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  Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit

A few days ago, this video hosted by metacafe popped up on digg, explaining how to increase site download times by tweaking your browser settings to increase connection parallelism. To explain why this works, let’s step back a bit to discuss how browsers manage server connections. In building any application, developers are often required to make ‘utilitarian’ choices. Pretentiously paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, ‘utilitarian’ describes an approach that â...

   HTTP,Concurrent connection limit,Solution,AJAX     2011-12-14 13:01:02

  Hash Tables in Javascript

IntroductionHash tables are a permutation of associative arrays (i.e. name => value pairs). If you use PHP, then you are very familiar with this type of data structure already since all PHP arrays are associative.The Javascript language implements very loose and somewhat limited support for associative arrays. Any JavaScript array can use other objects as keys, making it a hash, but there exists no formal constructor for initializing them and it is more or less unweildy to work with. A short ...

   JavaScript,Hashtable,Implementation,Array     2011-11-26 02:43:40

  A Clash of Titans Between Elon Musk and Larry Page over AGI's Future

Artificial General Intelligence(AGI) has long been a topic of fascination and concern for technology leaders, with some seeing it as humanity's ultimate tool, while others view it as an existential threat. This clash of perspectives was on full display during the acquisition of DeepMind by Google in 2014, as two tech titans, Elon Musk and Larry Page, found themselves on opposite sides of the debate. While Page saw AGI as a necessary and desirable step in humanity's evolution, Musk was more wary ...

   AI,LARRY PAGE,ELON MUSK,AGI     2023-04-30 11:13:53

  In praise of impractical programming

Although it’s become a cultural mainstay now, I still remember when I first saw that thick book — the one with the wizard on the cover — about a school for magic where wonders are easily conjured by those who know the proper spells. Of course, I’m talking about the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. There was that other book with the spells, but the “Wizard Book” sincerely claimed to teach magic. For the past few years, I’ve been ...

   Impractical Programming,Structure,Scheme,Practical     2011-12-05 12:28:58

  How I Learned to Program Computers

I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, especially after I built YouTube Instant. So, here’s the answer, once and for all, for those who are interested.In short:I learned how to program by building lots of websites.The full story:I learned how to program by working on lots of different website projects starting from a pretty young age. What follows is a full account of all the major websites I’ve built, back to the very first site I made when I was 11 years old. Wha...

   Programming,Computer,Tips,Feross Aboukhadijeh     2011-10-17 10:25:32

  PHP Sucks! But I Like It!

I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It's been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it's rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture. A Few Mistakes The post makes quite a few mistakes and odd apples to oranges comparisons. Let me point out the major ones that I saw. No Debugger - PHP has xdebug which works quite...

   PHP,Bad design,Like     2012-04-12 06:15:42

  How To Build A Site That Looks Great On Every Screen

The responsive design revolution is upon us. With tablet and smartphone use soaring and changing our media habits, Web publishers no longer have a choice but to build designs that work properly on any device or screen size.The hard-working Silicon Valley design firm ZURB has recently released version 2.0 of its responsive design boilerplate kit called Foundation, which is a fundamental framework for a one-size-fits all Web project.Foundation is a CSS and Javascript framework that comes with...

   Website,Design,Device,Screen,Adaptable,Mobile     2011-10-31 10:46:32

  5 Signs of a Great User Experience

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook. In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many ...

   Usef interface,Standard,Good UI,Criteria     2012-01-30 05:51:35

  Why I Quit My Job to Start a Tech Company

Back in November of 2006, before NY Mag and TimeOut put startups on the cover, before the “tech bubble”, before Twitter and Foursquare were popular, before working at a startup in NY was considered a reasonable thing to do, I was a private equity investor for a $1.6 billion fund called Quadrangle Group. It was just my third year out of college and I made a little over $250,000. For a Brazilian immigrant who spent most of his childhood kind of worried he would have to do physica...

   Start,Company,Creative,Innovation,Techno     2011-08-16 08:38:35

  RAM is the new disk...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation...

   RAM,Flash,Memory,,Future,Disk     2011-08-12 07:34:27