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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 378 posts.
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Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?) . Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to…
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Ken and Roberta (2011)
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
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Why are amplitudes complex?
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
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Google Memory Loss
[Update: As of Jan 1, 2023 this is fixed! Thanks to Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google for figuring out what was going on. Yay!] I think Google has stopped indexing the older parts of the Web. I think I can prove it. Google’s competition is doing better. [Update, Feb. 2022: It’s still happening.]
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AI winter is well on its way
Deep learning has been at the forefront of the so called AI revolution for quite a few years now, and many people had believed that it is the silver bullet that will take us to
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Why I Ripped the Same CD 300 Times
I collect music by buying physical CDs, digitizing them with Exact Audio Copy , and scanning the artwork. This is sometimes challenging if the CD was self-published in a limited run in a foreign country ten years ago. It is very challenging if the CDs have an innate defect that renders some tracks unreadable.
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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change
It is surprisingly difficult to find realistic, interesting and creative privacy case studies. It is perhaps even more difficult in the case of major software. There are no proper motivations for making this kind of work public (employees often paid to do some kind of work in-house; their compensation
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Useful Mental Models (2016)
These are some mental models I find useful. They’re rooted in decades of experience of thousands of experts – a modern equivalent of folk wisdom. Mental models are useful to quickly and correctly reason about seemingly intractable problems. They require quite a bit of intuition to properly internalize, but once you’ve…
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Why Skylake CPUs Are Sometimes 50% Slower
I got a call that on newer hardware some performance regression tests have become slower. Not a big deal. Usually it is a bad configuration somewhere in Windows or some BIOS settings were set to no…
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Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status
By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it …
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HTTP-over-QUIC will officially become HTTP/3
The protocol that's been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3. This was triggered by this original suggestion by Mark Nottingham. The QUIC Working Group in the IETF works on creating the QUIC transport protocol. QUIC is a TCP replacement done over UDP…
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On generative algorithms
An illustrated essay on generative algorithms written by Anders Hoff.
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The Elements of UI Engineering
What makes UI engineering difficult?
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Where Vim Came From
Tracing the long lineage of software that brought us Vim.
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Inheritance Often Doesn't Make Sense
There are three different types of inheritance going on. Ontological inheritance is about specialisation: this thing is a specific variety of that thing (a football is a sphere and it has this radius) Abstract data type inheritance is about substitution: this thing behaves in all the ways that thing does and has this…
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Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot
I recently posted a blog post about a new hash table, and whenever I do something like that, I learn at least one new thing from my comments. In my last comment section Rich Geldreich talks about h…
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Not Lisp again (2009)
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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A new fast hash table in response to Google’s new fast hash table
Hi, I wrote my new favorite hash table. This came about because last year I wrote the fastest hash table (I still make that claim) and this year one of the organizers of the C++Now conference asked…
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Embedded in Rust: Brave new I/O
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff