1951
The Pull Request Hack
After writing about Open Source And Responsibility , I’d like to share a small collaboration hack I came up with last year. Here it is:
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
1952
Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.
1953
HFT in My Backyard
INTRO As soon as the summer sun returns to Belgium, there is a natural human migration from Francophone Wallonia to the west coast sea in the Flemish part of the country. Here, à la mer du Nord, pe…
1954
Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes
Want to learn more? Learn To Count to a Billion in Korean in 15 Minutes ! Or Learn to Read Russian in 15 Minutes !
1955
Seemingly impossible functional programs (2007)
Andrej has invited me to write about certain surprising functional programs. The first program, due to Ulrich Berger (1990), performs exhaustive search over the “ Cantor space ” of infinite sequences of binary digits. I have included references at the end. A weak form of exhaustive search amounts to checking whether…
1956
1957
Prompt Engineering: Steer a large pretrained language model to do what you want
Prompt Engineering, also known as In-Context Prompting, refers to methods for how to communicate with LLM to steer its behavior for desired outcomes without updating the model weights. It is an empirical science and the effect of prompt engineering methods can vary a lot among models, thus requiring heavy…
1958
Let’s build a browser engine (2014)
I’m building a toy HTML rendering engine, and I think you should too. This is the first in a series of articles:
1959
Terrorism is not about terror
Terrorists act irrationally from a rational activism perspective, and groups act in ways most consistent with terrorism being about social status and belonging
1960
1961
Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do…
1962
In Defense of Inclusionism
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
1963
Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022176 points45 commentscited by 10History & Retro Computing details
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, w…
1964
Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)
April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
1965
The most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen (2021)
This is the story of a bug that was discovered and fixed in Telegram’s self-rolled cryptographic protocol about seven years ago. The bug didn’t get any press, and no one seems to know about it, probably because it was only published in Russian.
1966
1967
Policy on the AI Exponential
In one of the side plots to The Lord of the Rings , two of the Hobbits attempt to rouse Treebeard—a wise but ponderous sentient tree—to defend his forest from an army that is cutting it down. The problem is that Treebeard operates at a very different speed than the Hobbits. It takes him a full day simply to say hello…
1968
The network is reliable
I’ve been discussing Jepsen and partition tolerance with Peter Bailis over the past few weeks, and I’m honored to present this post as a collaboration between the two of us. We’d also like to extend our sincere appreciation to everyone who contributed their research and experience to this piece.
1969
The Performance Cost of Integer Overflow Checking
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
1970
Problems with Go channels (2016)
Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…
1971
Epoll is fundamentally broken
This time we'll focus on Linux's select(2) successor - the epoll(2) I/O multiplexing syscall.
1972
Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
1973
Tiny, cheap, and dangerous: Inside a fake iPhone charger
Thoughts on the death of Ma Ailun According to reports , a woman in China was tragically electrocuted using her iPhone while it was char...
1974
Story of Vitamin D Toxicity (2022)
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
1975
A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
1976
1977
jj init – getting serious about replacing Git with Jujutsu
Jujutsu (`jj`) is a new version control system from a software developer at Google. I have been using it full time for 6 months. Here’s why you should switch, too.
1978
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
1979
Analyzing 1.1B NYC Taxi and Uber Trips
The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission has released a staggeringly detailed historical dataset covering over 1.1 billion individual taxi trips in the city from January 2009 through June 2015. …
1980
Why undefined behavior may call a never-called function
My twitter feed has recently been filled with discussions about the following program #include <cstdlib> typedef int (*Function)(); s...