Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 411 posts.
Ssss: Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme (2006)
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here…
37signals Leaves the Cloud
Basecamp has had one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago. We've run extensively in both Amazon's cloud and Google's cloud. We've run on bare virtual machines, we've run on Kubernetes. We've seen all the cloud has to offer, and tried…
The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation (2000)
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee…
Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?
Cocktail party ideas
You don't have to be at a party to see this phenomenon in action, but there's a curious thing I regularly see at parties in social circles where people value intelligence and cleverness without similarly valuing on-the-ground knowledge or intellectual rigor. People often discuss the standard trendy topics (some recent…
Europe: The end of the privacy of digital correspondence
The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content - generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of full
Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
Plato's Argument Against Writing
The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions are going to be.
Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator
Making performant dynamic manual memory management in C feel almost like garbage collection.
Embed is in C23
It happened. Nearly 5 years of paper writing, being snuck Committee Meeting notes on the DL until I could access them myself and absolve my co-conspirators of their sins, 5 different implementations/patches later, I can
How to write a Git commit message (2014)
Commit messages matter. Here's how to write them well.
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
Hacker News Parody Thread (2013)
This page is intended to be a humorous parody of Hacker News . It is not in any way affiliated with Hacker News. The page's theme and layout are based on the original site. The usernames (with two exceptions) are intended to be fictitious.
There’s no speed limit (2009)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
If PHP Were British (2011)
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
How does GPT obtain its ability? Tracing emergent abilities of language models
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
V Language Review
V is a programming language promising to be “Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software.” V has a controversial past but what is the state of V in 2022?
Money, money, money (and investing) (2015)
A comprehensive introduction to investing in stocks, mutual funds (managed and index), short-selling, and stock options.
Amish Hackers (2009)
[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →