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Let’s build a browser engine (2014)
I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles:
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 378 posts.
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How much is time wrong around the world? (2014)
Why Spaniards have dinner so late? A map of the difference between solar time and clock time around the world.
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Is Lisp Still Unique? Or at Least Different? (2002)
October 1997: It has been six years since I finished Paradigms of AI Programming (or PAIP ), and now seems like a good time to look back at how Lisp and AI programming have changed.
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Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, E…
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Metacrap
Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy).
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Why FTL implies time travel
In science fiction, it is pretty standard fare to introduce some form of faster-than-light communication or travel. After all, space is big, and you can't write your swashbuckling Hornblower-in-space novel if you have to wait for a generation ship to crawl painfully slowly between the nearest stars,
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The Practical Test Pyramid
Find out what kinds of automated tests you should implement for your application and learn by examples what these tests could look like.
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Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
We can admit our knowledge gaps without devaluing our expertise.
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Maybe you don't need Rust and WASM to speed up your JS
Few weeks ago I noticed a blog post "Oxidizing Source Maps with Rust and WebAssembly" making rounds on Twitter - talking about performance benefits of replacing plain JavaScript in the core of source-map library with a Rust version compiled to WebAssembly.
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“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history
Before it became a covert surveillance tool disguised as an outstanding browser extension, Stylish really was an outstanding browser extension. It bestowed upon its users nothing less than the power to change the appearance of the internet. Its extensive bank of user-made skins gave bright websites a dark background…
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Pipenv: promises a lot, delivers very little
Pipenv is a Python packaging tool that does one thing reasonably well — application dependency management. However, it is also plagued by issues, limitations and a break-neck development process. In the past, Pipenv’s promotional material was highly misleading as to its purpose and backers.
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Why Use F#?
Why you should consider using F# for your next project
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Bret Victor Redesigns Classic Strogatz Paper (2011)
This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.
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How I became Leonardo da Vinci on the Blockchain
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain"…
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Datomic: Event Sourcing without the hassle
When I got started using the Datomic database, I remember someone describing it to me as 'Event Sourcing without the hassle'. Having built Event Sourcing systems both with and without Datomic, I think this is very well put, although it might not be obvious, especially if you don't have much experience with Datomic.
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Fear of Macros
Practical Racket macros
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Prospecting for Hash Functions
Update 2022 : TheIronBorn has found even better permutations using a smarter technique. That thread completely eclipses my efforts in this article.
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GDPR: Don't Panic
In another week the GDPR , or the General Data Protection Regulation will become enforceable and it appears that unlike any other law to date this particular one has the interesting side effect of causing mass hysteria in the otherwise rational tech sector.
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Firefox removes core product support for RSS/Atom feeds
TL;DR: from Firefox 64 onwards, RSS/Atom feed support will be handled via add-ons, rather than in-product.
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Earth-Moon Fire Pole
My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?
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DNSFS – Store files in others' DNS resolver caches
A while ago I did a blog post about how long DNS resolvers hold results in cache for, using RIPE Atlas probes testing against their default resolvers (in a lot of cases, the DNS cache on their modem/router).
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Administrative Purgatory
your case is still going through administrative processing and we don't know when that process will be completed. Last year I was denied to go to the US when I was about to travel to San Francisco. Me and my employer's legal team never got answers as to why this happened so I've personally tried … Continue reading…
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