1711
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
1712
1713
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. …
1714
1715
Distributed systems for fun and profit
git , Single page HTML , Kindle .mobi , PDF , .epub , HTML for printing , book cover .
1716
Beginner's Health and Fitness Guide
That's what this guide is for. It's a basic guide to diet and fitness for beginners who want to get in better shape. If you want to look better, improve your overall athletic ability, or just improve your health, read on. If you're a bodybuilder or athlete, you probably already know most of this anyway.
1717
Why Isn’t Telegram End-to-End Encrypted by Default (2017)
telegra.ph/why-isnt-telegram-end-to-end-encrypted-by-default-08-142021127 points145 commentscited by 11Security & Privacy details
I've been getting this question more often this year. It's based on the wrong assumption that some other popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp are "end-to-end encrypted by default", while Telegram is not. This post is intended to disprove this myth that has been so carefully crafted by Facebook/WhatsApp marketing…
1718
We Need Hardware Traps for Integer Overflow
How many problem domains require wrapping signed integers or non-wrapping unsigned integers? Can the current undefined case be replaced with a trap and everything else be left intact?
1719
No more yes. It's either hell yeah or no.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
1720
Operational Transformation (algorithm behind Wave, Google Docs)
Almost exactly a year ago, Google made one of the most remarkable press releases in the Web 2.0 era. Of course, by "press release", I actually mean keynote at their own conference, and by "remarkable" I mean potentially-transformative and groundbreaking. I am referring of course to the announcement of Google Wave , a…
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“What the Hardware Does” Is Not What Your Program Does: Uninitialized Memory
This post is about uninitialized memory, but also about the semantics of highly optimized “low-level” languages in general. I will try to convince you that reasoning by “what the hardware d...
1723
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-…
1724
Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
1725
Entitlement issues (2009)
I am home. My dog is happy to see me. The world is a good place and I am behind on work because American Airlines doesn't have proper power ...
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1727
Everyone has JavaScript, right?
These are by no means all the reasons why your JavaScript might fail to run even when you expected it to. Andy Bell has a great list over at piccalil.li of a handful of very realistic reasons JavaScript won’t be available . Check ’em out, and be prepared.
1728
Thoughts on Martini – Introducing Negroni
Originally published on CodeGangsta on May 19, 2014. Restored here to preserve the legacy Martini/Golang archive. It’s never easy to take honest criticism, especially when the target of the criticism…
1729
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Schneier: The Value of Privacy
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…
1731
The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
1732
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
1733
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
1734
Show HN: Designing Web Applications
It's not that you set out to create a poorly designed product, but lots of mistakes—big or small—along the way left you with an interface that does its job, but is painful to use.
1735
The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
1736
Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope
The stakes are incredibly high, and Apple knows it. Whatever you think of Apple’s decision to implement these features, they’re not doing so lightly.
1737
Autoenshittification
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
1738
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
1739
The Netscape Dorm (1994)
If someone has linked you to this page, they're probably trying to con you. Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading right now. Don't read this page. Go read this page instead.
1740
The Scaling Hypothesis (2021)
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.