Daniel Lemire is a software performance expert. He ranks among the top 2% of scientists globally (Stanford/Elsevier 2025) and is one of GitHub's top 1000 most followed developers.
Visit lemire.me → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2014 – Sep 2026
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As a kid, my parents would open the television set, and we would get to watch whatever the state television decided we would watch. It was a push model. Some experts pick the content you need and they deliver it to you. You have little say in the matter. There was one newspaper in my … Continue reading Stop spending…
I envy economists. Unlike computer scientists, they seem to be able to publish best-seller books with innovative research. One such book is Piketty's Capital. The book is reminiscent of Marx's capital in its scope. If you haven't heard about the book yet, it has a simple message: the yield on capital is higher than…
In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We face a major replication crisis where important results in fields such as psychology and…
The concept of property is a social construction. Animals, such as cats, can own a piece of food, or a territory, but only as long as they are able to personally maintain a credible threat of violence. And animals can only defend concrete, physical properties, such as an area, a dead bird or a tree. … Continue reading…
I have previously reported that there has been a silent revolution in science where countries like China, India, South Korea... that previously contributed few research articles... have started to catch up and even exceed the productivity of the western world. The National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US has…
The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast. Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is … Continue reading Why speed matters
There is a widely reported threat to our economy: robots are going to replace human workers. It is nothing new... In 1930, Keynes, the famous economist introduced the term "technological unemployment"... We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they…
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives like the Dvorak keyboard. However, this appears to be largely a myth backed by dubious science. There is the similarly often repeated story of … Continue…