all they do is develop an open source client for an open source protocol. Anyone else can develop their own client (and some people have) and no…
The Next Bubble - Don't Get Fooled Again
My friend, Ben Horowitz, and I debate the tech bubble in The Economist. This post originally appeared as part 1 of 3 ———————————…
Dear Yahoo, hire me as your next CEO
News is going around that Yahoo! is looking for a new CEO . I have no idea if this is true or not, but if it is, I would like to announce that I’m ready, willing, and insane enough to go long and go big with Yahoo! as your new CEO. Yahoo! showed glimmers of hope when it bought Flickr and Delicious. It’s been a bastion…
Kay on the Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming"
Dr. Alan Kay explains when "object-oriented" was first used and what it means. []
There is no such thing as a CEO of pre-product startup. Get off of it.
Just chatted with an entrepreneur that has gotten himself into a bit of trouble. When he started his company, all of his cofounders took C titles. He was CEO, his best friend and co-founder was CTO, and their marketing friend became CMO. That was 2 years ago.
SQLAlchemy and You
The Django ORM feels so much easier than SQLAlchemy? Maybe this article can change your perception.
Objective-C Blocks vs. C++0x Lambdas: Fight
Blocks are perhaps the most significant new language feature introduced by Apple in years, and I've written a lot about them before. The new C++ standard, C++0x, introduces lambdas, a similar feature. Today, I want to discuss the two features and how they are alike and how they differ, a topic suggested by David…
JavaScript Trie Performance Analysis
After my last post discussing dictionary lookups in JavaScript the unanimous consensus seemed to be that utilizing Trie would result in additional space savings and yield performance benefits.
Smaller than Bloom filters
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
Obliterate Startup Depression
One of my favorite parts of the startup community is that we generally all acknowledge that we’re not playing a zero sum game. We create value by creating new markets and disrupting old, inefficient markets. Sure, we compete against each other as well, but in general, the communal spirit of entrepreneurship is a…
CSS background image hacks
Emulating background image crop, background image opacity, background transforms, and improved background positioning. A few hacks relying on CSS pseudo-elements to emulate features unavailable or not yet widely supported by modern browsers.
The Python Paradox is now the Scala Paradox
Paul Graham has written a bunch of good essays on entrepreneurship, laying down much of the philosophy behind Y Combinator . If you’ve not read any of them yet, you should go and read them now – they contain lots of wisdom.
Plutonium is Forever
I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I
Apple’s Magnum Opus
It’s been a few days now since Apple’s epic WWDC keynote, I have been sick everyday since that keynote so I have been passively following all the reactions from my RSS reader. Here̵…