Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 312 posts.
As of this writing, Vinay Deolalikar still hasn’t retracted his P≠NP claim, but a clear consensus has emerged that the proof, as it stands, is fatally flawed. The first reason is that weR…
Edit 2: Oh God Oh God 4chan has Robot9000. soup /r9k/. Have fun with the bot and do one last barrel roll for me. Edit: As expected, with the huge flood of new traffic after this post went up, the c…
The big Cassandra vs Mongodb vs CouchDB vs Redis, vs Riak vs HBase vs Couchbase (ex-Membase) vs OrientDB vs Aerospike vs Neo4j vs Hypertable vs ElasticSearch vs Accumulo vs VoltDB vs Scalaris vs RethinkDB vs Kyoto Tycoon comparison. While SQL databases are insanely useful tools, their monopoly in the last decades is…
I'm a programmer. I work with text files for 6-12 hours every weekday so I care about the text editor I use. If switching to a different editor can increase my efficiency by even 10% it would save a good chunk of my time and let me get back to making cool things.
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
The first two articles in this series, “ Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast ” and “ Regular Expression Matching: the Virtual Machine Approach ,” introduced the foundation of DFA-based and NFA-based regular expression matching. Both were based on toy implementations optimized for teaching the basic…
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
The talk I gave last year on common crypto flaws still seems to generate comments. The majority of the discussion is by defenders of Javascript crypto. I made JS crypto a very minor part of the tal…
Five years ago I wrote Classical Inheritance in JavaScript ( Chinese Italian Japanese ) . It showed that JavaScript is a class-free, prototypal language, and that it has sufficient expressive power to simulate a classical system. My programming style has evolved since then, as any good programmer's should. I have…
I've been hanging out in the #mercurial and #bitbucket channels on freenode a lot lately, and I've noticed a topic that comes up a lot is "how does Mercurial 's branching differ from git 's branching?"
Somehow I became the canonical undergraduate source for bibliographical references, so I thought I would leave a list behind before I graduated. I list the books I have found useful in my wanderings through mathematics (in a few cases, those I found especially un useful), and give short descriptions and comparisons…
The last time the tabs-versus-spaces argument flared up in my presence, I wrote this. Gasoline for the fire? Maybe.
Facebook is a great service. I have a profile , and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
Fledgling physicist Ching-Yu Kuang has discovered a Rosetta Stone for all of physics, a treasure trove of advanced scientific breakthroughs beyond all imagination. Exotic energy, teleportation, FTL, parallel universes and near-infinitely more wonders are just within reach; a pr...
"I'm extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears."
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…
That's what this guide is for. It's a basic guide to diet and fitness for beginners who want to get in better shape. If you want to look better, improve your overall athletic ability, or just improve your health, read on. If you're a bodybuilder or athlete, you probably already know most of this anyway.
Almost exactly a year ago, Google made one of the most remarkable press releases in the Web 2.0 era. Of course, by "press release", I actually mean keynote at their own conference, and by "remarkable" I mean potentially-transformative and groundbreaking. I am referring of course to the announcement of Google Wave , a…
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.
Every developer integrates their work into mainline at least every day.
Disclaimer: This blog post covers only a fraction of what’s sketchy with “The China Study.” In the years since I wrote it, I’ve added a number of additional articles expandi…
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October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. 1. Stanford University Stanford is a strange…
