Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017 , where it ended up on 1st place.
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…
The explanation lies in the interaction of labor laws and aviation regulations. Let's consider labor laws first. The law compels a company to negotiate with a labor union. If it cannot reach an agreement, however, and the union goes out on strike, the company is able to hire replacement workers and continue its…
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
by Worst-Online-Dater
(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…
Are you falling victim to the peeking problem? Learn how to design and run an experiment properly.
QR codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode arbitrary text strings. A common use of QR codes is to encode URLs so that people can scan a QR code (for example, on an advertising poster, building roof , volleyball bikini , belt buckle , or airplane banner ) to load a web site on a cell phone instead of having to…
Of course, ``security hole in qmail'' does not include problems outside of qmail: for example, NFS security problems, TCP/IP security problems, DNS security problems, bugs in scripts run from .forward files, and operating system bugs generally. It's silly to blame a problem on qmail if the system was already…
Update: I have written a fairly comprehensive article about steps to lower deaths per terawatt hour . Primary focus on pollution mitigation. Air pollution causes 3.1 million deaths per year
June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those…
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’…
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
I was writing a tiny website to display statistics of how much sponsored content a Youtube creator has over time when I noticed that I often write a small tool as a website that queries some data from a database and then displays it in a graph, a table, or similar. But if you want to use a
I'm trying to combine WebKit and Node.js into a new kind of terminal, with an emphasis on rich display and web/network orientation.
(Here begins a comment written by John Carmack in 2014, about an email he sent to a programmers’ mailing list in 2007.)
🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0, stopchatcontrol.fr🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇩🇰 Danish: chatcontrol.dk🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole Table of contents: The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence and the End of Anonymous Communication Take action to stop Chat
September 2014 There’s a screening test for bipolar disorder. You ask patients a bunch of things like “Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?”. If they say ‘yesR…
People often ask me "What good is Relativity?" It is a commonplace to think of Relativity as an abstract and highly arcane mathematical theory that has no consequences for everyday life. This is in fact far from the truth.
Quick introduction to git internals for people who are not scared by words like Directed Acyclic Graph .
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this:
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
