Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
In a recent blog post , antirez detailed a new operation in Redis: WAIT . WAIT is proposed as an enhancement to Redis’ replication protocol to reduce the window of data loss in replicated Redis systems; clients can block awaiting acknowledgement of a write to a given number of nodes (or time out if the given threshold…
There is a misconception that Lisp is a dynamically typed language and doesn’t offer compile-time type checking. Lisp being the…
Update August 11, 2026: A group of researchers from all over Europe were inspired by this post, and actually turned it into a real working attack! Check out their writeup and paper here. This is a …
It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
Douglas Self,
Normally I avoid complaining about Apple because (a) there are plenty of other people carrying that flag, and (b) I honestly like Apple and own numerous lovely iProducts. I’m even using one t…
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
This is a very unusual post. It’s not about cyber-crime, malware, our latest business achievements or my latest long journey around the globe. It’s about truth and facts, and the importance of not hiding certain facts while revealing others. For sure I was surprised to read such an article from a journalist who, up…
There's a great deal said about Ada, Countess of Lovelace that I find misguided. And, worse, the real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is ...
Google has recently announced their intention to remove the H.264 video codec from its Chrome browser. This decision has been smeared as an evil campaign for controlling video on the web, akin to not-invented-here syndrome. It’s also been lauded as the push that the web needs to remain open and free. Mostly, it’s been…
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
You know what’s universally regarded as un-fun by most programmers? Writing assembly language code. As Steve McConnell said back in 1994: Programmers working with high-level languages achieve better productivity and quality than those working with lower-level languages. Languages such as C++, Java, Smalltalk, and…
Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to…
Hi, I'm Kevin Fox. I've been blogging at Fury.com since 1998. I can be reached at .
Introduction [DISCLAIMER: The original author is a layperson without medical/scientific credentials and this post represents a best-effort attempt to synthesize relevant research and unpack the policy implications of the “lockdown” approach as compared with the proposed alternative.] [Note: See the very last section…
I’ve started work on the next in my 1-bit Woodblocks series: “Tekagami” (Ito Shinsui’s “Hand Mirror”). So it’s a good time to talk about how I turned an iPad...
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
As you hopefully have heard, we at scikit-learn are doing a user survey (which is still open by the way). One of the requests there was t...
Note: code used in this article can be found on the Github repo jepsen-postgres-ha .
Effective D Programming Language.
I chatted with a young guy last night about his new startup idea. He’s got a vision for a social commerce app with a few cool spins on it. As I listened to him, I was thinking about how I had heard this exact pitch half a dozen times before. I also knew I had a lot to offer him in terms of help. I have a good friend…
A real bummer — Apple removed Scratch from the iTunes store, so it’s no longer available for iPad, iPhone, or iTouch. Why? Discussion on the Scratch forums suggests that it’s be…
