Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Disclaimer 2024-12-02 Since this rant is going viral again (again (again)), some disclaimers: I wrote this six years ago to “”“win”“” an ugly Twitter fight. I’m glad I anonymized the inciting tweet and hope I’m the only person still getting grief over this. The core interesting bit— why it’s mathematically valid to…
You’ve seen the stories—in the Financial Times, Technology Review, CNET, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or elsewhere—saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computation…
This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…
[Note: there have been several developments in this space since thisarticle was published. See A Tail Calling Interpreter For Python (And Other Updates) for...
Personal blog of John Novak
I have always wanted to write an emulator. I made a half-hearted attempt in college but it never made it to a demo-able state. I also didn't want to write Yet Another Emulator. It should at least bring something new to the table. When I discovered LLVM , I felt like I finally had worthwhile idea for a project.
Serverless architectures replace a managed server with a collection of third party services and FaaS
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI. A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a …
This is an interesting demonstration of the capabilities of afl ; I was actually pretty surprised that it worked! $ mkdir in_dir $ echo ' h...
PHP, as the result of a spectacular error of judgement, appears to be written in US English. How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." -Mahatma Gandhi
Fourier transforms are a tool used in a whole bunch of different things. This is a explanation of what a Fourier transform does, and some different ways it can be useful.
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
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.
Alexis Beingessner's Text Rendering Hates You , published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.
I remember AIDS. I’m older than you probably think I am, and I remember what AIDS in America meant in the eighties, when William F. Buckley suggested all “carriers” be tattooed, a…
Flatpak - a security nightmare
This is a follow-up to Allan Odgaard's excellent article macOS 10.15: Slow by Design . I want to talk specifically about the first section "Spawning a new Process", because there has been widespread misunderstanding of this. Odgaard provides a simple test to show that the first run of an executable is delayed while…
Leaving node.js land
I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
Apple reportedly had objections to what Jon Stewart said in his video program — it canceled the show after he had criticized China, and something the article describes as "AI". (It could be that what he criticized was actually large language models, which may be an important issue but are not "intelligence" .)
Or: How the AI Bubble, Panic, and Unpreparedness Stole ChristmasWritten by Tom of Moore’s Law Is DeadSpecial Assistance by KarbinCry & kari-no-sugataBased on this Video: https://youtu.be/BORRBce5TGwIntroduction — The Day the RAM Market SnappedAt the beginning of November, I ordered a 32GB DDR5 kit for pairing with a…
The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…
XScreenSaver 5.15 is out now. Along with the usual set of minor improvements, this version runs as an iOS application. As all of the 3D modules in XScreenSaver are written against the OpenGL 1.3 specification, and as the iPhone only supports OpenGL ES 1.1 and newer, this was something of a big deal. I accomplished…
V is a programming language promising to be “Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software.” V has a controversial past but what is the state of V in 2022?
