Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Rye and Uv: August Is Harvest Season for Python Packaging
My thoughts on Rye and uv.
Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS
New APIs, capabilities, bugs, and challenges for Safari and PWAs running in iOS 15.4 and iPadOS 15.4, including Web Push Notifications, WebXR
The Apple Watch
After one week wearing an Apple Watch, my big picture thoughts and observations. It all hinges on the Taptic Engine and digital touch communication.
The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling
The following is a transcript of a teaching experiment, using the Socratic method, with a regular third grade class in a suburban elementary school. I present my perspective and views on the session, and on the Socratic method as a teaching tool, following the transcript. The class was conducted on a Friday afternoon…
Bitcoin's fungibility graveyard
Where the pipe-dream of Bitcoin’s real-world fungibility goes to die.
Programming the Z3 SMT solver
Abstract. This tutorial provides a programmer ' s introduction to the Satisfiability Modulo Theories Solver Z3. It describes how to use Z3 through scripts, provided in the Python scripting language, and it describes several of the algorithms underlying the decision procedures within Z3. It aims to broadly cover almost…
The Sad Saga of Purism and the Librem 5
Today I’m going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core…
Lexical differential highlighting instead of syntax highlighting
This type of highlighting is ideal for assembly. With it, the things that shouldn't seem similar usually don't.
What's really wrong with BlackBerry
Just a couple of weeks after Research in Motion turned in a good earnings report, the death watch over the company has resumed, with Busines...
“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
Making Rust binaries smaller by default
Have you ever tried to compile a helloworld Rust program in --release mode? If yes, have you seen its binary size? Suffice to say, it’s not exactly small. Or at least it wasn’t small until recently. This post details how I found about the issue and my attempt to fix it in Cargo.
Writing a GPT-4 script to check Wikipedia for the first unused acronym
Curious what the first ‘unused’ alphabetic acronym is, I have GPT-4 write a script to check English Wikipedia. After three bugs, the first unused one turns out as of 2023-09-29 to be the three-letter acronym ‘CQK’, with another 2.6k TLA unused, and 393k four-letter acronyms unused. Exploratory analysis suggests…
The Nerd Handbook
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That's the nerd working on his project in his hea
Against Essential and Accidental Complexity
In the classic 1986 essay, No Silver Bullet , Fred Brooks argued that there is, in some sense, not that much that can be done to improve programmer productivity. His line of reasoning is that programming tasks contain a core of essential/conceptual 1 complexity that's fundamentally not amenable to attack by any…
How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
So you know the first 6 rules. You’ve maneuvered through the initial offer conversation, you’ve lined up counteroffers from other companies, and now it’s time to move into the actual negotiating. N...
I'm a phony. Are you?
pho·ny also pho·ney (fō'nē) adj. pho·ni·er, pho·ni·est 1. a. Not genuine or ...
I was wrong, we need crypto
To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the…
To Know If the Election Was Hacked, Look at the Ballots
You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical…
Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
macOS Internals Deep Dive Building a Development Kernel Collection Configuring our Mac to boot the Development Kernel Collection Putting our machine to work! When did Apple grace us with this feature? Undoing our work for OS updates Closing Thoughts
The Actual OSI Model
I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that…
Better Models: Worse Tools
About an aggravating tool-calling regression in newer Claude models.