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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,098 posts.
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Using /usr/local
Technologist, podcaster, and inventor. Founder of the 5by5 podcast network and Fireside.
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Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
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The Cloud Is Not for You
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The Twitter "Patent Hack"
Yesterday Twitter announced that they plan to amend the assignments agreements that they sign with their employees. They call this proposed amendment the Innovator's Patent Agreement. I've been aware of this effort inside of Twitter for a while and I like to call this move the "Twitter Patent Hack" because I think…
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On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
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Entrepreneurship is hard but you can’t die
I’m posting a series of articles on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make a dent in the universe. Hoping they’ll give you a point of v…
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The 17x17 problem solved
THE 17x17 PROBLEM HAS BEEN SOLVED!!!!! On Nov 30, 2009 I posted here the following challenge: If someone emails me a 4-coloring of...
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Why being broke is the best startup strategy
Why being broke is the best start-up strategy there is. Startups are hard, but not because entrepreneurs don’t have an appetite for hard work. Rather, it’s the constant rejection, the inability to…
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Python for Data Analysis
I recommend using Python for data analysis, and I recommend Wes McKinney's book Python for Data Analysis. I prefer Python to R for mathematical computing because mathematical computing doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's always other stuff to do. I find doing mathematical programming in a general-purpose language is…
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Tim Berners-Lee Confirms The Exact Location Where the Web Was Invented: France
[ Update, Feb 2014. Plaque placed outside room where web was invented.] Success (of sorts)! ARS Electronica have given an award to Tim Berners-Lee and CERN for the invention of the web. They had he…
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SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
About a year ago I built a Chrome extension called SiteChat -- the premise was simple: turn every website into a chatroom. The app was an instant success, and over the following year I watched entire societies emerge and die off inside the bizarre ecosystem that I had created. Genesis and
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Quake 3 Source Code Review
Since I had one week before my next contract I decided to finish my "cycle of id". After Doom , Doom Iphone , Quake1 , Quake2 , Wolfenstein iPhone and Doom3 I decided to read the last codebase I did not review yet: idTech3 the 3D engine that powers Quake III and Quake Live . The engine is mostly an evolution of…
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Responding to Beggars
In the late 70s, a beggar outside Harvard Square station asked for a quarter to take the subway. I gave him one. As I walked down the stairs I noticed that he was not coming along. Instead he was asking another person for a quarter to take the subway. I looked at him for a minute to show him I knew he had lied to me.
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This is the mail system
This is how we tell hundreds of millions of computer users that something has gone wrong:
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