Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
I’ve been listening to the excellent Season 2 of the podcast Startup , which gives an inside look at YCombinator startup The Dating Ring (NYT coverage here ). The episodes are all great. They talk about many important topics, but I had some specific comments on fundraising for dating products .
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
RabbitMQ is a distributed message queue, and is probably the most popular open-source implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol. It supports a wealth of durability, routing, and fanout strategies, and combines excellent documentation with well-designed protocol extensions. I’d like to set all these wonderful…
I began with inanimate objects living in a world of forces, and I gave them desires, autonomy, and the ability to take action according to a system of
Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Microsoft Corp. is slated to release a software update on Tuesday to fix an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows . Those sources say Microsoft has quietly shipped a patch for the bug to branches of the U.S…
UPDATE: Just to make this explicitly clear: I did not write this program. The fourth sentence makes this fairly clear, but some comments indicate that some people are a bit lazy :). I also added a video of the rush to the bottom.
Telegram, the encrypted messaging app loved by terrorists, has been in the news lately. Terrorists have long used existing commercial and…
We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.
(update 26-Aug-2020: the MSVC team has recently added C11language support to their roadmap, hooray!)
WG21 has a strict schedule (see P1000) by which we ship the standard every three years. We don’t delay it. Around this time of each cycle, we regularly get questions about “but why so strict?”, esp…
New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
Security is both very important and often under-emphasized. While many targeted techniques help, there are some basic clean code habits which every developer can and should be doing
GPT4-V is the new mode of GPT-4 that allows you to upload images as part of your conversations. It’s absolutely brilliant. It also provides a whole new set of vectors …
In response to the call for blogs about the vision for Rust for 2020, I’m going to write about GUI. I believe the time is right for a native GUI toolkit written in Rust, and that such a thing would fill a very important niche. There is a demand for performance (which, to me, includes startup time, RAM footprint, and…
The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete tha…
The command line tools that ship with any Unix-like system are extremely handy for many data tasks. Here are some of the ones that I've found most useful.
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk on file safety with a mobile-friendly non-bloated format .
A small CSS library to make browser defaults more consistent
UPDATE: This article has started an ongoing conversation with the Godot devs. They care about the issues raised, and would like to improve things. Significant improvements will almost certainly be made, although it’s still early days and it’s unclear what will change and by how much. I am encouraged by the response. I…
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
Toast was my first published short story collection. It's now effectively out of print — there was going to be a limited, signed, "final" edition, but I haven't seen hide nor hair of it for a year or two now — so I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons license.
