Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
Computer users organize their files into folders because that is the primary tool offered by operating systems. But applying this standard hierarchical model to my own files, I began to notice shortcomings of this paradigm over the years. At the same time, I used some other information systems not based on…
From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for…
Please note that this post expresses my personal opinion and mine alone, not those of my employer or my teammates.
In these videos, I talk about how VGA signals work and build a circuit that provides the correct timing of sync signals so that a monitor recognizes the signal and displays an image stored on an EEPROM.
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This s…
obama_oj Originally uploaded by charmaine_cooper. When you walk into our conference room at Union Square Ventures, you see the box of cereal on the right on our conference room credenza next to a wifi router and a jar of Jolly Ranchers. It is there because we are big Obama fans? Nope. The cereal box is […]
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020263 points74 commentscited by 10History & Retro Computing details
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
I’m tired of reading about investors and journalists claiming there’s a bubble in tech. I understand that it’s fun to do and easy press, but it’s boring reading. I also understand that it might...
Why conversational UI fails in practice and what the West can really learn from Asian messaging apps.
I was struck by this passage in Steven Pinker’s article about why academics’ writing stinks :
Client-Server Game Architecture | Client-Side Prediction and Server Reconciliation | Entity Interpolation | Lag Compensation | Live Demo
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it’s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most important thing...
So, have a seat. Put your feet up. This may take some time. Can I get you some tea? Earl Grey? You got it.
LRtDW is a series of articles putting Rust features in context for low-level C programmers who maybe don’t have a formal CS background — the sort of people who work on firmware, game engines, OS kernels, and the like. Basically, people like me.
Phantomderp and I have both recently been very aligned on a particular subject: being extremely angry about C ABIs and trying to fix them . Where we’re not aligned is why we’re mad about them.
There has been a sudden resurgence of interest in my "donut" code from 2006 , and I've had a couple requests to explain this one. It's been five years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my memory, so I will reconstruct it from scratch, in great detail, and hopefully get approximately the same result.
“The audio processing thread is stalling because the client’s implementation of some XAudio2 callback is doing things that can block the thread, such as accessing the disk, synchronizing with other threads, or calling other functions that may block. Such tasks should be performed by a lower-priority background thread…
This is a story consisting of several little building blocks and they occurred spread out in time and in different places. It is a story that shows with clarity how our current system with CVE Ids and lots of power given to NVD is a completely broken system. CVE-2020-19909 On August 25 2023, we got … Continue reading…
Hey! Before we go any further — if you want to support my work, please sign up for the premium version of Where’s Your Ed At, it’s a $7-a-month (or $70-a-year) paid product where every week you get a premium newsletter, all while supporting my
Do not be misled. The many "atomic time" wristwatches you see on the market today are merely cheap quartz wristwatches with a built-in radio receiver. The watch sets itself from 60 kHz VLF radio time signals transmitted by NIST from station WWVB near the US atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. At least once a day…
October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. 1. Stanford University Stanford is a strange…
or: Why Your Friends Keep Spamming You to Sign Up for LinkedIn
An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple…
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics. It’s joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica. I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have…
3 Years ago, my wife and I were starting Grad School, and we needed to save $30,000 a year. I remember in college I’d ask:
