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The Nokia N9 Alarm Clock (2014)
I want to talk about the Nokia N9 (2011) alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Why is finance so complex? (2011)
Lisa Pollack at FT Alphaville mulls a question : “Why are we so good at creating complexity in finance?” The answer she comes up with is the “ Flynn Effect “, basically the idea that there is an uptrend in human intelligence. Finance, in this view, gets more complex over time because financiers get smart enough to…
4833
The sad state of SMTP encryption
This is a quick recap of why I’m sad about SMTP encryption. It explains how TLS certificate verification in SMTP is useless even if you force it.
4834
How to implement Q&A against your docs with GPT3 embeddings and Datasette
If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text …
4835
Levels of code in Forth programming (2002)
I had been programming in Fortran and assembler for a number of years when I got my first personal computer. It was exciting. On the first generation PC one had to toggle in a paper tape loader from front panel switches, byte by byte, then start the paper tape reader and then one could output to the led on the front…
4836
Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
4837
An opinionated map of incremental and streaming systems
Disclaimer: I used to work for Materialize which is one of the systems being compared in this post.
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WebAssembly doesn’t make unsafe languages safe
WebAssembly is all the rage these days. And for good reasons. It’s pretty exciting to see many compiled languages adopting a common intermediate represe...
4841
Optimizing a ring buffer for throughput (2021)
In this article I will take a look at the classic concurrent ring buffer and how it can be optimized to increase throughput.
4842
Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves
Edit: Since this post, I've created an interactive tool for binary visualisation - see it at binvis.io
4843
Making Sandspiel
Sandspiel is a falling sand game I built in late 2018. I really enjoyed writing this game, and wanted to put into writing some of my goals, design decisions, and learnings from that process. If you’re reading this but haven’t played sandspiel, you should probably go try it !
4844
Building Photoshop 1.0
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
4845
Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023159 points126 commentscited by 4Career & Management details
This week we’re going to take a detour into understanding the structure of academia, in particular the different kinds of ‘professors’ and their academic ranks in the American sys…
4846
The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, …
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Using computers more freely and safely
The most important step is the first one. Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures. Gravitating away from monopolies is a way everyone can help improve software, regardless of our abilities or needs.
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The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
In 1998 Looking Glass Studios released the stealth game Thief: The Dark Project . This was just as 3D hardware acceleration was taking off, so due to the development cycle it didn't use hardware acceleration; it was a purely software-rendered game.
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Bored people quit (2011)
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
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McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator (2005)
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
4852
Emacs: Mastering Eshell
Emacs has a shell written entirely in Emacs Lisp. Here's how you master Eshell, a versatile and powerful shell capable of supplanting bash or zsh as your daily driver.
4853
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
4854
New Khan Academy Exercise Framework Is Live
Today we’re pushing live a complete rewrite of the Khan Academy Exercise framework ( live demo ).
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Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91
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Introduction to monads in JavaScript
I know, I know, the world does not need yet another introduction to monads (or yet another article complaining that world does not need yet another introduction to monads). So you’ll be glad to know this isn’t one of those, in the sense that it’s not new. I thought I’d write it because, first, monads are worth knowing…
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Shoelace knots
List of different knots for shoelace tying speed, simplicity, security or style.
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The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.