Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 415 posts.
I am deeply honored and humbled by the CEO role. I’m also grateful for the messages of support. At the same time, I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest, first by making a set of commitments to you. More…
Mark Twain? Jonathan Swift? Thomas Francklin? Fisher Ames? Thomas Jefferson? John Randolph? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? Winston Churchill? Terry Pratchett? Anonymous?
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
This talk announces the most ambitious software project I've ever undertaken, then considers why its existence is so surprising (and in some cases frustrating) to people.
Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post. We’ve been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back.
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?
People often ask me "What good is Relativity?" It is a commonplace to think of Relativity as an abstract and highly arcane mathematical theory that has no consequences for everyday life. This is in fact far from the truth.
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 …
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 .
A recipe for a functional app, part 2
The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of “Associa…
2012 note: This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this…
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
Here's a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static analysis tools ) that has good support for macros plus decent-ish support for FP, plus a lot more. What's not to like? I'm mostly not going to talk about how great Julia…
This post is part of the series “Debris: Opening the box”. Okay, previous posts from this series aimed to actually convey useful technical information: assuming you actually want to wri…
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
Why a programming language should not offer a primitive to capture undelimited continuations (call/cc).
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
What implications exist around linking friendly-c code with machiavellian-c? I.e. put the performance critical kernels in there own module and work realy hard to make it correct.
A list of things about unicode on Linux and Python 3 you really did not want to know.
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. The video of that talk (minus the first few minutes) is now online .
Major DNSSEC Outages and Validation Failures
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
Noteworthy display sizes of monitors, PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches and HMDs. Link background color takes into account typical viewing distance:
I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of “I hate peo…
