Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 439 posts.
Update: Due to lack of interest/use, in June 2021 this site was shut down and user data (emails, names, search alerts) deleted from all systems and backups. For Extramaze LLC I'm using Racket in a commercial project -- a search engine with email alerts fo...
I've just finished the final rewrite of my website. I'm not lying: this is the last time I'm ever going to do it. This website has gone through countless rewrites – from WordPress to Jekyll to multiple static site generators of my own – but this is the final one. I know so, because I've found the ultimate method for…
The principle of charity is a philosophical principle that denotes that, when interpreting someone’s statement, you should assume that the best possible interpretation of that statement is the one that the speaker meant to convey. Accordingly, to implement the principle of charity, you should not attribute falsehoods…
In my time, I've done a number of side projects — some serious, some decidedly less so. My latest side project is quite definitely in the latter category: trying to win a game show on national television.
Good evening and thank you all for coming. I want to use my time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening the very survival of open societies. Last year when I stood before you I spent most of my time analyzing the nefarious role of the IT monopolies. This is what […]
After my first day with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, I’m very optimistic about it.
This guide will walk you through the setup of a remote machine that will act as a personal VPN server at the cost of 3 to 5 USD per month. We will also configure it to act as a DNS resolver that will automatically block spam, tracking, advertising and malware domains on all of your connected devices.
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves cheaper than divisions. For this reason, compilers frequently replace division instructions by multiplications. Roughly speaking, it works in this manner. Suppose that you want to…
One of the most useful lessons I learned from working at Facebook had nothing to do with technology: Doubt the media. Always doubt the…
The nuance between timestamp with and without time zone
Ruby apps can use a lot of memory. But why? Various people in the community attribute it to memory fragmentation, and provide two “hacky” solutions. Dissatisfied by the current explanations and provided solutions, I set out on a journey to discover the deeper truth and to find better solutions.
By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo…
This blog post is a slightly edited version of the live transcript of the talk I gave at RustFest 2019 in Barcelona on November 10th, 2019. As it's a transcript some parts of it are a bit repetitive or badly worded, but I hope the message behind the talk will be conveyed by this post anyway.
Allow me to be controversial for a moment: arbitrary password restrictions on banks such as short max lengths and disallowed characters don't matter. Also, allow me to argue with myself for a moment: banks shouldn't have these restrictions in place anyway. I want to put forward cases for
This post describes a compile-time technique for catching use-after-move bugs in modern C++. It’s currently used to prevent some mistakes in the Serenity Operating System.
A pragmatic new design for high-level abstractions Monads (and, more generally, constructs known as “higher kinded types”) are a tool for high-level abstraction in programming languages1. Historically, there has been a lot of debate inside (and outside) the Rust community about whether monads would be a useful…
Update: I've made several edits to the post since Aleksey Shipilëv was kind enough to suggest many corrections and improvements.If you closely follow JVM development scene, you've probably noticed ...
You may be interested in my new arXiv paper, joint work with Xi Cheng, an undergraduate at UC Davis (now heading to Cornell for grad school); Bohdan Khomtchouk, a post doc in biology at Stanford; a…
Join me as I test-drive the smallest ever Kubernetes distribution k3s. Find out how this runs on Raspberry Pi compared to kubeadm with Docker.
I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…
There is a misconception that Lisp is a dynamically typed language and doesn’t offer compile-time type checking. Lisp being the…
Douglas Self,
The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card sized computer that has two built-in microcontrollers called PRUs. While the PRUs provi...
I. Kaj Sotala has an outstanding review of Unlocking The Emotional Brain; I read the book, and Kaj’s review is better. He begins: UtEB’s premise is that much if not most of our behavior is dr…
“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of…
