Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 817 posts.
When You’re Hot, You’re Hot: Career Successes Come in Clusters
Bursts of brilliance happen for almost everyone. Explore the “hot streaks” of thousands of directors, artists and scientists in our graphic.
Why not program right?
(Originally published on CACM blog.) Most of the world programs in a very strange way. Strange to me. I usually hear the reverse question: people ask us, the Eiffel community, to explain why we program our way. I hardly understand the question, because the only mystery is how anyone can even program in any other …
Proposition C
Read the latest news and information from Stripe, including corporate and product announcements, research reports, brand assets, and more.
Peak Valley?
The Economist has a cover story this week called Peak Valley. The article suggests that Silicon Valley’s lead as a hub for innovation has peaked and other regions are rising. It ends with the concern that innovation more broadly has peaked. I somewhat agree with “the rise of elsewhere” narrative and disagree that…
Twitter Killing Its Mac App
Holy smokes: For the full Twitter experience on Mac, visit Twitter on web. ???? https://t.co/fuPJa3nVky — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 16, 2018 I’m glad Twitter got rid of all of the Nazis and Russian bots on their platform before this.
How Amazon Can Blow Up Asset Management
Amazon’s home page is arguably the most valuable real estate in the world. What happens if that page offers an ASSET MANAGEMENT tab?
Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...
The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige
There is an unhealthy desire for prestige and money that is ruining people's lives. At the end of all the striving, you might end up feeling empty inside. The desire for prestige and money is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education despite it being free, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we
Apple’s New Ad Conversion Tracking Will Benefit User Privacy
Apple has released new developer APIs that will allow mobile advertising conversion tracking while protecting individual user privacy. The new APIs are part of the StoreKit framework and include a …
How Much Does a Compiler Cost?
The compiler tool chain is one of the largest and most complex components of any system, and increasingly will be based on open source code, either GCC or LLVM. On a Linux system only the operating system kernel and browser will have more lines of code. For a commercial system, the compiler has to be completely…
CEBIT Hanover to be cancelled
Die HANNOVER MESSE ist die Weltleitmesse der produzierenden Industrie. Sie verbindet Produktionssicht und Produktsicht, Marktvergleich und Systemverständnis, technologische Innovation und industrielle Umsetzung. Auf der HANNOVER MESSE erleben Sie zukunftsweisende Technologien live: Von autonomen ...
Very Good Security
“Never answer an anonymous letter” —Yogi Berra Did you ever wonder why doctor offices ask for your social security number? They don’t want to keep your SSN, but it’s the primary “key” that identifies you to an insurance company. In computer science/math terms, they need to call a function. Let’s call it: int…
The European Commission versus Android
Examining the history of Android explains why the European Commission may be right to fine Google for its actions around Android, even as the reasoning feels off.
Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t
The American Community Survey collects data on the college majors of people who’ve graduated college. This excellent data has lots of untapped potential for family research, because it tells …
Telltale Autopsy
So Telltale Games is out of business. Like most of the rest of the industry – including the employees of Telltale – I had no idea this was coming. I looked at the popularity of their breakout hit The Walking Dead and the overall quality of some of their earlier adventure game offerings and just assumed this was a…
Where Yegge’s Wrong
Recently, Steve Yegge published two rants, each of which has gone viral and moved the Internet conversation needle a bit. I liked both of them, thought they were generally well-argued and useful. Unfortunately, there are a few assertions of fact there that are just wrong, and may be damaging. So I thought that, first…
In the Works – AWS Region in Milan, Italy
Late last month I announced that we are working on an AWS Region in South Africa. Today I would like to let you know that we are also building an AWS Region in Italy and plan to open it up in early 2020. Milan in 2020 The upcoming Europe (Milan) Region will have three Availability […]
AI Nationalism
For the past 9 months I have been presenting versions of this talk to AI researchers, investors, politicians and policy makers. I felt it was time to share these ideas with a wider audience. Thanks to the Ditchley conference on Machine Learning in 2017 for giving me a fantastic platform to get ear