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Lizardman’s Constant Is 4%
Beware of Phantom Lizardmen I have only done a little bit of social science research, but it was enough to make me hate people. One study I helped with analyzed whether people from different countr…
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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Terminal and shell performance
There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…
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Category Theory for Programmers (2014)
Table of Contents Part One Category: The Essence of Composition Types and Functions Categories Great and Small Kleisli Categories Products and Coproducts Simple Algebraic Data Types Functors Functo…
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Countering Trusting Trust Through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)
David A. Wheeler's Page on Countering 'Trusting Trust' through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) - Countering Trojan Horse attacks on Compilers
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Orbital Speed
What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?
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Typing with pleasure, and low latency
In this article I examine human- and machine aspects of typing latency (“typing lag”) and present experimental data on latency of popular text / code editors. The article is inspired by my work on implementing “zero-latency typing” in IntelliJ IDEA.
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Ideas for Startups (2005)
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
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The C10K problem
It's time for web servers to handle ten thousand clients simultaneously, don't you think? After all, the web is a big place now.
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How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
GTA Online. Infamous for its slow loading times. Having picked up the game again to finish some of the newer heists I was shocked (/s) to discover that it still loads just as slow as the day it was re
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Solarized - Color scheme for vim, mutt, terminal emulators
Precision colors for machines and people
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Save your eyes, start using f.lux
Software to warm up your computer display at night, to match your indoor lighting.
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Nicotine as a useful stimulant
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Results of XKCD Color Survey
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter int…
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The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code (2000; Still relevant?)
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?
Stephen Wolfram explores the broader picture of what's going on inside ChatGPT and why it produces meaningful text. Discusses models, training neural nets, embeddings, tokens, transformers, language syntax.
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Scissor Statements: Sort by Controversial
[Epistemic status: fiction] Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway. This starts in September 2017. I was working for a sm…
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Spolsky on "Commoditizing Your Complements"
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
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Banking Applications Compatibility with GrapheneOS
Maintained Compatibility List for International Banking Apps This list includes banking apps that have been tested, submitted, reviewed, and verified as compatible. LIST | SUBMIT | UPDATE | POSSIBLE WORKAROUND SOLUTIONS Introduction Welcome to the crowd-sourced dataset for GrapheneOS users on currently supported…
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A Plan for Spam
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
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How Not to Die (2007)
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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How Not To Sort By Average Rating
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?