Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
While reviewing some of the comments on my post about parallelism and concurrency, I noticed that the great fallacy about dynamic and static languages continues to hold people in its thrall. So, i…
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
Go is defined to be a safe language. Indices into array or string references must be in bounds; there is no way to reinterpret the bits of one type as another, no way to conjure a pointer out of thin air; and there is no way to release memory, so no chance of “ dangling pointer ” errors and the associated memory…
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
I’ve had an unusual number of interesting conversations spin out of my previous article documenting that mobile web apps are slow. This has sparked some discussion, both online and IRL. But…
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文) For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work corresponde…
Over time, a system collects state on its root partition. This state lives in assorted directories like /etc and /var , and represents every under-documented or out-of-order step in bringing up the services.
Visit the post for more.
They’re not burritos.
Michael Isard, Derek Murray, and I recently sent in a HotOS submission (it’s not blind, so no harm talking about it, we think). The subject is hinted at from...
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
A surge involving the rapidly-transmitting Delta variant in heavily vaccinated countries has led to much hand-wringing that the vaccines are not effective against Delta, or vaccine effectivenss wanes after 4-6 months. This has fueled anti-vaccine sentiment suggesting the vaccines are not working, and causing much…
The conventional wisdom is that hashing more entropy sources can't hurt: if H is any modern cryptographic hash function then H(x,y,z) is at least as good a random number as H(x,y), no matter how awful z is. So we pile one source on top of another, hashing them all together and hoping that at least one of them is good.
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .
the quality of the music is not exactly what you are used to :-) but at least it works!
I'm developing a programming language called Kernel. Kernel is a conservative, Scheme-like dialect of Lisp in which everything is a first-class object.
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
