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The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 428 posts.
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Text rendering hates you (2019)
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Meditations On Moloch
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
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There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
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"Attention", "Transformers", in Neural Network "Large Language Models"
I find this literature irritating and opaque. This is at least somewhat because I do not yet understand it well, and there's too much of it. But clearly I need to wrap my head around it, before I become technically obsolete. My scare quotes in the title of these notes thus derive in part from jealousy and fear. But…
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Comic Code: Monospaced interpretation of the most over-hated typeface
Name: Comic Code, Comic Code Ligatures Type: Retail typeface Publisher: Tabular Type Foundry Release year: 2019 Purchase links: I Love Typography (both)
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Is it possible to write games like Pac-Man in a functional language? (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
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A dozen USB chargers in the lab: Apple is good, but not quite the best (2012)
When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside...
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Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco (2008)
Last week, Debian announced that in September 2006 they accidentally broke the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator while trying to silence a Valgrind warning. One effect this had is that the ssh-keygen program installed on recent Debian systems (and Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu) could only generate 32,767…
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Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't (2019)
For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…
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The Bipolar Lisp Programmer (2007)
You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. Robin Williams
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Linux being secure is a common misconception
Linux being secure is a common misconception in the security and privacy realm. Linux is thought to be secure primarily because of its source model, popular usage in servers, small userbase and confusion about its security features. This article is intended to debunk these misunderstandings by demonstrating the lack…
49
The Story of Mel
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
50
Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
51
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
52
The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
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Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
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Non-determinism in GPT-4 is caused by Sparse MoE
It’s well-known at this point that GPT-4/GPT-3.5-turbo is non-deterministic, even at temperature=0.0. This is an odd behavior if you’re used to dense decoder-only models, where temp=0 should imply greedy sampling which should imply full determinism, because the logits for the next token should be a pure function of…
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Elastic tabstops
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
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Ghostty 👻 – Mitchell Hashimoto
My writings about Ghostty, the terminal emulator I work on.
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The age of average
In the early 1990s, two Russian artists named Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid hired a market research firm to survey the public on what they wanted in a work of art. Across 11 countries they then set about painting a piece that reflected the results. Each piece was intended to be a unique a colla
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ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram plugin gives computationally accurate answers to ChatGPT queries using Wolfram's data knowledgebase and language. Custom visualizations are given as well. Stephen Wolfram explains how it works.