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Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code
Some people can sell their ideas with a brilliant speech or a slick powerpoint presentation. I can't. Maybe that's why I'm skeptical of idea...
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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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
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Open source confronts its midlife crisis
Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown: the kids that were such a fresh adventure when they were infants and toddlers are now grappling with their own transition into adulthood – and you try to…
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DataLake
A Data Lake is a store that hold raw data as a source for data scientists to explore ways to gain information. It should not be accessed by end-users or used for system integration.
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Malthusianisms
(See also: Umeshisms, Anthropicisms) Why, in real life, do we ever encounter hard instances of NP-complete problems? Because if it’s too easy to find a 10,000-mile TSP tour, we ask for a 9,0…
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Hands-Free Coding (2020)
Earlier this year, I lost the ability to use a keyboard and mouse for extended periods. Fortunately, this wasn't as catastrophic as it sounds! This article chronicles my experience using adaptive tools like dictation and eye-tracking as my primary mechanisms for writing code.
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Qubes-Lite with KVM and Wayland
I've been running QubesOS as my main desktop since 2015. It provides good security, by running applications in different Xen VMs. However, it is also …
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Understanding Neural Networks Through Deep Visualization
Research portfolio and personal page for Jason Yosinski
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Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
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Three-Valued Logic
Making decision despite missing SQL data (NULL): How to avoid OR…IS NULL in the WHERE clause.
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The case against geometric algebra (2024)
Every once in a while the internet gets talking about Geometric Algebra (henceforth GA) and how it’s a new theory of math that fixes everything that’s wrong with linear algebra and multivariable calculus. When I come across this stance I am compelled to respond with something like: “wait wait, it’s not true! GA is…
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Quasi-Polynomial Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism
Update (Dec. 14): The long wait is over! Here’s Laci’s paper on the arXiv. So far, I’ve read it only deeply enough to note that it contains the following sentence: A group G ≤ S…
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XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way
One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack.
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Mail from the (Velvet) Cybercrime Underground
Over the past six months, “fans” of this Web site and its author have shown their affection in some curious ways. One called in a phony hostage situation that resulted in a dozen heavily armed police surrounding my home . Another opened a $20,000 new line of credit in my name. Others sent more than $1,000 in bogus…
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Memory Reordering Caught in the Act
When writing lock-free code in C or C++, one must often take special care to enforce correct memory ordering. Otherwise, surprising things can happen. Intel lists several such …
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Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax
A discussion of how Sorbet's type syntax came to be, the problems it solves, and how it could improve.
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Shell Has a Forth-Like Quality
This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
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Pretty State Machine Patterns in Rust (2016)
A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.
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A better merge workflow with Jujutsu
A merge workflow for activating multiple branches simultaneously using Jujutsu, an alternative VCS to Git.
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An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable"
The talk I released today is called " Media for Thinking the Unthinkable ". It's the most personal talk I've given, in that it was driven by my own motivations as opposed to someone else's.
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Non-Lexical Lifetimes in Rust
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting my free time to fleshing out the theory behind non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good point and I plan to write various posts talking about it. Before getting into the details, though, I wanted to start out with a post that lays out roughly how…
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Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?
What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?
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Starlink is a big deal
Part of my series countering misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. Starlink, SpaceX’s plan to serve internet via tens of thousands of satellites, is a staple in the…
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Modular Errors in Rust
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole: