Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Disclaimer: This software is not ready. I am using it and it is stable but I still have to make it feel great , if you have suggestions I would be glad to take them. I wrote a list of work that I will attempt in the future.
My review of Apple’s new iPhones.
Stéphane Graber's website -
A lot of people use VPN every day. Somebody use it in always-on mode to circumvent government or corporative internet censorship, while…
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs . What's that about?
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
In 1999, Lutz Prechelt published a seminal article on the COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM (October 1999/Vol. 42, No. 10) called Comparing Java vs. C/C++ Efficiency Differences to Interpersonal Differences , henceforth Java VS C , which seems to have later (March 2000) been expanded into a full paper, An empirical comparison…
I’ve wanted a new Mac for awhile now. Now I have one faster than almost any Mac that Apple can sell you. Here’s how I built it.
LLMs have the potential to revolutionise our field of healthcare, but the fear and reality of hallucinations prevent adoption in most applications.
This infamous answer [https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/7488] on StackOverflow have reached meme status. The question is about finding opening tags in XHTML using a regular expression, and the answer makes it abundantly clear that this is not possible - and you will surely go mad if you try. The
You ever notice that there's this funny threshold for getting to the front page on sites like HN? The exact threshold varies depending on how much traffic there is, but, for articles that aren't wildly popular, there's this moment when the article is at N-1 votes. There is, perhaps, a 60% chance that the vote will…
Resurrecting an old tradition of this blog, let’s take a simple problem, go over a way too long list of alternative solutions, and evaluate their merits. Our simple problem is this: we want t…
How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS’19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t …
tl;dr If you want to ship high quality code, you should invest in more than one of formal code review, design inspection, testing, and quality assurance. Testing catches fewer bugs per hour than human inspection of code, but it might be catching different types of bugs.
A critique of 'invisible design' and the NoUI movement: invisibility propagates the myth of immateriality, ignores interface culture and takes agency away from users and designers.
This is a followup to my previous post, prefix sum on Vulkan. Last year, I got a fancy algorithm for this problem running well on one device. This time, I will dive into the question of how to make it work well across a wide range of devices. The short answer is, it can be made to work pretty portably on Vulkan and…
Via this comment on Hacker News I started exploring the ClickHouse Playground . It's really cool, and among other things it allows CORS-enabled API hits that can query a decade of history from the GitHub events archive in less than a second.
We have finished the first chapter on a long journey of resurrecting Fortran: forming an initial core community of developers and users with enough momentum around the new Fortran website and projects at fortran-lang.org . There is still have a long way to go to, but this was a necessary (although not sufficient)…
I was watching engineers argue, someone was bitching about a code reviewer asking him to put more parentheses in a conditional: “As if I don’t know the precedence rules!” I don’t know them, as a matter of principle.
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
