91
Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
92
Book Review: The Hungry Brain
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
93
The Patriot Missile Failure
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
94
Introduction
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
95
[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely refle…
96
The best laptop ever made
Apple has made many great laptops, but the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro (2012–2015) is the epitome of usefulness, elegance, practicality, and power for an overall package that still hasn’t been (and may never be) surpassed.
97
98
Smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size) .
99
X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
100
The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008)
Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages.
101
Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony
Update: taking this down for now until some questions about the deterministicbuilds are answered; currently I do not believe the Zcash trusted setup shouldbe...
102
Finding Great Developers
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
103
Modern garbage collection
A look at the Go GC strategy
104
How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner
Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor ...
105
Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures (2015)
Front-end antics and typographic mischievousness
106
Let’s Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points
Update: This post got a sequel, Breaking our latin-1 assumptions. I’ve seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in posts discussing it. …
107
108
Against Murderism
[Content warning: discussion of racism. Comments are turned off due to bad experience with the comments on this kind of material.] I. A set of questions, hopefully confusing: Alice is a white stay-…
109
How long does it take to make a context switch? (2010)
That's a interesting question I'm willing to spend some of my time on. Someone at StumbleUpon emitted the hypothesis that with all the impr...
110
How Tesla Will Change the World (2015)
The story of how change really happens.
111
TMI About me
Recently, I've become aware of a whisper campaign going around the Drupal world, discussing details about my personal life. I do not know where it started or who all has been part of it. However, it's become apparent that it's not going to settle down, and has now had a major, direct impact on me and my professional…
112
The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of…
113
Flood Death Valley
Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
114
Hardcore History 59 The Destroyer of Worlds
[vc_row height=”auto” width=”full” us_bg_image=”195316″ us_notification=”” notification=””][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”892px”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row parallax_bg_width=”110″][vc_column width=”1/4″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
115
Painless Functional Specifications
When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, …
116
Benedict’s Newsletter
What mattered in tech this week? A weekly email newsletter.
117
How Trello is different
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
118
Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
119
Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
120
Containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
Design differences of containers, Zones, Jails and VMs.