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Things I wish someone had told me before I started angel investing
Back in 2005 I suddenly found myself sitting on a big pile of money after the Google IPO so I did what any young nouveau-riche high-tech dil...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,813 posts.
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Practical SQL for Data Analysis
What you can do without Pandas
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The gold standard of optimization: A look under the hood of RollerCoaster Tycoon
Due to some lucky circumstances, I recently had the chance to appear in one of the biggest German gaming podcasts, Stay Forever, to talk about the technology of RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999). It was …
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017
Center for the Study of the Public Domain2017602 points135 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1960 The books To Kill a Mockingbird and Rabbit, Run, the films The Magnificent Seven and The Time Machine, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s…
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XOR
Recently I was called on to explain the ‘XOR’ operator to somebody who vaguely knew of its existence, but didn’t have a good intuition for what it was useful for and how it behaved.
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AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing
How to fix jaggies the analytical way with some juicy secrets
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The deception of “buying” digital movies
World of Matthew is a personal website, like few others. Not just a blog but also provides reviews and video content
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The rise of E Ink Tablets and Note Takers: reMarkable 2 vs Onyx Boox Note Air
There's something happening in the E Ink space, somewhat quietly, but ...
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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams
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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric
This is a story that started back in 2022, but I think its a perfect time to reflect on the impact that it has had on my friend group still to this day. Update (2/7/2025): I'm genuinely blown away by the response to this post. This hit the
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Facebook proven to negatively impact mental health
New study first to establish causal link between use of the platform and reported worsening in anxiety and depression among college students
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Disconnect. Offline only
Disconnection can be good.
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Reptar
We have a CPU mystery! We found a way to cause some processors to enter a glitch state where the normal rules don’t apply, but what does that mean…?
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Secret Documents Show Pepsi and Walmart Colluded to Raise Food Prices
The Trump FTC tried to hide a complaint showing Pepsi forced shoppers to pay higher prices everywhere but Walmart. But now it's unsealed. And the politics of affordability are explosive.
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`COPY –chmod` reduced the size of my container image by 35%
Earlier this week, I was writing a Dockerfile to download and run a binary when I noticed the image size was way more than what I would expect. I’m using ubuntu:21.10 as the base image, which is about 70MB. The binary I’m running is about 80MB. Other packages I’m installing would add 10-ish MB. But the image size is…
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Postgres Full-Text Search: A search engine in a database
With Postgres, you don't need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution. If you haven't yet given Postgres' built-in full-text search a try, read on for a simple intro.
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Why does a spray bottle work?
Exploring a simple machine I took apart a simple spray bottle to see how it kept fluid flowing only in one direction from the reservoir to the nozzle. It does so with simple check valves made of two pieces of plastic, a spring, and a small sphere. It’s a simple way to solve a tricky problem. A simple spray bottle One…
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No boundaries for Facebook data: third-party trackers abuse Facebook Login
by Steven Englehardt [0], Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan So far in the No boundaries series, we’ve uncovered how web trackers exfiltrate identifying information from web pages, browser password managers, and form inputs. Today we report yet another type of surreptitious data collection by third-party scripts that we…
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An animated introduction to Fourier series
This article will be part of an extensive series in which I plan to explore various aspects of Fourier Mathematics. I will take notes, create some visuals (a good pretext to learn more about graphics), and hope that it will be helpful to anyone looking for a clear, visual introduction to these concepts. The article…
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On Leaving Facebook
After 8.5 years at Facebook I joined a small startup called Replit. Leaving wasn't easy, and during the process I've talked to half a dozen friends who were ...
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A CTO should be technical
Why engineering leaders also need to be great engineers.
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Google is forcing us to make our open source VoIP app worse
Instead of checking the open source code, Google makes assumptions about our use of contacts in the Voys App, with dire consequences.
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.