Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]
TLA+ is a formal specification and verification language intended to help engineers specify, design and reason about complex, real-life algorithms and software or hardware systems. We explore its motivation, application and principles of design.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023121 points5 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
In July 1999, there was a news article stating that PC usage had doubled yet again, reaching penetration of 50% of homes. People were hailing this as yet another sign of the inevitable climb of technology, but I saw it as a warning sign that the glass was half empty, and coined the following:
As the New York Times posts yet another breathless story about Stuxnet, I’m surprised that no one has pointed out its obvious deficiencies. Everyone seems to be hyperventilating about its pur…
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
A floating point number f has the form f = m · 2 e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent . We like to read numbers scaled by powers of ten, not two, so computers need algorithms to convert binary floating-point to and from decimal text. My 2011 post “ Floating Point to Decimal Conversion is…
A long-form article entitled: "Domain Logic and SQL"
DISCLAIMER : The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
There’s a scene toward the end of the book Contact by Carl Sagan, where the protagonist Ellie Arroway finds a Message embedded deep in the digits of PI. The Message is perhaps an artifact of …
A lot of more modern financial infrastructure follows the paths blazed by checks, at least in the U.S.
Security protocols often assume an accurate, local clock (e.g. TLS, Kerberos, DNSSEC and more). It's a widely accepted assumption when designing protocols but, for a lot of people, it just isn't true. We find good evidence that at least 25% of all certificate errors in Chrome are due to a bad local clock.
There are two aspects surrounding Apple’s patent litigation against HTC that demand further consideration. First, the severe problems with the U.S. patent system as a whole, particularly regarding software patents. Second, the strategic implications of Apple’s decision to file suit.
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.
a guided introduction for first-timers
This page provides a single entry point to all the posts in the story of how the world got online. Now available as a book, buy here. The Backbone: Introduction One System, Universal Service? The U…
Reconstructing films with artificial neural networks
The Django ORM feels so much easier than SQLAlchemy? Maybe this article can change your perception.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021119 points14 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the first part of a planned five-part series (I, II, III, IV, V) covering some of the basics of fortifications, from city walls to castles and field fortifications! We are going to discuss …
(Update 2023-03: I wrote this in 2020 when GPT-3 was highly hyped, but ultimately made only <1% of the splash that the monstrous ChatGPT made 3 years later. If I had to rewrite this today, I’d 1) think more kindly about defensibility, especially through deep product, user experience, and marketing/distribution (see…
Amber on Rails
