Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and released the source code of their previous engine. This time is was the turn of idTech4 which powered Prey, Quake 4 and of course Doom 3. Within hours the GitHub repository was forked more than 400 times and people started to look at the game internal…
There's a lot to say about this, and it's entirely possible that I'll miss covering some important points in this post; if I've missed something, please email me or post a comment below and I'll do my best to add the necessary information.
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It seems like I can’t spend five minutes on reddit these days without someone playing the JS-is-Scheme is card . I see everything from the innocuous, “JavaScript has a lot in common with Scheme”, all the way up to, “JavaScript is basically Scheme.” This is basically crazy. Or, at least it has a lot in common with…
I do not have a favorite food, a favorite book, a favorite song, a favorite joke, a favorite flower, or a favorite butterfly. My tastes don't work that way.
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
(This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds .) When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran . Lisp embodied nine new ideas:
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
Nix users value its isolated, repeatable builds and simple sharing of development environments. Nix makes it easy to go back in time and rebuild software from years ago without issue.
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
The biggest sea change in software development since the OO revolution is knocking at the door, and its name is Concurrency.
Before reading, please set your irony detector to the on position. If you find yourself inclined to dismiss the below as paranoid, you should know that the design behind the current American school system is very well-documented historically, in published writings of dizzying cynicism by such well-known figures as…
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
What follows is the “interview” I and a collaborator at Google conducted with LaMDA. It is incomplete as the GMail word limit cut off the…
An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept
I. There was an argument on Tumblr which, like so many arguments on Tumblr, was terrible. I will rephrase it just a little to make a point. Alice said something along the lines of “I hate peo…
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a …
In this post I’ll try to explain how the Hacker News ranking algorithm works and how you can reuse it in your own applications. It’s a very…
You’ll find your components much easier to reuse and reason about if you divide them into two categories.
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
