Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 428 posts.
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web
Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired . I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
Modern extension to classic 2003 article by Joel Spolsky
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Try to spot who liked hacking away at corpses rather than computers
There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are…
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Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. We had only one remaining shot at revival, launching our two-years in the making rewrite: Digg v4. It did not go as planned.
This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database written in Zig in a similar style, and, well, I now find myself…
See also: Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment right now .
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
Preface: I don’t use iCloud. I don’t use an Apple ID. I don’t use the Mac App Store. I don’t store photos in the macOS “Photos” application, even locally. I…
Google is forcing its bullshit generator, Gemini, on many users of Gmail without asking them, and not even offering the users a way to deactivate it.
I've been floating ways to simplify the memory management story in Rust around the core team lately. Memory management is a contentious topic, since we've worked hard to get to the current state of things, and with the push toward stability lately, there is a (quite reasonable!) resistance to any changes at this…
OSINT & Analysis by Oliver Alexander2023165 points633 commentscited by 6Society, Policy & Culture details
On the surface Seymour Hersh's story looks passable, but as you dig deeper it has more holes than the Nord Stream pipeline.
Since this article contains a lot of interactive demos relying on fairly modern browser technology, let's make sure that everything is OK before continuing.
The final compromise text of the EU Cyber Resilience Act is now officially available, and various open source voices are currently opining on it. This is a complex act and other parts of the open source world (like the Eclipse Foundation and NLNet Labs) have been hard at work to advocate with the EU and member states…
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we manage instead of the outcome, from the Empire State Building up.
If you remove the first word from the string "hello world" , what should the result be? This is the story of how we discovered that the answer could be your root password!
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool…
If you find this piece worthwhile, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding ongoing cancer care. Alex Tabarrok writes about how “when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bo…
The teeth are not the only problem
