Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
A sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing.
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1). I am not…
This guide is mainly intended for expert programmers familiar with Java concurrency, but unfamiliar with the memory order modes available in JDK 9 provided by VarHandles. Mostly, it focuses on how to think about modes when developing parallel software. Feel free to first read the Summary .
I show how I built a mini startup called Hoodmaps in public from the first line of code to a functioning web app that I got to the frontpage of Reddit with ove…
This blog post compares deep learning to the brain and derives an estimate of computational power for the brain which is used to predict the singularity.
The previous article Docker in Production: A History of Failure was quite a hit. After long discussions, hundreds of feedbacks, thousands of comments, meetings with various individuals and major pl…
Richard Serra? Carlota Fay Schoolman? Steve Atkins? Tom Johnson? Claire Wolfe? Andrew Lewis? blue_beetle? Tim O’Reilly?
Last time I reviewed various security keys at a fairly superficial level: basic function, physical characteristics etc. This post considers lower-level behaviour.
Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it d…
It's difficult to get the Windows Console to display Unicode characters, so here's a C++ WinForms program that will display the arguments in a TextBox.
Albert Einstein? Al-Anon? Narcotics Anonymous? Max Nordau? George Bernard Shaw? Samuel Beckett? George A. Kelly? Rita Mae Brown? John Larroquette? Jessie Potter? Werner Erhard?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
This is the first post in a series about JIT compilers. The plan is to take a simple input language and develop some interpreters and JITs for it, in roughtly increasing degree of complexity. It's my hope that by the end of the series readers will have a good understanding of what it takes to develop a JIT compiler…
HTTP Public Key Pinning is a very powerful standard that allows a host to instruct a browser to only accept certain public keys when communicating with it for a given period of time. Whilst HPKP can offer a lot of protection, it can also cause a lot of harm too.
For today’s post, I’ve drawn material not just from one paper, but from five! The subject matter is ‘word2vec’ – the work of Mikolov et al. at Google on efficient vect…
In a previous article I demonstrated video filtering with C and a unix pipeline . Thanks to the ubiquitous support for the ridiculously simple Netpbm formats — specifically the “Portable PixMap” ( .ppm , P6 ) binary format — it’s trivial to parse and produce image data in any language without image libraries. Video…
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
An empirical study on the correctness of formally verified distributed systems Fonseca et al., EuroSys’17 “Is your distributed system bug free?” “I formally verified it!R…
An analysis of which stories are removed from the front page of Hacker News due to moderator intervention.
It is time for tech companies to start speaking up about some of the actions taken by President Trump’s administration. There are many actions from his first week that are objectionable. In...
Catalonia, with Barcelona as its capital, is currently one of Spain’s seventeen autonomous comunities. It has a long story of pro-independence movements, and has even declared itself independent in the past. Nowadays, the political climate is very heated up. A majority of catalan people want to hold a referendum for…
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
We've all heard how expensive college is getting, along with plenty of criticism surrounding its value in a changing job market. Of course, there are many benefits beyond the monetary ones that should be considered when exploring college options, but for the purpose of this post I'm going to limit the scope and purely…
Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules. Let this pledge be duly noted on the permanent record of the Internet. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but I’ll be finding out soon enough, and I plan
