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A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
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Software Disenchantment (2018)
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.
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An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra (2012)
Despite two linear algebra classes, my knowledge consisted of "Matrices, determinants, eigen something something". Why? Well, let's try this course format:
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Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
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):
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Resignation Letter
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
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Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
As one of the maintainers of eCryptfs , and a long time Thinkpad owner, I have been asked many times to add support to eCryptfs for Th...
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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
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Macbook charger teardown: surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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The Advertising Bubble
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
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Xi-Editor Retrospective
A bit more than four years ago I started the xi-editor project. Now I have placed it on the back burner (though there is still some activity from the open source community). The original goal was to deliver a very high quality editing experience. To this end, the project spent a rather large number of “novelty…
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93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
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Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
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Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…
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Why Japanese web design is so different (2013)
In the mind’s eye of many people, Japan is a land of tranquil Zen gardens, serene temples, and exquisite tea ceremonies. Both traditional and contemporary Japanese architecture, books and mag…
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The Duct Tape Programmer
Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful thin…
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The relative performance of C and Rust
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
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