Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 426 posts.
On Being A Journeyman Software Developer2013463 points177 commentscited by 9Life, Learning & Writing details
Yesterday I made a mistake . Without thinking, I put up a mean tweet about some code that Heather Arthur wrote. And I want to apologize. ...
Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel ...
A new design for Acko.net, fusing WebGL, CSS 3D and HTML at sixty frames per second.
History, background, visiting, ordering, using, & analyzing the drug market Silk Road 1
I really believe all developers should learn Haskell. I don’t think everyone needs to be super Haskell ninjas, but they should at least discover what Haskell has to offer. Learning Haskell opens your mind.
With the arrival of core.async , ClojureScript provides a powerful advantage over other popular compile to JavaScript languages like CoffeeScript , Dart , and TypeScript . These languages fail to address the single largest source of incidental complexity for any sizeable client side application - concurrency. In my…
For those who aren’t regular readers: as a followup to this post, there are four posts detailing the basic four methods of proof, with intentions to detail some more advanced proof techniques in the future. You can find them on this blog’s primers page. Do you really want to get better at mathematics? Remember when…
About a year ago I wrote a short post urging Apple to publish the technical details of iMessage encryption. I’d love tell you that Apple saw my influential crypto blogging and fell all over t…
People commented about a point I made in a recent essay: In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes. Yes, that’s wrong. Where I said “months,” I should have…
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
Some updated tips for porting software to Python 3.
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
Yesterday my colleague mentioned that a script I wrote was getting a lot of attention on Twitter. This particular project was something I wrote a couple years ago to help me out with a workflow. I …
I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous...
I love Make . You may think of Make as merely a tool for building large binaries or libraries (and it is, almost to a fault), but it’s much more than that. Makefiles are machine-readable documentation that make your workflow reproducible.
Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…
I’m sorry I haven’t been keeping up with Bubble City. I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks lying in bed and drinking fluids. (With occasional breaks to play Rock Band, much to the annoyance of my neighbors.) Once again, I’ve been sick — this time, with four different illnesses.
Wow, what the heck is going on with Bitcoin? When I started this post, the value of a single bitcoin had surged upwards of $250. It’s corrected a bit since then (down $100 or so), but it̵…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.
Recently, I paid $ 12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI. Simple, but functional; nothing compared to a smartphone, but useful if you’re going out and worried about getting your primary phone wet or stolen.
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
In this, I describe why Erlang is different from most other language runtimes. I also describe why it often forgoes throughput for lower la...
