4591
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
4592
What's New in POSIX 2024
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
4593
Dollar Shave Club and the Disruption of Everything
Dollar Shave Club is a textbook example of how the new Internet economy will destroy value in incumbent industries.
4594
Fast Rust Builds
It's common knowledge that Rust code is slow to compile. But I have a strong gut feeling that most Rust code out there compiles much slower than it could.
4595
Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA
This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From source…
4596
Greece
Greece is a remarkable country full of wonderful people, but along dimensions of development and governance, the place is plainly pretty fucked up. It has been fucked up that way for a long time, for decades at least . This has never been secret. Anyone who has visited Athens knows it has far more in common with…
4597
Data-oriented design or why you might shoot yourself in the foot with OOP (2009)
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the…
4598
Perlis Languages
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis
4599
Color Spaces
Interactive article explaining color spaces and how they're used to express color.
4600
Blogger Finger
Great to see you back Steve! I'm sorry to hear about your hand troubles, and glad that there's a 95% approval rating. The interweb just got slightly better again. Welcome back.
4601
Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby
A while ago Jeff and I had Eric Sink on the Stack Overflow Podcast, and we were yammering on about version control, especially the trendy new distributed version control systems, like Mercurial and…
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4603
Cache Eviction: When Are Randomized Algorithms Better Than LRU? (2014)
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn't so bad. That random eviction isn't bad can be surprising — if your cache fills up and you have to get rid of something, choosing the least recently used (LRU) is an obvious choice, since you're…
4604
Exploiting aCropalypse: Recovering truncated PNGs
This article assumes you’ve already heard about the aCropalypse vulnerability, aka CVE-2023-21036. If not, go read about it here (oops, this page doesn't exist yet. Read this tweet in the meantime).
4605
John McCarthy: The Robot and the Baby
THE ROBOT AND THE BABY
4606
Towards Principled Reactive UI
Update 7 May 2022: A followup to this post containing significant conceptual advance is Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust. I consider the Crochet experiment to be mostly negative, as there were a number of ergonomic and functional “paper cuts,” though several of the research goals were met, at least to some extent.
4607
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
4608
Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
The Doomsday Algorithm gives the day of the week for any date (and you can do it in your head)
4609
4610
Inequality in Equalland
Every resident of Equalland has the same life story. From birth until age 18, they live with their parents, earning nothing and spending nothing — their parents cover all their needs. At age 18, they graduate from high school, become independent of their parents, and go to college. The government of Equalland funds…
4611
Syntax highlighters are wrong (2014)
Syntax highlighters make value judgments about code. Most highlighters judge that comments are cruft, and try to hide them. Most diff viewers judge that code deletions are bad.
4612
Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy
Applied Computer Science: On Murder Considered As STEM Field—using information theory to quantify the magnitude of Light Yagami’s mistakes in 𝐷𝑒𝑎𝑡𝘩 𝑁𝑜𝑡𝑒 and considering fixes
4613
Life Below 600px
Paddy Donnelly, an Irish UX/Web Designer in Belgium who really lives on the Internet. Aspires to be a webmaster. Co-host of @sameforyou. Remembers when Pluto was a planet.
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4615
Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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4617
Bye Twitter – Manu Cornet
Manu Cornet's personal website.
4618
Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people wh…
4619
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.
js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read. Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding. Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on…
4620
Misidentifying talent
Out of context, you might think they were scouting actors or models, but these are baseball players ("A" is Lloyd Moseby, "B" is Jim Abbott, and "C" is Derek Jeter), ones that were quite good (Lloyd Moseby was arguably only a very good player for perhaps four years, but that makes him extraordinary compared to most…