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VC isn't VC anymore
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 80,902 posts.
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Facebook is not worth $33 billion
Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…
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Solar
I spent some time (in Fall 2023) reading about solar deployment. Some facts that struck me:
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The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)
A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.
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Quitting my job has been the best thing I've done for my career
This post is not meant to be prescriptive. It’s also not intended to be another “Quitting Google to pursue my passion for X” article because, well, I haven’t been able to pass the interview there yet. This is a telling of my story that I hope will inspire those who are thinking about quitting to take the leap.
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Getting things “done” in large tech companies
What does it mean to get things done? In the abstract, you can complete a mathematical proof or a problem set, but the real world is much fuzzier. Suppose I…
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Making it clear when we're on a call with you to protect you from fraud
If someone calls you claiming to be from Monzo, you can now check to see if they’re telling the truth or not in the Monzo app.
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Important Coding Habits
The most important coding habits are those that enable us to enjoy this craft for years to come. Here are tips for programming without pain.
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What a good debugger can do
When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…
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Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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Heisenberg Developers (2014)
TL:DR You can not observe a developer without altering their behavior. First a story. Several years ago I worked on a largish project...
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How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
Instagram's guiding principles and tech stack explained simply
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Clojure Design Patterns
Disclaimer: Most patterns are easy to implement because we use dynamic typing, functional programming and, of course, Clojure. Some of them look wrong and ugly. It’s okay. All characters are fake, coincidences are accidental.
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Computers are fast
Computers are *fast*!
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Cloud Run GPUs, now GA, makes running AI workloads easier for everyone
Support for GPUs in Cloud Run makes running GPU-accelerated applications simpler, faster, and more cost-effective, as well as enabling new use cases.
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How RSS beat Microsoft
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
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Unified versus Split Diff
Which is better for code reviews, a unified diff or a split diff?
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Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company
Exploring how agents become multipliers, not replacers.
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Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel
Back in August of 2019 I had a Sing-Along Week contest on RetroBattlestations with the challenge of playing a MIDI file synchronized to a speech synthesizer singing the lyrics. In my stash of cards I found an MQX-32M MIDI card (Roland MPU-401 clone) which I wanted to use for converting MIDI signals to interface to an…
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Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js
I typically start new front-end prototypes with a single HTML file that I view using a file:// URL. I enjoy this practice of incrementally growing my projects, so I’ll keep working in that single file for as long as I can. Once it becomes unwieldy, I’ll split out the CSS and JavaScript into dedicated files. Then when…
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Insects don't swarm at LED lights
Remember when you used to encounter swarms of insects around outdoor electric lights? Their well known attraction to outdoor lights is used by entomologists and moth lovers to conduct insect surveys. All you need is a light and a white sheet to see who’s flying at night.
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The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a…
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Introducing Shadow DOM API
We’re pleased to announce that basic support for the new slot-based shadow DOM API is now available in the nightly builds.
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An introverts guide to increasing energy
As an introvert, learning how to recharge, protect, and increase your energy is vital to taking care of yourself. Learn how!
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I’m leaving Redis for SolidQueue
Rails 8 eliminates Redis from the default stack. Learn how SolidQueue, SolidCache, and SolidCable replace Redis for job processing, caching, and real-time updates—powered entirely by PostgreSQL. Explore the true cost of Redis, how SolidQueue works, when it scales, and how to migrate from Sidekiq to a simpler…