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The Logic of “Stupid” Poor People
We hates us some poor people. First, they insist on being poor when it is so easy to not be poor. They do things like buy expensive designer belts and $2500 luxury handbags. To be fair, this isn…
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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Fast and easy Levenshtein distance using a trie (2011)
<img src="http://stevehanov.ca/blog/images/acer.jpg"/> If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In…
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.2.3 reconfiguration
In the previous Jepsen analysis of RethinkDB , we tested single-document reads, writes, and conditional writes, under network partitions and process pauses. RethinkDB did not exhibit any nonlinearizable histories in those tests. However, testing with more aggressive failure modes, on both 2.1.5 and 2.2.3, has…
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The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
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On Hyperloop
Dr. Drang (And now it's all this)2013167 points203 commentscited by 6Society, Policy & Culture details
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Throne of JS: Eight JavaScript MV* Libraries Compared
Steve Sanderson's Blog
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Blowing holes in Seymour Hersh’s pipe dream
OSINT & Analysis by Oliver Alexander2023165 points633 commentscited by 6Society, Policy & Culture details
On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.
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The Fallacy of Cracking Contests (1998)
In this issue: The Fallacy of Cracking Contests How to Recognize Plaintext News The Doghouse: Iomega Zip Disks Counterpane Systems News Final Report from the Commerce Department Technical Advisory Committee on Key Recovery Comments From Readers About "CRYPTO-GRAM"
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Steve Yegge and Grok
Bryan Summersett's home page.
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The true power of regular expressions (2012)
As someone who frequents the PHP tag on StackOverflow I pretty often see questions about how to parse some particular aspect of HTML using regular expressions. A common reply to such a question is:
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Everything Is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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Programming with RISC-V Vector Instructions
Perhaps the most interesting part of the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) is the vector extension (RISC-V "V"). In contrast to the average single-instruction multipe-data (SIMD) instruction set, RISC-V vector instructions are vector length agnostic (VLA). Thus, a RISC-V "V" CPU is flexible in choosing a…
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Lou's Pseudo 3D Page (2013)
Previous update: An explanation of 3d projection mathematics (under Road Basics) and analysis of Activision's Enduro (under Case Studies)! Thanks to everyone for all the e-mail! Keep it coming :) Sorry, I can't answer questions about when I'll post source code, but I'm always happy to answer anything else about these…
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Dark corners of Unicode
I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…
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What happens when DNS in China is poisoned and pointed at your server
I’ve been using the Internet in one form or another since the mid-80’s. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff happening on our global network. On Tuesday, I experienced something extraordinary. It all started with a text message from my partner Ged at 8:30 AM: Mail server down. Please take a look […]
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Ship / Show / Ask: A modern branching strategy
Ship/Show/Ask is a branching strategy that helps teams wait less and ship more, without losing out on feedback.
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X Window System Basics (2014)
Since this article contains a lot of interactive demos relying on fairly modern browser technology, let's make sure that everything is OK before continuing.
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Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted
The default timer resolution on Windows is 15.6 ms – a timer interrupt 64 times a second. When programs increase the timer frequency they increase power consumption and harm battery life. They also…
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Microsoft Open Sources .NET and Mono
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
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Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016)
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
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Rails and Merb Merge
Today is a fairly momentous day in the history of Ruby web frameworks. You will probably find the news I’m about to share with you fairly shocking, but I will attempt to explain the situation. Before talking tech, and even going into the details of the announcement, I want
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I am a puts debuggerer
Update (2023-06-28): Added “I required a file, but I want to know what files were actually loaded” I love puts debugging I am a puts debuggerer. I don’t say this to disparage people that use a Real Debugger. I think Real Debuggers are great, I’ve just never taken the time to learn one well. Every time I try to lean…
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“CEO said a thing” journalism
"CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.
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Shrink Go binaries 7x with this one weird trick
Ok, I lied, there’s no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools.
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EU Cyber Resilience Act: What does it mean for open source?
The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now officially available, and various open source voices are currently opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states…
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics