Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
I have lived in IRC for about 7 years. What I mean by this is that IRC has been my primary hub for reading information online and interacting with people and systems. I don't use an RSS reader, I visit Twitter and Facebook only ...
Unix tradition encourages the use of command-line switches to control programs, so that options can be specified from scripts. This is especially important for programs that function as pipes or filters. Three conventions for how to distinguish command-line options from ordinary arguments exist; the original Unix…
Why do we ask for donations so often? Because it’s important! As KDE becomes more successful and an increasing number of people use our software, our costs grow as well: Web and server hostin…
Overview of Python's Package management ecosystem in 2024
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
Back to: The myth of heroism | Forward to: A footnote about the publishing industry
wingolog: article: just-in-time code generation within webassembly
By making a minor concession EU governments hope to find a majority next week to approve the controversial „chat control“ bill. According to the proposed child sexual abuse regulation (CSAR), providers of messengers, e-mail and chat services would be forced to automatically search all private messag
Broccoli is an asset pipeline for building JS+CSS apps running in the browser. Read about the architecture, and how it compares to other build tools.
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein , in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
Out for a walk one day, a woman came across a construction site and saw three men working. She asked the first man, “What are you doing?” Annoyed by the question, the first man barked, “Can’t you see that I’m laying bricks?” Not satisfied with the answer, she …
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...
This post is about an obscure corner of TCP network programming, a corner where almost everybody doesn’t quite get what is going on. I used to think I understood it, but found out last week that I didn’t.
The 1600 LoC patch allows userspace to pass the kernel the encryption keys for an established connection, making encryption happen transparently inside the kernel.
I have updated this article with new data, better code, and friendlier data visualization. You can read the new version here . Th...
Jim is a great chef. He's too modest to say that about himself, but he's worked either as head chef or assistant head chef at a number of re...
Dear Korean, My name is The English Teacher. The English Teacher has a question for The Korean. The English Teacher read the Korean's rece...
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020130 points49 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
Today, in Part II of our three part series on War Elephants, we’re going to look at the drawbacks of war elephants. Last time (here), we discussed the factors that made war elephants so power…
The number of people who majored in computer science in the US isn't much higher in 2015 than in 2005. Why do so few students major in computer science?
I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief fora…
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
I was in a Facebook discussion about “Friendly Artificial Intelligence” — this is a buzzword from the Singularity Institute people. They be...
Programming is all about managing complexity. Without good tools to manage it, the complexity of programs becomes mentally intractable for our limited brains and we’d lose control and understanding of our programs (imagine writing a big software system entirely in assembly language).
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
In many information systems, we work with arrays of integers. For example, maybe you need to keep track of which records in a database contain a given value. This sort of mapping can be expressed as an array of integers. These arrays can end up taking up a large fraction of your memory or disk … Continue reading…
This is a self-contained computer with its own display and keyboard, based on an ATmega1284, that you can program in the high-level language Lisp:
Everyone’s been talking about it. JD Vance read it. What does it actually tell us?
