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Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
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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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
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AVX-512: when and how to use these new instructions
Note: This blog post from 2018 predates the Intel Ice Lake (Sunny Core) and AMD Zen 4 processors. These newer processors are not affected by the issues described in this blog post. Our processors typically do computations using small data stores called registers. On 64-bit processors, 64-bit registers are frequently…
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The Story of ISPC: Intel SPMD Program Compiler
Collected together all for your convenience.
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The Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017)
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
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Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
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Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
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Apple's New Map
Four years in the making, it covers just 3% of the U.S.’s area and 4.9% of its population:
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UTC Is Enough for Everyone, Right?
Programming with dates, times, and timezones is hard. But here's some help.
130
Learn just a little Awk (2010)
An Awk tutorial by example. Learn practical Awk incantations in just a few minutes.
131
How to Run Your Own Mail Server (2017)
A guide to self-hosting your email on FreeBSD using Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and LDAP.
132
Finding a CPU Design Bug in the Xbox 360
The recent reveal of Meltdown and Spectre reminded me of the time I found a related design bug in the Xbox 360 CPU – a newly added instruction whose mere existence was dangerous. Back in 2005 I was…
133
What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)
In early 2016 I eventually decided it was my turn to take part in this project. I decided my job was going to be presenting the potential and the beauty inside these sketches. I selected those that I found most interesting and genuine and diverse, then rendered them as if they were real. I became the executor of these…
134
The Bill Gates Line
Understanding the differences between aggregators and platforms matters for companies interacting with them and also regulators considering antitrust.
135
Why Create a New Unix Shell?
Please read this update instead: Why Create a New Unix Shell? (2021) . This page is obsolete!
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GDPR – A Practical Guide for Developers (2017)
You’ve probably heard about GDPR. The new European data protection regulation that applies practically to everyone. Especially if you are working in a big company, it’s most likely that there’sContinue reading
137
The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands
How Colleges Make More Money Than God By Giving It Away
138
Gluten Free Antarctica
Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.
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How the Go runtime implements maps efficiently without generics
This post discusses how maps are implemented in Go. It is based on a presentation I gave at the GoCon Spring 2018 conference in Tokyo, Japan.
141
One-Process Programming Notes
This content covers my recent exploration of writing internet services, iOS apps, and macOS programs as an indie developer.
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Vectorized Emulation: fuzzing at 2 trillion instructions per second
This is the introduction of a multipart series. It is to give a high level overview without really deeply diving into any individual component.
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Why Do React Hooks Rely on Call Order?
Lessons learned from mixins, render props, HOCs, and classes.
147
Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products…
148
About rel=noopener (2016)
2021 update: Browsers now implicitly set rel=noopener for any target=_blank link, following a spec change . If the demo on this page no longer seems scary, congratulations — you’re using a modern browser!
149
Stacked Diffs versus Pull Requests
Update: This post received quite a lot of healthy discussion on Hacker News. You can follow that conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18119570
150
Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov , are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors…