6031
Tree Sitter and the Complications of Parsing Languages
I talk about tree sitter, CEDET, and Combobulate -- my "paredit-style" package that's designed to work with most programming languages.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
6032
The Later Years of Douglas Adams
If God exists, he must have a sense of humor, for why else would he have strewn so many practical jokes around his creation? Among them is the uncanny phenomenon of the talented writer who absolutely hates to write.
6033
Times New Roman alternatives: You can do better (2013)
Butterick’s Practical Typography
6034
Domes are overrated
Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. It is an unwritten rule of space journalism that any article about Moon or Mars bases needs to have a conceptual drawing of habitatio…
6035
Stages of Denial
It is a lazy Tuesday afternoon. Perhaps you were idly browsing your favorite news aggregator, or visiting The Orange Website to wade through murky startup groupthink in search of interesting links.
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How to Crash Systemd in One Command
After running this command, PID 1 is hung in the pause system call. You can no longer start and stop daemons. inetd-style services no longer accept connections. You cannot cleanly reboot the system. The system feels generally unstable (e.g. ssh and su hang for 30 seconds since systemd is now integrated with the login…
6038
Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder
I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and …
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The Missing 11th of the Month (2015)
Personal website of David R Hagen, scientific software engineer
6041
Today I saw the future
Mozilla and OTOY deliver the power of native PC applications to the Web, unveil next generation JavaScript video codec for movies and cloud gaming
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"It'll never work": a collection of failed predictions
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
6044
Design For Hackers: Why You Don't Use Garamond on The Web
Garamond is widely considered one of the greatest fonts ever made. But the things that make Garamond so beautiful also make it a problem.
6045
Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
6046
macOS's Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool (2025)
AVAILABLE NOW OpenAI, Anthropic, and Chrome ship it. Apple deprecated it. Nobody documented it. Until now. → sandbox-exec: The Miss...
6047
Why Clojure? (2010)
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
6048
Wii Architecture – A Practical Analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The unprofitable SaaS business model trap
Marketo filed for IPO. They have $60m in revenues and a nice growth rate; unfortunately they're *losing* $35m/year. Why do SaaS business fall into the trap of being forever unprofitable, and what is the secret to the ones who overcome this trap?
6051
Diffusion Is Spectral Autoregression
A deep dive into spectral analysis of diffusion models of images, revealing how they implicitly perform a form of autoregression in the frequency domain.
6052
The Making of Warcraft 1: Origin of the series & creation of multi-unit select
Before Warcraft became a legend, it was a risky DOS-era experiment. This is how it actually began.
6053
Lessons from GitHub's First Year
The end of the year is a great time to sit down with a glass of your favorite beverage, dim the lights, snuggle up next to the fire and think about what you’ve learned over the past twelve months.
6054
Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling
Update (12/5): The Google team, along with Gil Kalai, have raised questions about whether the results of the new BosonSampling experiment might be easier to spoof classically than the USTC team tho…
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6056
Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)
The human genome project was inaugurated at the beginning of the decade as an ambitious international effort to determine the complete DNA sequence of human beings and several experimental animals. The justification for this undertaking is both scientific and medical. By understanding the genetic makeup of an organism…
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