Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 405 posts.
Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice offered
This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
One of my bucket list items since I read my first party report back in 1991 was to attend a european demoparty and compete in a compo. I competed at NAID ’96 and placed there, which was awes…
You’ll find your components much easier to reuse and reason about if you divide them into two categories.
I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem...
To quote the last part of this blog post, "I think it's [asyncio] really well done, it's fun to use, and I still am interested in having more of a SQLAlchemy story for it, because I'm sure folks will still want this no matter what anyone says.". To that end, SQLAlchemy 1.4 now includes complete support for asyncio …
If you want to order a book (or something else), don't buy it from Amazon. Amazon harms its customers, as well as workers, the national treasury, and many others that it affects.
How to run docker containers on your desktop.
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
Part 2: "Our Immortality or Our Extinction". When Artificial Intelligence gets superintelligent, it's either going to be a dream or a nightmare for us.
It turns out that finite state machines are useful for things other than expressing computation. Finite state machines can also be used to compactly represent ordered sets or maps of strings that can be searched very quickly.
Question for Quote Investigator : There is a great quote by Plato or Socrates about the misbehavior of children in antiquity that I read in the New York Times. The quote shows that the problems between generations are not just a recent occurrence. Instead, the conflicts between parents and offspring are timeless: 1
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins).
I. In the old days, you had your Culture, and that was that. Your Culture told you lots of stuff about what you were and weren’t allowed to do, and by golly you listened. Your Culture told yo…
So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover they’ve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace they’ve ever had, with challenging work, rewards for talent, initiative, and…
Eric Lippert notes the perils of programming in C++: I often think of C++ as my own personal Pit of Despair Programming Language. Unmanaged C++ makes it so easy to fall into traps. Think buffer overruns, memory leaks, double frees, mismatch between allocator and deallocator, using freed memory, umpteen dozen
The rants and raves of Simon Wardley on Evolution, Technology, Economics and Business
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
(This post is an aspirational transcript of the talk I gave to the Data Terra Nemo conference in May 2015. If you’d like to watch the less eloquent version of the same talk that I actually gave, the video should be available soon!)
If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it. The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself. The second, somewhat unpo…
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
