Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 228 posts.
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
Introduction The Three Projections of Futamura are a sequence of applications of a programming technique called 'partial evaluation' or 'sp...
This sixteen-rank organ was designed and built for our home by Abbott and Sieker of Los Angeles, California, as their “Opus 67.” It has 812 pipes, separated into three divisions:
C:\TEMP> md5sum hello.exe cdc47d670159eef60916ca03a9d4a007 C:\TEMP> .\hello.exe Hello, world! (press enter to quit) C:\TEMP>
Scraping for AI training is killing small websites like ours. Traffic from users is drowned out by bots at a factor of 100 to 1. At times, the load on our server from bots makes our server so unresponsive we can't get in to administer it.
If you use an object-oriented domain model, and you don't put behavior in your objects, you're missing out on most of the benefits of that pattern.
November 2009 I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with…
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
A young man comes to town. He is reasonably good looking, has a little money in his pocket. He finds it easy to talk to women. He doesn’t speak much about his past, but it is clear that he sp…
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
Another enjoyable read. Thanks! One thing, though -- it's about time to update your understandings of Python's object system. Python's culture doesn't insist that traditional (Smalltalkish) OO is the One True Way to re-use code, but that doesn't mean that everything in Python is not an object (because they are, since…
After holding off for nearly two years, I’m posting this because too many people have asked for it. The lasses should read it, too, as the same principles can be applied to bodyfat loss. I weighed 152 lbs. for four years of high school, and after training in tango in Buenos Aires in 2005, that […]
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
( Originally appeared on the Machine Intelligence Research Institute blog, September 2007.)
Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
This article outlines the responsibilities of users, including employees, students, and faculty, who create and maintain personal webpages to ensure that the content is appropriate, accurate, and accessible to all users.
Towards the tail end of PubCon, I noticed a spate of articles talking about subdomains and subdirectories in Google, and I wanted to talk more about this subject in case I was unclear. Historically…
Numerous claims about Judy's performance are made in the Judy whitepaper . I don't think any of those claims are wrong. However, it does not appear that sufficient effort was put in benchmarking Judy against other data structures. Now, it is unlikely there is another data structure that is both as fast and as small as…
A lot of people remarked that in my post on Tail Recursion Elimination I confused tail self-recursion with other tail calls, which proper T...
(These are some notes I made for a panel discussion on programming language design at MIT on May 10, 2001.) 1. Programming Languages Are for People. Programming languages are how people talk to computers. The computer would be just as happy speaking any language that was unambiguous. The reason we have high level…
