Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 290 posts.
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
Update, November 2023: here are the full term rewrite and language macros which formed the seed of this story. These files include OO notation as well as the basic Algol syntax shown here. There is also a sketch of an object-oriented language with classes and inheritance, implemented as a Clojure macro. I do not…
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…
An important announcement There Is No Antimemetics Division has been picked up for publication by Penguin Random House! Find out more here. Everything below is for the original self-published version of the story only. An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring p...
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
There is such a thing as a free lunch
They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides. Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that complexity begins from the most simple systems, the number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is virtually endless. The richness of most playing card…
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day…
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
The recent innovations in the AI space, most notably those such as GPT-4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from the utopian eliminating of drudgery, to the dystopian damage to the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself.
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
The point of these scripts is not to ban all use of constructs like the passive voice. (When it comes to writing, there are exceptions to every "rule.")
People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust's syntax, they actually object to Rust's semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I'll try to disentangle the two.
A Chess-GPT Linear Emergent World Representation
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
Playing around with the Representation Engineering paper, I made some interesting control vectors, and a Python package to make your own.
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they'll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
Photographic memory comes to Windows, and is the biggest security setback in a decade.
