Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 475 posts.
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
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.
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
An introduction to Zig's curious concurrent programming API.
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
Why I can't use Elm, and can't recommend it to others.
How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.
A non-comprehensive and opinionated guide to best monitor for programming
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020272 points68 commentscited by 20History & Retro Computing details
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance an…
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
Given The Intercept's vehement denials, readers are entitled to see for themselves what the truth is: transparency journalism with integrity requires.
[EDIT 2/13/21: This post is originally from June 2020, but there’s been renewed interest in it because the NYT article involved just came out. This post says the NYT was going to write a posi…
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…
The story of how Microsoft embraced and then killed AppGet.
The hardest program I’ve ever written, once you strip out the whitespace, is 3,835 lines long. That handful of code took me almost a year to write. Granted, that doesn’t take into account the code that didn’t make it. The commit history shows that I deleted 20,704 lines of code over that time. Every surviving line has…
Rakhim's homepage. I build open source projects and write about technology, programming, and life.
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
Despite two linear algebra classes, my knowledge consisted of "Matrices, determinants, eigen something something". Why? Well, let's try this course format:
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
