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Finding Great Developers
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
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DNSSEC Downtime: List of Outages & Validation Failures
Major DNSSEC Outages and Validation Failures
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Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
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Freedom On The Centralized Web
I. A lot of libertarians and anarcho-capitalists envision a future of small corporate states competing for migrants and capital by trying to have the best policies. But the Internet is about as clo…
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Overdue Account
"Dear Jane, I do not have any money so I am sending you this drawing I did of a spider instead."
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Quote Origin: Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
Steve Jobs? Pablo Picasso? T. S. Eliot? W. H. Davenport Adams? Lionel Trilling? Igor Stravinsky? William Faulkner? Apocryphal?
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Laser Pointer
If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
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PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus
University of Waterloo, Fall 2006 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00-2:30pm BFG Building, 2nd floor seminar room (BFG2125)
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Taco Bell Programming
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
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A Few Notes on the Culture, by Iain M Banks
Link to: Main page | About Me | Puzzle | Book Reviews | Essays and Short Stories | Babylon 5 | Space School UK | Gallery | Links
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The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license
Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about "proof of concept." These rough edges make academics reluctant to release their software. But, that doesn't mean they shouldn't.
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The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
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DPI Calculator / PPI Calculator
Noteworthy display sizes of monitors, PCs, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches and HMDs. Link background color takes into account typical viewing distance:
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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
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Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
Inside the complacency and decisions that eroded trust in Azure—from a former Azure Core engineer.
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The web sucks if you have a slow connection
A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were…
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An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
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The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama
Ollama gained traction by being the first easy llama.cpp wrapper, then spent years dodging attribution, misleading users, and pivoting to cloud, all while riding VC money earned on someone else's engine. Here's the full history, and why the alternatives are better.
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Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
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Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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What every computer science major should know (2011)
Given the expansive growth in the field, it's become challenging to discern what belongs in a modern computer science degree.
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A High Frequency Trader's Apologia, Part 1
I'm a former high frequency trader. And following the tradition of G.H. Hardy, I feel the need to make an apology for my former profession. Not an apology in the sense of a request for forgiveness of wrongs performed, but merely an intellectual justification of a field which is …
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YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection
You only look once (YOLO) is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system. On a Pascal Titan X it processes images at 30 FPS and has a mAP of 57.9% on COCO test-dev.
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8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
One of my bucket list items since I read my first party report back in 1991 was to attend a european demoparty and compete in a compo. I competed at NAID ’96 and placed there, which was awes…
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Spaced repetition
Efficient memorization using the spacing effect: literature review of widespread applicability, tips on use & what it’s good for.
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Text rendering hates you (2019)
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020272 points68 commentscited by 20History & Retro Computing details
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
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