Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 2,668 posts.

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2644

Hiring Is Obsolete (2005)

May 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.) The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?…

2656

On Covering Webcams

The problem isn’t your camera, it’s malware. Don’t install any software from unknown or sketchy sources, keep your OS up to date, and you should be fine. And if you do have malware on your Mac, the webcam is likely the least of your problems.

2664

Rails is omakase (DHH)

There are lots of à la carte software environments in this world. Places where in order to eat, you must first carefully look over the menu of options to order exactly what you want. I want this for my ORM, I want that for my template language, and let's finish it off with this routing library. Of course, you're going…

2668

Gell-Mann Amnesia

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so…