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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Jonathan Coulton on MegaUpload and piracy
I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. There are many comments and questions out there…
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Cory Doctorow on Kagi Search
Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.
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I spent way too much effort to win a game show on Dutch national TV
In my time, I've done a number of side projects — some serious, some decidedly less so. My latest side project is quite definitely in the latter category: trying to win a game show on national television.
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Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
If you skim this blog entry too quickly or just read the title, you might think I am someone who does not like F#. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the last several months, I have become a big F# fan. It has become my preferred language for personal projects.
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The borrow checker within
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
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The AI Threat to Open Societies
Good evening and thank you all for coming. I want to use my time tonight to warn the world about an unprecedented danger that’s threatening the very survival of open societies. Last year when I stood before you I spent most of my time analyzing the nefarious role of the IT monopolies. This is what […]
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GPT-4 gets a B on my quantum computing final exam
Update (April 14): On the suggestion of my TA Justin Yirka, I gave GPT-4 problem 2 from the final exam, along with its own answers and my and Justin’s grading comments, and asked it whether i…
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Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
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Who Invented Backpropagation?
Its modern version (the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Seppo Linnainmaa
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The New York Times uses the dark patterns it derides
New York Times op-ed recently decried tricks websites use to manipulate users… but have you ever tried to cancel your NY Times subscription?
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The Rust compiler has gotten faster again
I worked on Rust part-time for several years at Mozilla. During that period I regularly summarized how the compiler’s performance had improved. For example: 2017-11-12 to 2019-07-24.
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The cause for all your Mac OS X mouse annoyances
By that I mean a delay between receiving movement data from the mouse device and rendering the on-screen cursor. The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that.
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Hacking Transcend WiFi SD Cards
UPDATE : This post has been featured in the Hacker News front page! Thanks! I have also updated this post with additional information (at t...
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Functional Programming using JavaScript
There is no clear, widely-accepted definition of Functional Programming. It is a collection of related featues which cohere well into a very useful style of programming.
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The 16-Inch MacBook Pro
After my first day with the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, I’m very optimistic about it.
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Gridlock vs. Bottlenecks: A visual explanation
"Emails show [Chris Cristie]'s aides did plan bridge gridlock," says Salon . To a transportation engineer, the aides are innocent: bridges can't have gridlock. While we often say "gridlock" to mean "bad traffic," it has a technical meaning.
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Making deep learning go brrrr from first principles (2022)
So, you want to improve the performance of your deep learning model. How might you approach such a task? Often, folk fall back to a grab-bag of tricks that might've worked before or saw on a tweet. "Use in-place operations! Set gradients to None! Install PyTorch 1.10.0 but not 1.10.1!"
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Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast? (2011)
One of life's minor annoyances is having to wait on my devices to connect to the network after I wake them from sleep. All too often, I'll open the lid on my …
6176
So you want to compete with Roblox
My inbox is stuffed with pitches from start-ups wanting to compete with Roblox, that plucky Lego-ish multiplayer game-creation platform currently valued at 41 billion dollars. They shouldn't try, but here's how to maybe not fail if they insist anyways.
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Setting Up an Ad-Blocking VPN with WireGuard and Pihole
This guide will walk you through the setup of a remote machine that will act as a personal VPN server at the cost of 3 to 5 USD per month. We will also configure it to act as a DNS resolver that will automatically block spam, tracking, advertising and malware domains on all of your connected devices.
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Trello, Inc
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last post. I’m retired from blogging, remember? Want to hear something fun…
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The Internals of Postgres – Concurrency Control
Concurrency Control is a mechanism that maintains atomicity and isolation, which are two properties of the ACID, when multiple transactions run concurrently in a database.
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