451
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
452
SELECT wat FROM sql
Thanks to Nikhil Benesch, Justin Jaffray and several decades of "wouldn't it be nice if..." for contributions.
453
Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
454
Why Aren’t More Users More Happy With Our VMs? Part 1 (2018)
Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor…
455
How to Write a Book in Emacs (2015)
Writing a book is a time consuming process, and if you’re going to dedicate a year, or more, of your life to it, it makes sense to pick the best tool for the job. If you’re technically inclined – and if you use Emacs – then the choice is obvious.
456
Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade
For the past ten years, I have written a lengthy year-end series, documenting some of the dominant narratives and trends in education technology. I think it is worthwhile, as the decade draws to a ...
457
Rich Comment Blocks in Clojure
A blog about life between two parens.
458
Transformers Are Graph Neural Networks
Engineer friends often ask me: Graph Deep Learning sounds great, but are there any big commercial success stories? Is it being deployed in practical applications? Besides the obvious ones–recommendation systems at Pinterest, Alibaba and Twitter–a slightly nuanced success story is the Transformer architecture, which…
459
The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
460
Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)
From home temperature monitoring to a Kubernetes cluster hosting a live Drupal website, I have a lot of experience running Raspberry Pis. I've used every model through the years, and am currently using a mix of A+, 2 model B, and 4 model B Pis. The 3 model B+ was the first generation that had me concerned more about…
461
Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
462
Timeouts and cancellation for humans (2018)
Your code might be perfect and never fail, but unfortunately the outside world is less reliable. Sometimes, other people's programs crash or freeze. Networks go down; printers catch on fire . Your code needs to be prepared for this: every time you read from the network, attempt to acquire an inter-process lock, or…
463
The Hunt for the Fastest Zero
Unexpected performance deviations depending on how you spell zero.
464
War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020130 points49 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
Today, in Part II of our three part series on War Elephants, we’re going to look at the drawbacks of war elephants. Last time (here), we discussed the factors that made war elephants so power…
465
Why do so few people major in computer science? (2017)
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
466
Assange Hearing Day 10
The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New…
467
Domain Logic and SQL (2003)
A long-form article entitled: "Domain Logic and SQL"
468
Starting a Business Around GPT-3 Is a Bad Idea
(Update 2023-03: I wrote this in 2020 when GPT-3 was highly hyped, but ultimately made only <1% of the splash that the monstrous ChatGPT made 3 years later. If I had to rewrite this today, I’d 1) think more kindly about defensibility, especially through deep product, user experience, and marketing/distribution (see…
469
From scratch: reverse-mode automatic differentiation (in Python)
The site of Sid
470
Decision Table Patterns
Decision tables are easy, simple, and powerful. You can teach them in five minutes and write one in half that time. You can look at a table and understand what it’s saying, see if it matches your problem, and check for design flaws. So it’s kinda weird that there’s basically nothing about them online. I wrote an…
471
Bits of History, Words of Advice
"Why do you jackasses use these inferior linguistic vehicles when we have something here that’s so precious, so elegant, which gives me so ...
472
Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types
A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…
473
Everything Is an X
Analysis and examples of the popular high-level pattern of making all the things in your system conform to a common interface.
474
The lack of namespaces on crates.io is a feature
Rust doesn’t have namespaces in its package management system. It’s often viewed as a bug. But it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! While there are negative aspects of a flat package registry, there are also real benefits. Stability, continuity, and unity (discourages forks and fragmented identity)…
475
Windows Timer Resolution: The Great Rule Change
The behavior of the Windows scheduler changed significantly in Windows 10 2004 (aka, the April 2020 version of Windows), in a way that will break a few applications, and there appears to have been …