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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever
A trip deep into a retrocomputing jungle.
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U.S. Tech Funding – What’s Going On?
What’s going on in the public markets? What are all these so-called “unicorns”? What’s going on in venture capital? “This time is different.” It is different. Because it’s always different… And one big reason is mobile.
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A Constructive Look at TempleOS
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
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Study: Some car models consuming around 50% more fuel than official results
New cars, including the Mercedes A, C and E class, BMW 5 series and Peugeot 308, are now swallowing around 50% more fuel than their lab test results, new…
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Microsoft's new foldable keyboard
The latest news and stories about how technology is helping people around the world solve problems, innovate and do more each day.
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OS X Reviewed
Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote my first review of Mac OS X for a nascent “ PC enthusiast’s " website called Ars Technica . Last fall, I wrote my last . Though Apple will presumably announce the next major version of OS X at WWDC this coming June , I won’t be reviewing it for Ars Technica or any other publication…
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Ruling from USPTO Invalidates All Claims Used to Threaten Podcasters
San Francisco - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) invalidated key claims in the so-called “podcasting patent” today after a petition for review from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—a decision that significantly curtails the ability of a patent troll to threaten podcasters big...
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Goodbye, Sourceforge
This page used to be a rant about SourceForge's shady practices around circa 2015, along with some basic comparison of other hosting services.
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“I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon”
Last Saturday, I read the 6,000-word New York Times piece, “Inside Amazon,” in the car on my way to the beach. I sat quietly in the front…
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Why I Quit OS X – Geoff Wozniak
After nearly 10 years of using OS X as my primary OS for personal work, I switched away in late 2014. I consider it to be the best tech decision I made last year.
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Apple has lost the functional high ground
Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with embarrassing bugs and fundamental…
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Files Are Hard
I haven't used a desktop email client in years. None of them could handle the volume of email I get without at least occasionally corrupting my mailbox. Pine, Eudora, and outlook have all corrupted my inbox, forcing me to restore from backup. How is it that desktop mail clients are less reliable than gmail, even…
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After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6
Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.
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Best things and stuff of 2015
Great things and people that I discovered, learned, read, met, etc. in 2015. No particular ordering is implied. Not everything is new.
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What happens if you remove randomness from Doom?
For some reason, recently I have been thinking about Doom. This evening I was wanting to explore some behaviour in an old version of Doom and to do so, I hex-edited the binary and replaced the random number lookup table with static values.
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Just doesn’t feel good
I’ve pulled Peace from the App Store. I’m sorry to all of my fans and customers who bought this on my name, expecting it to be supported for longer than two days. It’ll keep working for a long time if you already have it, but with no updates.
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What happens when you stop relying on resumes
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I’ve come to rely quite heavily on data. I’ve counted typos on resumes, I’ve sifted through a corpus of engineering offers, and I’ve skimmed thousands of recruiting messages to tag them by personalization level. This post, however, is going to be a bit of […]
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Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014
Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually.
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Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
If you attempt this project, your classmates will think you're a nerd. You'll likely wind up getting your head flushed and/or balls greased.
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Focus by Firefox, a Content Blocker for iOS
Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of Focus by Firefox, a free content blocker for Safari users on iOS 9 that gives users greater control of their mobile Web ...
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What is the best hard drive?
Check out the latest Hard Drive Stats. It was one year ago that I first blogged about the failure rates of specific models of hard drives, so now is a
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1/999999999999999999999998999999999999999999999999
Divide the number 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,998,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 into 1 and express the result as a decimal expansion, and you’ll find the Fibonacci sequence presented in tidy 24-digit strings: (Thanks, David.)
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Do the math on your stock options
Things you should know about stock options before negotiating an offer
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YC for Hardware
As YC has grown, we’ve funded more and more hardware companies. Hardware companies have very different needs from pure software companies, and we’re delighted to announce a number of new resources for YC hardware companies. First, there are a number of new deals for our hardware startups–across-the-board discounts &…
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Choosing an HTTP Status Code
What could be simpler than returning HTTP status codes? Did the page render? Great, return 200. Does the page not exist? That’s a 404. Do I...