Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
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…
GTD—or “Getting things done”—is a framework created by David Allen for organizing and tracking your tasks and projects. Its aim is a bit higher than just “getting things done”, though. (It should have been called “Getting things done in a much better way than just letting things happen, which often turns out not to be…
Does anyone have any questions about NAFTA for my PSYCHIC PIG?
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”
Humans don’t start their thinking from scratch every second. As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don’t throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Your thoughts have persistence.
Some people claim that unit tests make type systems unnecessary: "types are just simple unit tests written for you, and simple unit tests aren't the important ones". Other people claim that type systems make unit tests unnecessary: "dynamic languages only need unit tests because they don't have type systems." What's…
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
This post is the first of many to come on Apache Arrow, pandas, pandas2, and the general trajectory of my work in recent times and into the foreseeable future. This is a bit of a read and overall fairly technical, but if interested I encourage you to take the time to work through it.
SaaS pricing is a mystery to many developers. Here is how to do it better.
From heat guns to kernel compiler flags
After a temporary stay in Japan to focus on my health and personal responsibilities, I am fully recovered, ready, and excited to work abroad again.
Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the die rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
Last month, Ethan Heilman, Tadge Dryja, Madars Virza, and I took a look at IOTA, currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency with a $1.9B…
Update(9/25/17): My article about the licensing change.
Bill Gates? James E. Fawcette? Nancy Andrews? Jerry Pournelle? InfoWorld? Apocryphal?
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
At present the world is partitioned into a finite number of large, discrete time zones. A time zone is an area on Earth where all of the clocks are set to the same time. An example of a time zone is America/Santiago, an area which covers continental Chile. All the clocks in this ...
This story begins, as they so often do, when I noticed that my machine was behaving poorly. My Windows 10 work machine has 24 cores (48 hyper-threads) and they were 50% idle. It has 64 GB of RAM an…
If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. This paper will present guidelines and hints for doing your work more quickly and with fewer mistakes.
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
SBT is the default build tool for the Scala programming community: you can build Scala using other tools, but the vast majority of the community uses SBT. Despite that, nobody seems to like SBT: people say it's confusing, complicated, and opaque. This post will deeply analyze what exactly it is about SBT that people…
Project Loom's mission is to make it easier to write, debug, profile and maintain concurrent applications meeting today's requirements. Threads, provided by Java from its first day, are a natural and convenient concurrency construct (putting aside the separate question of communication among threads) which is being…
