Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
In 2013, I spent 6 months converting 0install's 29,215 lines of Python to OCaml (learning OCaml along the way). In this post, I'll describe the …
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium…
Lest you think that this is a fluke that was quickly corrected, here is the /bin/true program from AT&T's Sys/V libraries as of 1990:
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or…
How many times are words, names or functions found in the Linux kernel source code? Browse an example or write your own comma-separated list to find out! You can use * for wildcards, foo|bar for sums, and a word is defined as \<[[:alnum:]_]+\> (ignoring case, considering accents).
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
People I work with recognize my computer easily: it's the one with nothing but yellow windows and blue bars on the screen. That's the text editor acme, written by Rob Pike for Plan 9 in the early 1990s. Acme focuses entirely on the idea of text as user interface. It's difficult to explain acme without seeing it…
Presented in an experimental mnemonic medium that makes it almost effortless to remember what you read
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
Comic about a classic experiment into drug addiction science: Rat Park. Would rats take drugs if given a stimulating environment and company?
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
When an experimental study states "The group with treatment X had significantly less disease ( p = 1%)", many people interpret this statement as being equivalent to "there is a 99% chance that if I do treatment X it will prevent disease." This essay explains why these statements are not equivalent. For such an…
Researchers have exploited bit-errors before in amazing ways . But bit-errors can be detected and exploited in new ways on an Internet-wide scale. One of these means is by bitsquatting, or registering domain names one bit different than frequently resolved domains.
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real…
Name the most widely used bytecode interpreter or virtual machine. Sun's JVM? Adobe's Flash? .NET and Mono? Perl? Python? PHP? These are all certainly popular, but there's one more widely used than all those combined. That bytecode interpreter is Henry Spencer's regular expression library and its many descendants.
Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff engineers operating within the company. Everyone benefits from clear role expectations, but career ladders are a tool that applies better against populations than people. This is particularly true for Staff-plus engineers, whose career ladders…
If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?
Part 2: "Our Immortality or Our Extinction". When Artificial Intelligence gets superintelligent, it's either going to be a dream or a nightmare for us.
In 2012, I decided to try to learn MIT's 4-year undergraduate computer science curriculum in 12 months, without taking any classes. I was successful in passing the final exams for 33 classes and completing the required programming projects. You can view my TEDx Talk regarding the challenge, see links to all the free…
The typestate pattern is an API design pattern that encodes information about an object’s run-time state in its compile-time type . In particular, an API using the typestate pattern will have:
If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...
The disruption caused by the Internet in industry after industry has a common theoretical basis described by Aggregation Theory.
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
