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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 327 posts.
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A Note About Git Commit Messages
I want to take a moment to elaborate on what makes a well formed commit message. I think the best practices for commit message formatting is one of the little details that makes Git great. Understandably, some of the first commits to rails.git have messages of the really-long-line variety, and I want to expand on why…
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The AI-Box Experiment
On the first occasion (in March 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and Nathan Russell simulated the gatekeeper. The AI’s handicap (the amount paid by the AI party to the gatekeeper party if not released) was set at $10. On the second occasion (in July 2002), Eliezer Yudkowsky simulated the AI and David…
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JSLinux - Technical Notes
In 2011 I wrote the initial version of JSLinux, the first PC/x86 emulator in Javascript running Linux. I reused parts of another of my emulators ( QEMU ) for the x86 helpers and the devices.
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Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous
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
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TermKit - a graphical terminal replacement
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.
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Dynamic languages are static languages
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…
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Accounting for Computer Scientists
Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well…
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Kill Math
The power to understand and predict the quantities of the world should not be restricted to those with a freakish knack for manipulating abstract symbols.
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(An ((Even Better) Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
The tokens #t and #f are the True and False literals, respectively. The single quote mark serves to quote the following expression. The syntax ' exp is completely equivalent to (quote exp ) . The backquote character ` is called quasiquote in Scheme; it is similar to ' except that within a quasiquoted expression, the…
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Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
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Tarsnap critical security bug
There's a lot to say about this, and it's entirely possible that I'll miss covering some important points in this post; if I've missed something, please email me or post a comment below and I'll do my best to add the necessary information.
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Explorable Explanations
An active reader asks questions, considers alternatives, questions assumptions, and even questions the trustworthiness of the author. An active reader tries to generalize specific examples, and devise specific examples for generalities. An active reader doesn't passively sponge up information, but uses the author's…
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Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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steve yegge - five-essential-phone-screen-questions
The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ I've been on a lot of SDE interview loops lately where the candidate failed miserably: not-inclined votes all around, even from the phone screeners who brought the person in initially. It's usually pretty obvious when the
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Kind of Screwed
TL;DR version: Last year, I was threatened with a lawsuit over the pixel art album cover for Kind of Bloop. Despite my firm belief that I was legally in the right, I settled out of court to cut my losses. This ordeal was very nerve-wracking for me and my family, and I’ve had trouble writing […]
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Why we are unlikely to ever leave the solar system.
Fill this in yourself.
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How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
Detailed breakdown explaining questionable marketing techniques used by AirBnB. By David Gooden, marketing expert & MN luxury realtor.
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Open Source (Almost) Everything
When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were…