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How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 437 posts.
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Epoll is fundamentally broken
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
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Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
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To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
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Why undefined behavior may call a never-called function
My twitter feed has recently been filled with discussions about the following program #include <cstdlib> typedef int (*Function)(); s...
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Phishing with Unicode Domains
Vulnerability in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera makes users susceptible to phishing with Unicode domains
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Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons
CHAPTER from SKIN IN THE GAME
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Colorized Math Equations
Years ago, while working on an explanation of the Fourier Transform, I found this diagram: Most ideas aren't inherently confusing, but their technical…
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The Aggregate Magic Algorithms (2015)
There are lots of people and places that create and collect algorithms of all types ( here are a few WWW sites). Unfortunately, in building systems hardware and software, we in The Aggregate often have found it necessary to do relatively obscure low-level things very efficiently. Many of the tricks we've devised or…
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Were There Dark Ages?
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
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Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.
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Five Worlds
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…
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Mathematical Proof That the Lightning Network Cannot Be a Decentralized Bitcoin Scaling Solution
Have you heard of the Bitcoin Lightning Network? It is a proposal that claims that:
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Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …
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Days of Rage
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
137
Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
138
Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)
What is slack doing? The process was in the background when this happened. I wasn't even interacting with it - I was in a meeting. I only noticed because my laptop fans were whurring when I got back. Restarting slack seemed to fix it for now. But that's not abnormal
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Exploring different microcontrollers less than $1
A new series that reviews 21 different microcontrollers — all less than $1 — to help familiarize you with all the major ecosystems out there.
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The impossible dream of USB-C
I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.
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Thinkpad X62
Back in January, I used an old Thinkpad while my 12” Macbook was being repaired. I found myself really enjoying some aspects of it. This nudged me down a path that ended with me modding a frankenpad…
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Suicide Linux
You know how sometimes if you mistype a filename in Bash, it corrects your spelling and runs the command anyway?* Such as when changing directory, or opening a file. I have an idea: Suicide Linux. Any time - any time - you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter cr...
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Implementing Stripe-Like Idempotency Keys in Postgres
Building resilient services by identifying foreign state mutations and grouping local changes into restartable atomic phases so that every request can be driven to completion.
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Filesystem error handling
We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to check return codes of functions that can…
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AWS EC2 Virtualization 2017: Including Nitro
AWS EC2 Virtualization 2017: explaining the different virtualization types, from emulation and binary substitution, paravirtualization and Xen, PV, HVM, and PVHVM modes, and the new Nitro hypervisor
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