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I quit – Peak indifference, big tobacco
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
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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The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
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A Better Light Source for Scanning Color Negative Film
Narrowband trichromatic (RGB) light sources are superior to broadband (white) light for scanning color negative film; there are very good reasons why all commercial film scanners use RGB. ( film scanners were using blue LEDs at least a decade before they would be widely used in consumer products! ) Scanning film with…
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Collaborative Text Editing Without CRDTs or OT
Matthew Weidner | May 21st, 2025 Home | RSS Feed Keywords: text editing, server reconciliation, Articulated
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Tired of Safari
Yesterday, in reaction to pointer events becoming a W3C recommendation, Tim Kadlec published an important piece about Apple’s huge influence on the mobile web.
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Curl Security Audit
"the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive." I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing … Continue…
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Canadian man stuck in triangle of e-commerce fraud
A Canadian man who says he’s been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve “triangulation fraud,” which occurs when a consumer purchases something online — from a seller on Amazon or eBay , for example — but the seller doesn’t actually own…
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Text showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes
I have been working on a hobby project to reimagine the C core of Emacs in Rust. On this journey, I reached the point where I needed some way to represent the text of a buffer. The simplest approach is to just use a large string or array of lines. However these each suffer from poor performance as either the size or…
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The Polygons of Another World: Super Nintendo
This article is part of a study about the ports of Another World. It is highly recommended to read Another World 101 before reading this.
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What No One Told You About Z-Index
The problem with z-index is that very few people understand how it really works. It’s not complicated, but it if you’ve never taken the time to read its specification, there are almost certainly crucial aspects that you’re completely unaware of.
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Bloomberg’s ‘The Big Hack’
One way or the other, there is more to come on this story, and either Bloomberg’s or Apple’s and Amazon’s credibility is going to take a significant hit.
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CSS Modules
If you wanted to identify an inflection point in the recent development of CSS thinking, you’d probably pick Christopher Chedeau’s “CSS in JS” talk from NationJS in November, 2014. It was a watershed moment that set a bunch of different minds spiralling off in their own directions like particles after a high-energy…
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Apple curl security incident 12604
tldr: Apple thinks it is fine. I do not. On December 28 2023, bugreport 12604 was filed in the curl issue tracker. We get a lot issues filed most days so this fact alone was hardly anything out of the ordinary. We read the reports, investigate, ask follow-up questions to see what we can learn … Continue reading the…
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Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The big alcohol study that didn't happen
Why did a huge alcohol RCT get cancelled? A strange story of science, academia, bureaucratic maneuvering, ambition, politics, capitalism, the deep state, secret emails, and slippery ethical slopes.
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Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor
You might think of the Intel 386 processor (1985) as just an early processor in the x86 line, but the 386 was a critical turning point for m...
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AI coding tools can reduce productivity
Study Shows That Even Experienced Developers Dramatically Overestimate Gains
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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet
Open Source Freelancer
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Web components are okay
Every so often, the web development community gets into a tizzy about something, usually web components. I find these fights tiresome, but I also see them as a…
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Clasp – A Common Lisp with LLVM back end and interoperation with C++
Hello, everyone! Click here for up to date build instructions Today I am happy to make the first release of the Common Lisp implementation “Clasp”. Clasp uses LLVM as its back-end and generates nat…
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Systems that defy detailed understanding
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
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Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm
Reddit has a bug in their code. This bug is currently present in their production platform, and has been for years. It affects one of the most important algorithms in the entire site, the “Hot” ranking algorithm for link popularity. It has real, demonstrable negative effects. It has been reported to Reddit’s technical…
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Prince Of Persia Code Review
On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor…
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AWS Elasticsearch: a fundamentally-flawed offering
I'm currently working on a logging project that was initially implemented using AWS Elasticsearch. Having worked with large-scale mainline Elasticsearch clusters for several years, I'm absolutely stunned at how poor Amazon's implementation is and I can't fathom why they're unable to fix or at least improve it. I…
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Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets
A while back I wrote that Robert Martin was ruining software by being too good at programming. That was supposed to be a joke. Since then he’s done his damndest to actually ruin software by telling people they’re doing it wrong. His most recent response where he yells at software correctness was the breaking point for…
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Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014)
In the fall of 2000, I took my first engineering class: ECE 352 , an entry-level digital design class for first-year computer engineers. It was standing room only, filled with waitlisted students who would find seats later in the semester as people dropped out. We had been warned in orientation that half of us…
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You Can't Buy Integration
The usual build-versus-buy rules for applications don't apply to integration