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Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon
Here are my raw notes from the keynote. Update: PG posted this talk in essay form. It’s not much longer than my notes; you should probably read that instead. big startup ideas are actually t…
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Apple ignores bug report
Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games. This problem was new; it was introduced with the iOS 4.2.1 update and wasn't present on older iOS versions.
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The Magazine
Introducing The Magazine : a modern iOS Newsstand publication for geeks like us that’s loosely about technology, but also gives tech writers a venue to explore other topics that like-minded geeks might find interesting.
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If you were involved in the OpenGL ES specification, you are an idiot
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
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Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago
I’ve used MongoDB for over a year at scale at both Heyzap and Bugsnag and I’ve found it to be a very capable database. As with all databases, there are some gotchas, and here is a summary of the things I wish someone had told me earlier.
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Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
I frequently see a problem when people (especially techies) try to teach programming to someone (especially non-techies). Many programming tutorials begin with basic programming principles: variables, loops, data types. This is both an obvious way to teach programming and almost certainly a wrong way to teach…
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart p…
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Making Love to Webkit
If the world is going to end in 2012, Acko.net will at least go out in style: I've redesigned.
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A Tor of the Dark Web
Tell me if you’ve been in this situation: you’re chatting about online anonymity with your wife and the other Knight-Mozilla Fellows over a pizza in Florence. A quiet-spoken stranger who had been sitting across the room walks up to your table and says “are you all here for the Tor hackathon?” You respond “why yes, yes…
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Google+ Hacker News Circle makes Search plus Your World Amazing
When Google+ first launched, I hustled my way to get an early invite so that I could grope the shiny UI touches like circles, and oogle the sexy tech features like Hangouts, but up until now, I...
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Why does that QR Code go to justinsomnia.org?
Back in 2007 I stumbled upon something called a QR Code . It was a neat two-dimensional barcode that encodes textual information visually—with URLs being a promising application for the emerging smartphone market (thanks to the release of the iPhone that year). So I did what any self-respecting personal blogger would…
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PHP Addiction
I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive.