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My Left Kidney
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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. 6,985 posts.
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If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Why Language-Oriented Programming? Why Racket?
Beautiful Racket
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Retiring Python as a Teaching Language
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009)
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
3159
Working Off-Grid Efficiently
For the first 3 years we tested the limits of our space, and at first, it was difficult to create new things, as we had to make time to learn how to solve the underlying problems. Our boat was not just an office, it was also our house and transport. As for us, we were artists, but also had to be plumbers, deckhands…
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I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
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There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe
I recently worked on the update to the ASP.NET site, now in beta at ...
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What do you mean by “Event-Driven”?
Some notes on the different patterns that may be present when people talk about event-driven architectures.
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Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life
Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the…
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The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
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Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
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Storage for Photographers
There comes a time in every photographer's life when they must ask themselves what to do about all those photo RAWs filling up the tiny-compared-to-spinning-platters SSD on their primary machine.
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Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell
What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company that favored…
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Wage Stagnation
[Epistemic status: I am basing this on widely-accepted published research, but I can’t guarantee I’ve understood the research right or managed to emphasize/believe the right people. Som…
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Understanding Git
Git is quickly becoming one of the most popular version control systems in use. There are plenty of tutorials on Git already. How is this one different?
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Aaron Swartz: What Happens in The Dark Knight
As we’ve discussed, in Batman Begins 1960s-style full employment and antipoverty programs lead to skyrocketing crime while in The Dark Knight Rises 1980s-style tough-on-crime policies and neoliberal economics lead to a revolt of the economic underclass. The films are mirror images, one about the failure of liberal…
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The 100:10:1 method: my approach to open source
For many years I was whole hog into the open-source movement and at the time I rarely wrote a stitch of code in my free time that didn’t find itself in a public Sourceforge/GCode/Github repo. 1 However, over time I came to learn that the burden that came with publicly offering code to the universe, to put it mildly…
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Global Intelligence Crisis
A Thought Exercise in Financial History, from the Future
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Algorithmic Solution to My Insomnia
I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels…
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7-Zip: Multiple Memory Corruptions via RAR and ZIP
Blog about anti-virus software vulnerabilities.
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The Melancholy of Subculture Society (2019)
Internet links small groups, helping dissolve big groups; good, bad? But a bit sad.
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Better Compression with Zstandard
I think I first heard about the Zstandard compression algorithm at a Mercurial developer sprint in 2015. At one end of a large table a few people were uttering expletives out of sheer excitement. At developer gatherings, that's the universal signal for something is awesome . Long story short, a Facebook engineer…