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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
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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Trust but Verify
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that…
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Trampolines in JavaScript
A trampoline is a loop that iteratively invokes thunk -returning functions ( continuation-passing style ). A single trampoline is sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so expressed is trampolined, or in trampolined style; converting a program to trampolined style is trampolining…
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Is Extended Random a Malicious NSA Plot?
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
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Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
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What is a Full Stack developer? (2012)
Is it reasonable to expect mere mortals to have mastery over every facet of the development stack? Probably not, but Facebook can ask for it. I was told at OSCON by a Facebook employee that they only hire 'Full Stack' developers. Well, what does that mean? To me, a Full Stack Developer is someone with
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How the Canadian Tech Scene Encourages Finite Gameplay
Toronto is not the next great startup scene. Neither is Waterloo, or Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada. I’m sorry that I have to write this. I really am. I want it to work. But the growing cho…
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TreeMaker: Origami Design Software
In 1989, I wrote an article for the magazine Engineering & Science about the state of technical folding, which, even then, seemed to be progressing by leaps and bounds due to an infusion of scientific and mathematical principles. In recounting some of the connections between origami, math, and technology, I wrote:
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How to implement a programming language in JavaScript
This is a tutorial on how to implement a programming language. If you ever wrote an interpreter or a compiler, then there is probably nothing new for you here. But, if you're using regexps to “parse” anything that looks like a programming language, then please read at least the section on parsing . Let's write less…
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Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)
A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
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Debugging in Vim
Vim 8.1 was released in May 2018. The “main new feature” was official support for running a terminal within vim. Along with this came a built-in debugger plugin, termdebug, which provid…
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Inflation is differential and restructuring (2021)
When it comes to inflation, economists get it wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere differential.
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My Resignation from Freenode
As it is now known, the freenode IRC network has been taken over by a Trumpian wannabe korean royalty bitcoins millionaire. To make a long story short, the former freenode head of staff secretly "sold" the network to this person even if it was not hers to sell, and our lawyers have advised us that there is not much…
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Modern garbage collection: Part 2
A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do
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Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go
Supervisor trees are one of the core ingredients in Erlang's reliability and let it crash philosophy . A well-structured Erlang program is broken into multiple independent pieces that communicate via messages, and when a piece crashes, the supervisor of that piece automatically restarts it.
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Unlocking LUKS2 Volumes with TPM2, FIDO2, PKCS#11 Security HW on Systemd 248
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
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You could have invented Parser Combinators
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
3952
A Statistical Analysis of All Hacker News Submissions
After downloading all 1,265,114 Hacker News submissions from the official Hacker News API, I gathered a few interesting statistics which show the true impact of Hacker News.
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How AI text watermarking works
A gentle visual guide to how a statistical mark hides inside generated text, and what erases it.
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Personhood: A Game for Two or More Players
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray
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Merlin Mann: Better
Merlin's essay on the web, attention, and the virtues of trying a little bit harder.
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