1981
Why Ruby is an acceptable Lisp (2005)
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
1982
Zero Knowledge Proofs: An illustrated primer (2014)
One of the best things about modern cryptography is the beautiful terminology. You could start any number of punk bands (or Tumblrs) named after cryptography terms like ‘hard-core predicate&#…
1983
1984
1985
Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript
By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…
1986
Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
Stubbornness and disrespect, programming languages and operating systems, obsessive epistemology and formalist propaganda, Austrian economics and contemporary verse
1987
How to Optimize a CUDA Matmul Kernel for CuBLAS-Like Performance: A Worklog
In this post, I’ll iteratively optimize an implementation of matrix multiplication written in CUDA.My goal is not to build a cuBLAS replacement, but to deepl...
1988
Phishing with Unicode Domains
Vulnerability in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera makes users susceptible to phishing with Unicode domains
1989
Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
1990
The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
1991
Why I'm leaving Harvard (for Google)
The word is out that I have decided to resign my tenured faculty job at Harvard to remain at Google. Obviously this will be a big change in ...
1992
Gathering Intel on Intel AVX-512 Transitions
Investigating some details of SIMD related frequency transitions on Intel CPUs.
1993
Modern C
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
1994
Portrait of a N00b
Well, the typing issue is a thorny one. I think as a general rule, the reddit types are too eager to denounce it immediately and tell us all that Ruby is the answer, or whatever it is this week, and the Java purists and academics make the opposite argument. Coming from someone from a dynamic background, I didn't use a…
1995
The Whispering Earring
Cleaner, easier-to-reference repo of Scott Alexander’s The Whispering Earring (that’s the Schelling title, real title below). Original from livejournal is ba...
1996
Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (v5)
I'm assuming you're familiar with the basic idea of what a Turing machine is . There are a few parts to building one in Magic: a tape extending in two directions storing cells of a few different "colours"; a processing head that can read the current cell's colour, write a new colour and change its state if necessary…
1997
I can't believe I'm praising Tcl (2008)
So the other day I both defined Tcl procedures all by myself and used them interactively, and I liked it, to the point where it felt like some kind of local optimum. This entry is an attempt to cope with the trauma of liking Tcl, by means of rationalizing it. I'll first tell the story of my fascinating adventures, and…
1998
Strategic Scala Style: Principle of Least Power
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
1999
Why I’m Putting All My Savings Into Bitcoin
These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had...
2000
2001
Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
2002
Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
2003
2004
The Future of Web Startups
October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very…
2005
Cryptographic Agility
( These are notes that I wrote up from a talk that I gave at the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience . You can tell that it was in Washington, DC because of the “cyber”.
2006
2007
One sentence per line, please
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
2008
2009
In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
2010
Dual N-Back Meta-analysis
Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.