4021
Stay Gold, America
We are at an unprecedented point in American history.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
4022
Everything you never wanted to know about file locking
1. Nobody really knows how to do it 2. If you think you have a reliable system for doing it, you're probably doing the computer's job -- "...
4023
The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor
The first 8-bit microprocessor, the TMX 1795 had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commerci...
4024
Don’t Use Markdown for Documentation
“Markdown” is the most commonly used lightweight markup language on the internet. It is great for a subset of tasks, mainly blog posts and commenting. However, lately it has been adopted by the tec...
4025
4026
Slide Design for Developers
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
4027
The Shirky Principle (2010)
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
4028
Lean into the pain
When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you…
4029
Using uninitialized memory for fun and profit (2008)
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
4030
Mtime comparison considered harmful
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...
4031
A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed My Mailchimp Mailing List
You know when you're really jet lagged and really tired and the cogs in your head are just moving that little bit too slow? That's me right now, and the penny has just dropped that a Mailchimp phish has grabbed my credentials, logged into my account and exported
4032
Insert D-Wave Post Here
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…
4033
Smaller than Bloom filters
I've been looking at what would be needed in order to have a global view of CRLs in browsers. At the moment revocation has three problems: privacy (by asking the CA about the status of a certificate you're revealing to them what you're looking at), performance (OCSP checks take hundreds of milliseconds which adds up…
4034
Bitcoin contracts
Bitcoin is designed to support a wide variety of transaction types. Although currently the majority of transactions are standard payments to address it is possible to build more complex protocols.
4035
Implementing and Understanding Type Classes (2014)
Describing three strategies of implementing type classes, aiming to clarify their behavior
4036
So Here's How Many Games I Sell - Indie Game Developer Story
I get a lot of questions from young, aspiring Indie developers, and the most common query is: How many copies of a game does Spiderweb Softw...
4037
Golden Ratio for Readable Web Typography
This is the original introductory article to Golden Ratio Typography (GRT). The basic concepts you’ll find on this page are important for understanding GRT, but much of the math is now outdated (and has been replaced by updated formulae). For a more current and comprehensive look at all things GRT, check out the Golden
4038
Smalltalk Envy
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
4039
4040
New Edition of “Programming in Haskell” Now Available
An extensively updated and expanded version of the best-selling first edition. Now covers recent and more advanced features of Haskell.
4041
Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell
An article describing the experience of writing a Lisp interpreter in Haskell.
4042
4043
Varieties of Argumentative Experience
In 2008, Paul Graham wrote How To Disagree Better, ranking arguments on a scale from name-calling to explicitly refuting the other person’s central point. And that’s why, ever since 200…
4044
Introduction to AOLserver, Part 1 (1999)
(Written in July 1999 for www.linuxworld.com ; permanently installed now in Web Tools Review )
4045
4046
Transactionally Staged Job Drains in Postgres
Building a robust background worker system that leverages transactional isolation to never work a job too early, and transactional durability to never let one drop.
4047
Which programming languages are most token-efficient?
Comparing token efficiency across 19 popular programming languages using RosettaCode data - from Clojure to C, there's a 2.6x difference.
4048
The impossibility of intelligence explosion
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
4049
Magic Leap is a Tragic Heap
The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality–Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their cur…
4050
Actually using ed (2012)
The classic ed editor is a really good example of a sparse, minimal, standard Unix tool that does one thing, and does it well. Because there are so many good screen-oriented editors for Unix, there’s seldom very much call for using ed , unless you’re working on very old or very limited hardware that won’t run anything…